Cracked #312

Cracked's Back to School Issue arrives with a gloriously chaotic cover by John Severin, depicting a massive tornado bearing down on a school building while a panicked crowd of kids and teens scrambles across the lawn in every direction — cars and debris already swirling high into the funnel. It's a perfectly absurd mashup of summer-blockbuster disaster spectacle and back-to-school dread, and the promise of parodies targeting Twister, Schoolhouse Rock, and The Nutty Professor makes this 1996 issue a genuinely fun time capsule of mid-'90s pop culture. Severin's energetic linework gives the chaos a wonderfully lived-in cartoon energy that keeps the whole thing feeling more gleeful than grim.