A MADly Idiotic Birthday!
Happy 73rd birthday to the most prolific and longest-running writer in MAD Magazine history, MAD‘s Maddest writer Dick DeBartolo! Dick’s work first appeared in MAD #69, March 1962 (a piece he sold to the magazine while he was still in high school), and he has had work in 469 issues and counting ever since. He also has the record for the most consecutive issues appeared in with 452 (#103 to present). Dick’s work outside of MAD includes being a long-time writer for TV games shows and a popular podcast called “The Daily Giz Wiz” formerly on TWiT TV and now independently produced , appearances on TV and radio, etc. I did the above “caricature” of him for a piece in the “All Monkey issue” of MAD, where I portrayed the staff as monkeys or apes. Choosing Dick’s matching “monkey” was kind of a no brainer:
He also wrote a terrific book called Good Days and MAD that is a very funny peek behind the scenes of the magazine, and is an especially great look at Bill Gaines through the eyes of a very good friend, up through Bill’s passing. A must read for fans of MAD.
Dick wrote the very first piece I ever had published in MAD, “Gadgets to Really Make your Home Theater Like Going to the Movies” from #399, Nov. 2000. Since then we have collaborated on twenty-one other features, including nine movie parodies and eleven TV parodies. It’s always a pleasure working on one of his scripts.
Happy Birthday, Dick!
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Great tribute, but a couple of clarifications. Dick DeBartolo is certainly one of the most prolific MAD contributors, but not “the” most prolific. Currently, his total of 469 issues is behind the 504 issues for Al Jaffee and 479 issues for Sergio Aragones. Also, it is not quite inaccurate that he “has had a byline” in all 469 of those issues. Some examples (besides a few issues where he used a pseudonym instead of his actual name): (1) although DeBartolo had no byline in MAD No ,133, he was the uncredited writer for the cover gag; (2) DeBartolo’s name does not appear in No. 150; however, the writer of the article “Ads That Turn People Off” in that issue is incorrectly credited to Frank Jacobs but was actually written by DeBartolo; (3) his name is byline is also missing from MAD No. 488, but DeBartolo was the uncredited writer for the monkey film listings in the “Monkey-lini” section of that issue. Looking forward to more DeBartolo MAD contributions in the future!
I did not say most prolific “contributor”. I said most prolific “writer”. Jaffee and Aragones are writer/artists or cartoonists. I have corrected “byline” to “work”, which is what I meant in the first place.
Good point! I do consider Aragones and Jaffee writers as well as artists, but your classification as cartoonists as opposed to writers makes sense, too. And yes, DeBarotolo is the definitely the king of the writer only realm!
Holy crap, Dick was young when he got started. He’s still only 73 despite contributing to the magazine for like 55 years? Wow!
Dick DeBartolo sold his first piece to MAD when he was just 16, becoming the first of the magazine’s two teenage debuters (with Desmond Devlin being the other). DeBartolo was a regular contributor by the time he was 17-18.
I’m not sure whether he or Frank Jacobs have the most separate bylines, as opposed to being in the most issues. Jacobs got a six-year head start, but DeBartolo has outlasted him by several years. If Dick is behind, it’s probably not by much, and he’s still writing.
As far as I know, the youngest artist among the regulars was Hermann Mejia at 24, with Wally Wood and Don Martin being a year older than that. But there’ve been so many new names in recent years that it would be tough to double-check the leader board.