Was flipping through an old MAD Magazine and came across a strip that I really, really loved as a kid. Written by Dick De Bartolo and illustrated by Bob Clarke , “A Modern Business Success Story” showed a little old lady selling Apple Pies out of her house and slowly becoming more and more successful til she was the president of a huge conglomerate business.
Boy, did I LOVE this strip, ESPECIALLY the art- artist Bob Clarke was really a master at details in his artwork, and I remember spending ours poring over his stuff, looking at every thing going onion his pictures, from the customers, children, dogs and even chickens, to houses, cars, trucks and trains. He drew whole WORLDS in there!
At a kid, I enjoyed reading the strip and following the little old lady on her step up to the top, but it was only when I was older that I realized the REAL message wasn’t about how she grew from small time to big time, but, like a LOT of real businesses out there that you deal with all the time, the more successful she got, the more her product relied on cost-cutting methods,, from mass-marketing her items, moving from fresh to frozen pies, and finally, substituting real ingredients for processed, artificial substitutes, and as we see in the little corner, the people are now flocking to a NEW little old lady, offering what “Mom” once did, real, homemade apple pies!
From the beautiful artwork to the tale’s valuable lesson, this is MAD at its best! Man, they just don’t make strips like these anymore!
PS, if you look really close, you see only TWO people going to the huge factory outlet at MOMCO, and one of them is a blind man that probably meant to got to Aunt Bertha’s but got led to the wrong place by his seeing-eye dog, LOL!
