“$4.99 - Cheap” — are they MAD?!!!
People often fling the epithet “out-of-touch Media Elites” at us in the entertainment/publishing world — well, I don’t know how “elite” I am, but I’ve definitely been out of touch with the economic “pain” of the everyday MAD buyer, over the last 25+ years of getting my copies free from the editorial offices. Now that I’m “MAD’s Most Ostracized Writer“ and have to buy my own issues — yikes! It’s really $4.99 a copy?!! Both MAD and MAD KIDS?!! Good Lord!
When I was a kid-MAD-reader back in the 1960s, for the longest time, a copy of the magazine cost exactly the same as one large dipped-cone at Dairy Queen, 35 cents. Which was well within the reach of any kid, even those with extra-stingy allowances. For just one less ice cream cone every month and a half, you could experience the semi-subversive pleasures of MAD Magazine! I don’t know what the DQ cone costs today, but I’m 100% positive (without even looking) that it’s nowhere near $4.99! (To look at it another way: inflation in general, measured by the Consumer Price Index, has gone up a little more than 500% since 1967, while the MAD price has gone up, uh-oh, 1,425% in the same time — and that’s WITH their accepting advertising the last several years!)
But wait: something else is going on besides just the price-gouging! (And I’m amazed I haven’t brought it up until now — this struck me as one of the more slimy DC Comics “initiatives” when I first heard of it; and one of the things the MAD editors themselves complained about — that is, before they succumbed to a case of The Stockholm Syndrome!) As the MAD guys told it, a few years ago, DC Comics decreed that there shall be fewer and fewer pages with wholly original writer & artist content in MAD; and more and more staff-written, “recycled-art” (or NO art) pieces. If you’ve ever wondered about that new waste-of-space regular feature called, “What the Heck is the Difference [between 2 slightly different versions of an old MAD cover]?“, that’s exactly what this is. So, too, with “The Darker Side of the Lighter Side,” which is just old Dave Berg spreads with new editor-written word-balloons, at about half the page-density of the originals. And pretty much anything else you see in MAD without both a writer and artist byline. When I last talked with any of the editors 6 months ago, they were being pressured from above to do even more of this!
You have to admit: from the perspective of a businessperson, this sort of “content-shorting” is absolute GENIUS; on the other hand, for MAD readers (not to mention MAD writers & artists)…it kinda SUCKS!
And, just think: if all of the above trends continue…according my calculations, by about the year 2016, a newsstand copy of MAD should cost $149.99 and have NO original content whatsoever!