Warped speed ahead: new humor title aims for the hip at heart

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1990 by Susan Hovey

BROOKLYN, N.Y-IF you want a straight answer from Gary Brodsky, be forewarned: You might first have to weave through a verbal minefield of rapid-fire one-liners and endless digressions.

Ask him the circulation goal for his and co-founder Richard Buckler's new humor magazine, and he asks: "How many people are in the world today? Why think small?"

Eventually, after a barrage of wisecracks and observations about "gray suits" (those stuffy businessmen "who appear like black-and-white cutouts in a world of color"), Brodsky admits to a more modest newsstand distribution of 250,000 for the May debut of the 48-page Warped. Curtis Circulation will handle the bimonthly magazine, which is scheduled to carry advertising in its second, 64-page issue.

The 33-year-old Brodsky, however, has dispensed with enough "boring" details for now. So he answers the next question by naming Donald Trump as his nearest competitor. "People take themselves way too seriously," he says. "They take everything too seriously."

More the straight man, editor Buckler says Warped will aim for an audience somewhere between Mad and National Lampoon. "I think if we slant our material a little more in a contemporary direction, we'll reach a wider audience," he explains. "i don't think the entire humor market has been saturated. Much of it is ho-hum. Nobody's taking any chances."

Buckler expects that most of Warped's readers will be male and that they will fall anywhere between the ages of 10 and 25. "We're reaching the kids who are hip and the hip adults who are still kids inside."

Brodsky's own adolescent years were spent hanging around Marvel Comics, where his father, Sol, was executive vice president, and where Buckler worked as an artist. The two have been business partners for about three-and-a-half years. in addition to writing books like The Art of Getting Even and The Contemporary Devil's Dictionary (which gives the "real" definitions of words), Brodsky helped Buckler publish a number of how-to guides for comic artists.

"I handle the creative end," says Buckler. "Gary handles business. "