William Gaines

For William Gaines the professor, see: William Gaines (professor).

William Maxwell Gaines (March 1, 1922–June 3, 1992), or Bill Gaines as he was called, was the founder of MAD Magazine but he was also noted for his efforts to create comic books of sufficient artistic quality and interest to appeal to adults.

Bill Gaines was the son of Max Gaines, publisher of the All-American Comics division of DC Comics and also an influential figure in the history of comics, having tested the idea of selling comics on newsstands, inspiring the creation of Wonder Woman among other achievements.

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.

He 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, 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.

His horror comics were not simply compilations of horrifying visuals, but subtle, satiric approaches to horror with genuine dilemmas and startling outcomes, along with horrifying visual graphics, to be sure, often with stories drawn from classic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Likewise, his science fiction and fantasy titles dealt with adult issues like racism and the meaning of progress and had stories by, among others, Ray Bradbury. The books also featured artists who came to be among the most prominent commercial illustrators of the 20th century, among them Wallace Wood, Jack Davis and Bill Elder.

MAD was also first a comic book satirizing other comic books. It was so popular that dozens of imitations were published, including EC's own Panic.

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 and EC was effectively driven out of business by the Comics Magazine Association of America, an industry group that he had suggested, but 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 MAD's 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 seeing issues just before they were 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.

Toward the end of his life, Gaines' name on MAD's masthead grew more and more elaborate, ending as "William Mildred Farnsworth Higgenbottom Pius Gaines IX."

External links

• An Annotated Transcript of the William M. Gaines Memorial Service (http://www.instantclassics.com/ic_html/gaines1.html)