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MAD
ACCEPTS ADVERTISING
What's YOUR
Opinion
By DICK De BARTOLO
TO REPLY TO DICK, CLICK HERE
Whenever I’m not sure how to reply to long time MAD readers, I try to
channel the answers through Bill. For new readers, that’s Bill, as in
William M. Gaines, MAD’s first publisher. To get Bill to answer my
questions, I follow a strict routine. A table in a darkened room is set with
three Nathan Frankfurters, two bottles of wine, and a canister of his ashes.
Annie Gaines was kind enough to give me a small amount of Bill’s ashes. I
carefully picked the grayer ashes, figuring that was his brain. There were a LOT
of gray ashes. With everything in place, I asked the burning question! “Should
MAD take ads?” There was a pause, and then the first message came through.
“You went to Nathan’s and didn’t get fries?” I promised Frankfurters AND
fries for the next channeling session, and restated the question. Finally, we
were getting somewhere! “With the sky rocketing costs of paper, ink and
distribution, if I were still publishing MAD, I would take ads. As a matter of
fact, I would
have done it long before Time Warner thought of it. And I would NOT have told
Time Warner I was taking ads! I would have used the money to continue to show a
healthy profit, which would mean I could run the magazine anyway I wanted. If
anyone at Time Warner asked about the ads, I would claim they weren’t ads, but
a gentler sort of satire! A super subtle kind of satire only your long time
faithful readers would understand. And I think they would. I’m long gone
from MAD now, but if you’re asking my opinion, I’d like to see MAD continue,
and if it takes ads to do that, it doesn’t matter - as long as it means
continued work for my “Usual Gang of Idiots”. While I’m on a roll
here, let me add one other thing. I know a lot of readers will be saying
‘when Gaines sees a copy of MAD with ads, he’ll roll over his grave’. Ha!
I saw that coming, that’s why I asked to be cremated!”
Dick De
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