William Gaines
William Maxwell Gaines (
March 1,
1922 –
June 3,
1992) (frequently called "Bill") was the publisher of
EC Comics, and is best known for overseeing
Mad. Following a shift in EC's direction in 1950, he was arguably the first publisher to oversee a line of
comic books with sufficient artistic quality and interest to appeal to adults.
Bill Gaines was the son of
Max Gaines, who as publisher of the All-American Comics division of
DC Comics was also an influential figure in the history of comics. The elder Gaines tested the idea of packaging and selling comics on newsstands in 1933. In 1941, he accepted
William Moulton Marston's proposal for the first successful feminine superhero,
Wonder Woman.
As
World War II began, Bill Gaines was rejected by the
United States Army,
United States Coast Guard and
United States Navy, so he went to his draft board and requested to be drafted. He trained as an
Army Air Corps photographer at Lowry Field in Denver. However, when he was assigned to an Oklahoma City field minus any photographic facility, he wound up on permanent KP duty. As he explained in 1976 to Bill Craig of
Stars and Stripes, "Being an eater, this assignment was a real pleasure for me. There were four of us, and we always found all the choice bits the cooks had hidden away. We'd be frying up filet mignon and ham steaks every night. The hours were great, too. I think it was eight hours on and 40 off."
Stationed at DeRitter Army Airfield in Louisiana, he was reassigned to Marshall Field in Kansas and then to Governor's Island, New York. Leaving the service in 1946, he returned home to complete his chemistry studies at
New York University. In 1947, he was in his senior year at NYU when his father was killed in a motorboat accident on Lake Placid. Instead of becoming a chemistry teacher, he took over the family business,
EC Comics. The EC initials stood for both Educational Comics and Entertaining Comics, and the company was at that point best known for its adaptations of Bible stories.
Bill Gaines found his niche in publishing
horror,
science fiction and
fantasy comics, as well as realistic
war comics and two satirical titles,
Mad and
Panic. His books, including
Tales from the Crypt,
The Vault of Horror,
Shock SuspenStories,
Weird Science and
Two-Fisted Tales featured stories with content above the level of the typical comic. For a complete roster of titles, see the
List of Entertaining Comics publications.
Begun in 1952,
Mad was the company's biggest and longest-lasting success. It was so popular that dozens of imitations were published, including EC's own
Panic.
EC horror comics were not simply compilations of ghoulish clichés, but subtle, satiric approaches to horror with genuine dilemmas and startling "twist" outcomes. Likewise, EC's science fiction and fantasy titles dealt with adult issues like racism and the meaning of progress. In part because of the higher-quality material, EC soon assembled a stable of artists unparalleled in the industry then (and some argue, ever). Regular contributors included
Wally Wood,
Jack Davis,
Will Elder,
George Evans,
Graham Ingels,
Al Williamson,
Johnny Craig,
Reed Crandall,
Jack Kamen,
Bernard Krigstein,
John Severin,
Joe Orlando, and
Frank Frazetta, along with editor/artists
Harvey Kurtzman and
Al Feldstein. The company also treated its illustrators as selling points, profiling them in full-page biographies and permitting them to sign their work, a rarity in 1950s comic books. EC was notable for its lack of a "house style," as the artists were encouraged to pursue their own distinctive techniques.
All this was promoted with a snappy company attitude, in which the EC readers themselves were regularly tweaked and insulted for their poor taste in having selected an EC product. This only had the effect of attracting an avid fanbase who enjoyed the impudent posturing and in-jokes.
Pressed for content, Gaines' company soon began adapting stories drawn from classic authors, such as
Ray Bradbury,
Edgar Allan Poe, and
H.P. Lovecraft, and Kurtzman periodically ran humorously illustrated versions of famous poems to fill space in his
Mads.
Gaines's comics may have appealed to adults, but comic books were considered by the general public to be aimed at children. With the publication of Dr.
Fredric Wertham's
Seduction of the Innocent, comic books in the Gaines style drew the attention of the U.S. Congress and the moralizing classes in general. Gaines' testimony before a Senate subcommittee attracted notoriety for its unapologetic, matter-of-fact tone, and he became a boogeyman for those wishing to censor the product. In 1955, EC was effectively driven out of business by the backlash, and by the
Comics Magazine Association of America, an industry group that Gaines himself had suggested, but soon lost control of to John Goldwater, publisher of the innocuous
Archie teenage comics. See
Comics Code.
Gaines converted
Mad to a magazine in 1956 in order to retain the services of its talented editor
Harvey Kurtzman, who'd received offers from elsewhere. The change enabled
Mad to escape the strictures of the Comics Code. Kurtzman would leave Gaines' employ a year later anyway, but Gaines went on to a long and profitable career as a publisher of satire and enemy of bombast.
Gaines ran his business in an eclectic and sometimes counterintuitive fashion. He valued reader
Larry Stark's letters of critical commentary to such a degree that he gave a lifetime subscription to Stark, who later became a well known Boston theater critic. Although the original EC comic books ran paid ads,
Mad magazine never accepted advertising during Gaines' lifetime. Merchandising was also scarce and heavily overseen by Gaines, who apparently preferred to forego profit rather than risk disappointing
Mads fans with substandard ancillary products. In 1980, following the colossal success of National Lampoon's Animal House, Gaines lent the name of his magazine to the bawdy spoof Up the Academy. When the movie proved to be a disjointed botch, Gaines paid the film company to remove all references to the magazine from all future prints and even issued private refunds to fans who wrote complaint letters.
Although Mad
was sold for tax reasons in the early 1960s, Gaines remained as publisher until the day he died and served as a buffer between the magazine and its corporate interests. In turn, he largely stayed out of the magazine's production, often viewing content just before the issue was scheduled to be shipped to the printer. "My staff and contributors create the magazine," declared Gaines. "What I create is the atmosphere."
This he accomplished through various means, notably the "Mad
Trips." Each year, Gaines would pay for the magazine's staff and its steadiest contributors to fly off to some world locale. The first vacation, to Haiti, set the tone. Discovering that Mad
had a grand total of one Haitian subscriber, Gaines arranged to have the entire group driven directly to the person's house. There, surrounded by the magazine's editors, artists and writers, Gaines formally presented the bewildered subscriber with a renewal card. Eventually the trips became more elaborate, and the staff would visit six of the world's continents.
Toward the end of his life, Gaines' name on Mads masthead grew more and more elaborate, ending as "William Mildred Farnsworth Higgenbottom Pius Gaines IX Esq."
Mad writer
Dick DeBartolo's memoir,
Good Days and Mad, provides an image of Gaines as a fun-loving and sometimes eccentric mogul. DeBartolo recounts Gaines' generosity to writers (the
Mad trips), his insistence on
Mad's "cheap" image (at one point paying double the amount to keep
Mad on low-quality paper although it was in short supply) and his offbeat methods for running a magazine. It is said that when asked about
Mad's philosophy, he said
"Mad's philosophy is; we must never stop reminding the reader of how little value they get for their money!"
He would frequently stop meetings to find out who had called long-distance phone numbers. His passions for gourmet food and wine prompted him to build a wine cellar in the middle of his Manhattan apartment and find ways to dine at restaurants accessible by only walking downhill. The book, filled with anecdotes and forewords from
Mad contributors, shows Gaines loved elaborate practical jokes (both played by him and on him) and verbal abuse from his staffers. These eccentric behavior patterns are also described in Gaines' biography
The Mad World of William M. Gaines, written by
Mad writer
Frank Jacobs and published in 1972 by
Lyle Stewart, a longtime friend of Gaines.
*
An Annotated Transcript of the William M. Gaines Memorial Service*
Bill Gaines interviewed by Steve Ringgenberg*
The Long, Gory Life of EC Comics Reason magazine article
*
www.williammgaines.com, A Memorial Page
