By Marcellous L. Jones
(Image courtesy of Playboy Magazine/Twentieth Century Fox)

October 14, 2009


Paris, France - It had to happen one day or another. Television mom Marge Simpson has crossed over from cartoon suburbia and has splashed into the pages of Playboy Magazine. That’s right! The lady is now the newest “hip” thing to take mainstream media by storm.

According to the magazine’s editorial director Jimmy Jellinek, "We knew Marge's pictorial would appeal to a large demographic… This cover and pictorial is just another example of how we're evolving our editorial content to continue to reach men in their 20s, and also maintain the elements of the magazine that have attracted readers for more than 50 years."

This is welcomed news as the magazine faces a 25 percent drop in newsstand sales and a hurting 31 percent drop in advertising revenue from just the past year. The magazine is betting on the unorthodox gimmick to help it past these woes by identifying with a wider variety of men. In fact, the magazine’s founder Hugh Hefner claimed in an interview with CNN, "Marge Simpson is the quintessential girl next door who stole our hearts 20 years ago and has held them captive ever since. We were delighted to learn she wanted to grace the pages of our magazine. Her pictorial is truly stunning!”

Marge Simpson’s cover hits newsstands on Friday. It takes place exactly thirty-eight years following the iconic milestone cover on which Darine Sterm became the first African-American woman to pose for the magazine’s cover. And in fact, the October 2009 comic book-style cover is an artistic throwback to Stern’s October 1971 cover with it using the same pose as Stern’s. The cover is followed with a three-page pictorial in which she is scantily dressed in cartoon lingerie.