Talk:William Gaines

Problems

This article has a large number of problems that need attention. I'm going to list what I think they are. I may or may not come back later to fix the problems.

• "he was arguably the first publisher to oversee a line of comic books with sufficient artistic quality and interest to appeal to adults"

I dont think that statement in its current form can really be supported. The books certainly appealed to an older audience and had more mature subject matter, but its difficult to establish that EC had an "adult" following with the material was published.

• "Bill Gaines found his niche in publishing horror, science fiction and fantasy comics, as well as realistic war comics"

There is nothing particularly realistic about the EC war comics. They are different than other contemporary war comics, but not in any way realistic.

• It was so popular that dozens of imitations were published, including EC's own Panic.

Dozens? Maybe over thirty years, but I can't remember more than a handful at any given time.

• EC horror comics were not simply compilations of ghoulish clichés, but subtle, satiric approaches to horror with genuine dilemmas and startling "twist" outcomes.

In looking over most of the EC content, I can't find many things that I would classify as "subtile" or with "genuine dilemmas". What Satire there was worked almost at the level of self-parody.

• Likewise, EC's science fiction and fantasy titles dealt with adult issues like racism and the meaning of progress.

Where the are the examples of the scifi books dealing with racism other than one head-shot of an astronaut? And what story dealt with the "meaning of progress"?

• Gaines's comics may have appealed to adults, but comic books were considered by the general public to be aimed at children.

Again, which adults? EC was selling at a higher age group than other comics, but its difficult to support the idea that they were aimed at adults. It also should be mentioned that Gaines' product was distributed and racked with all other comics which were 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.

"moralizing classes" is POV.

• 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.

I dont think the "boogeyman" comment is supportable. And this is about the strangest view of the testimony I've ever read. Even Gaines considered his testimony to be a disaster. There is also the matter of his "speed" problem. A quote from the man himself: "At the beginning, I felt I was really going to fix those bastards, but as time went on I could feel myself fading away...They were pelting me with questions and I couldn’t locate the answers.”

Its more accurate to say that he made a fool of himself in front of the committee and that his lack of defense for the industry helped Wertham no end.

• 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.

EC was not driven out of business. It had distribution problems caused by the backlack which made the comics part of its business unprofitable. It was not the code or the CMAA that did him in, it was magazine distributors who often just returned the books rather than send them out.

He never "lost control" to Goldwater. Losing control implies he had control which he never did. He suggested that an industry group be formed, but that was it. "innocuous" is also POV.

• 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 converted Mad to a magazine because it got around the distribution problems he was having with the comics and because it was the most successful thing EC was publishing. I dont remember reading anything about Kurtzman being the reason for the decision. The other thing not mentioned that Kurtzman left within a year because the "enemy of bombast" refused Kurtzman's request to share in what he had created.

• 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."

Mad was sold in the early 1960s for money reasons, not tax reasons. 12.96.162.45 23:26, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

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When I met him in Provincetown, Mass. -- in the 1970s -- he said he was both publisher and founder. --Ed Poor

go tell that to this article & the one for the magazine instead of hanging around talk pages! ;-) (some of us don't remember the 1970s you know) -- Tarquin

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Do we need three separte entries on EC, Entertaining Comics and an as yet unwritten articel on Educational Comics as they are all efectively the same thing? wouldn't it make more sense to merge the EC & Entertaining comics articles and remove the educational link? quercus robur 00:15 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)

Done. Probably need to achieve some balance between this article and EC Comics, but later. They certainly educated and entertained me, E.C. Fan-Addict #22336, aka Ortolan88

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From the article:

"...EC was effectively driven out of business by the Comics Code, an industry censorship body that he had suggested, but lost control of to John Goldwater. publisher of the innocuous Archie teenage comics."

Hey whoever wrote the above quote, when did Gaines ever suggest an industry censorship body? My understanding is that Gaines proposed that publishers band together to FIGHT censorship, or as Frank Jacobs says, p. 112 of 'The Mad World of William M. Gaines':

"A few weeks after the hearings, Gaines tried to rally his fellow publishers. The plan was to start a new comic association that would be an action group. It would work with educators and psychologists to find out if there really was a link between horror and crime and juvenile delinquency. It would employ a public relations staff to reclaim the public's shattered faith in comic books. Finally it would protect publishers against the spectre of censorship."

Gaines was no censor. --AC 3/8/03

Yeh. But he was a pill-head who made a fool of himself and the industry in front of the senate. After his performance, nobody was going to start an association with him running things. 12.96.162.45 23:26, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Personal

There should be something about his marriage, he and his wife being some of the leading collectors of Statue of Liberty historic material, etc. AnonMoos 23:11, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

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This is a great article. It would be great to see more information on the EC line.CoolRanch3 16:16, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Deathbed tag:

On Gaines' deathbed,his wife honored his humor by giving Gaines a "Last Tag", which was one of Gaines' favorite strips from MAD Magazine, depicting a dying man tagging his friend from his deathbed, saying "Last Tag" just before dying. Gaines' wife with her tag fulfilled an inside joke and wish held between the two of them.

Any citation for this or is it a hoax? --Harizotoh9 (talk) 08:08, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Uncited material in need of citations

I am moving the following material here until it can be properly supported with reliable, secondary citations, per WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, et al. [ This diff] shows where it was in the article. Nightscream (talk) 17:12, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

Early life

Gaines was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish household. His father was 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, Max Gaines accepted William Moulton Marston's proposal for the first successful female 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 which did not have a 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."

Gaines was stationed at DeRidder Army Airfield in Louisiana, at Marshall Field in Kansas, and then at Governors Island, New York. Leaving the service in 1946, he returned home to complete his chemistry studies at Brooklyn Polytech, but soon transferred to New York University (NYU), intent on obtaining a teaching certificate.

References

Career

Early publishing work

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, Bill Gaines 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, satire and war comics. His comic 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. Its popularity inspired dozens of similar publications, including EC's own Panic.

EC horror comics were not generic 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 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, Harry Harrison, 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 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 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. Kurtzman periodically ran humorously illustrated versions of famous poems to fill space in Mad.

Gaines' opening statement was out of touch with the mood of the day, and of the subcommittee hearing in particular; but it has come to be remembered as a steadfast defense of the intellectual and creative freedoms later affirmed by Gaines' Mad, among others:

"Entertaining reading has never harmed anyone. Men of good will, free men should be very grateful for one sentence in the statement made by Federal Judge John M. Woolsey when he lifted the ban on Ulysses. Judge Woolsey said, 'It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned.' May I repeat, he said, "It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned." Our American children are for the most part normal children. They are bright children, but those who want to prohibit comic magazines seem to see dirty, sneaky, perverted monsters who use the comics as a blueprint for action. Perverted little monsters are few and far between. They don't read comics. The chances are most of them are in schools for retarded children.

What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do? Do we think our children are so evil, so simple minded, that it takes a story of murder to set them to murder, a story of robbery to set them to robbery? Jimmy Walker once remarked that he never knew a girl to be ruined by a book. Nobody has ever been ruined by a comic."

End of EC Comics and conversion of Mad format

Gaines was depicted by the national media as America's most amoral publisher. By 1955, EC was effectively driven out of business by the backlash, and by the Comics Magazine Association of America (Comics Code Authority). This was an industry group that Gaines himself had suggested to the industry in order to insulate themselves from outside censorship, but he soon lost control of the organization to John Goldwater, publisher of the innocuous Archie teenage comics. The Comics Code that was approved and adopted by most of the country's prominent publishers contained restrictions specifically targeted at Gaines' line of horror and crime comic books. Although he had already ceased publishing his line of horror comics, Gaines refused to subscribe to the Code, considering it hypocritical and not applicable to the new, clean line of realistic comics that he was promoting by then. This refusal, together with his already tarnished reputation, put EC on the verge of bankruptcy. Although Gaines relented and accepted the code, distributors refused to pass his titles along to newsstands. The damage was done, and Gaines abandoned comic books completely. He chose to concentrate his business on EC's only profitable title, Mad, which had recently changed to a magazine format. After distributor Leader News went bankrupt in 1956, EC was left with over $100,000 in unrecoverable debt. Gaines invested a considerable portion of his personal fortune to keep the company alive until a deal could be made with a new distributor.

1960 - 1992

Gaines ran his business in an eclectic and sometimes counterintuitive fashion. When agreeing to contracts, he insisted on striking the standard clause prescribing that both parties must settle disputes in a reasonable manner, saying that he could never promise to be reasonable. On the other hand, Gaines rejected a lucrative incentive package from Warner Brothers that would have been based on increased sales of Mad; Gaines explained that the act of accepting the incentive would have falsely suggested that he was not already doing everything within his abilities to maximize the magazine's circulation.

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. The original EC comic books ran paid ads, but Mad magazine quickly dropped all advertising and never accepted it again during Gaines' lifetime. Kurtzman and Feldstein urged Gaines to accept advertising, without result. 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.

In 1960, Gaines had arranged to move the magazine's offices to the 69th floor of the Empire State Building, but switched to a different location in the East 50s because one of the women in Mad's subscription department would have been terrified of the length of the elevator ride. His passions for gourmet food and wine prompted him to build a wine cellar in the middle of his Manhattan apartment. He managed to go from his apartment to his favorite restaurant by mapping out a route so he could get there by walking downhill only.

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 Esq." When asked about the magazine's philosophy, he said, "Mad's philosophy is, we must never stop reminding the reader of how little value they get for their money!"

References