"So the last will be first, and the first will be last."

This comment by Kaleberg reminded me of just how unlikely the triumphant return of the Cracked brand would have seemed forty or so years ago.

Though the magazine ran forever, it was always clearly the cheapest and the least respected.

In later years, the magazine was a useful training ground for such future independent comic book creators as Rick Altergott, Dan Clowes, and Peter Bagge. Clowes would later discuss his childhood ambivalence for the magazine with an interviewer: "No one was ever a fan of Cracked. We would buy Mad every month, but about two weeks later we would get anxious for new material. We would tell ourselves, 'OK, we are not going to buy Cracked. Never again!' And we'd hold out for a while, but then as the month dragged on it just became, 'OK, I guess I'll buy Cracked.' Then you'd bring it home, and immediately you'd remember, 'Oh yeah, I hate Cracked!'"

With the reboot, the lameness of the original actually became part of the joke

An article on Cracked.com, the website which adopted Cracked's name after the magazine perished, joked that the magazine was "created as a knock-off of Mad magazine just over 50 years ago", and it "spent nearly half a century with a fan base primarily comprised of people who got to the store after Mad sold out."