Source on William Gaines

“Gaines says his father, Max, an advertising man, invented the comic book. Gaines senior conceived the idea of producing small, hand-lettered color pictorials for department stores to use as giveaways. "As the family legend goes, he came up with the idea of putting a 10-cents sticker on them and putting them on the newsstand," Gaines said. The comics moved so quickly that he was able to persuade Dell Publishing Company to back him. His first comic book was called "Famous Funnies."”

“"It wasn't a patriotic thing," he said, laughing. "I was flunking out of school and I just wanted to get the hell away from home. The only problem was I was a physical wreck and nobody would take me." After being turned down by the Army, Coast Guard and Navy (he didn't even try the Marines), Gaines went back to his draft board and requested to be drafted. It worked. He was the first 20-year-old from his district to go during World War II. He was drafted into the Army Air Corps and trained as a photographer. But after his training at Lowry Field in Denver, he was assigned to a field in Oklahoma City that had no photo facility. He was put on permanent KP duty. He loved it. "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 says the comic-book business was subject to the same intense scrutiny that was applied to baseball in the 1920s and to movies in the 1940s. Gaines says the strict censorship crippled the comics industry. In the '50s, he says, there were 700 separate comic books with circulations of up to 400,000. Gaines said those figures began plummeting almost as soon as the censors took on the industry. Now, he says there are only 130 titles in comic books, with an average circulation of 150,000 each.”

“"In a way I was responsible for the crackdown, too," Gaines admits. "Some of the stuff I was publishing at that time was so rough that they had a Senate subcommittee investigating comics. Many thought that we were causing juvenile delinquency. When you look at it now compared with the material that is being published today, that stuff was innocuous. At that time, though, it was pretty rough." Gaines avoided censorship in another way. He has never accepted advertising in MAD and says this is the most effective way of maintaining freedom in picking material for the publication. "I don't know if anyone remembers it anymore, but I got this idea from a newspaper called PM that was published in New York in the '40s," said Gaines. "They were liberal and I was always intrigued with their concept — a paper refusing ads so they wouldn't have any censorship problems."”

“PM was edited by Ralph Ingersoll, who had made a name for himself at Time magazine, and published by Marshall Field, the Chicago-based department store magnate who went on to found Field Newspaper Enterprises. The newsstand price of PM was a nickel at a time when the N.Y. Daily News sold for 2 cents and the N.Y. Times, 3 cents. It began publishing in 1939 and ceased operating in 1946. "Ingersoll was my hero," Gaines laughs. "I did what he did only I got away with it. Seriously, though, when you consider the kind of material we publish, it makes sense not to accept ads. You can't take money from Pepsi and spoof Coke." It's been for that reason that Gaines has never brought MAD into other forms of the media as some of his rivals — most notably National Lampoon — have done. "First of all it's really a hard thing to do," he explains. "Many people have tried it. Look at Monty Python, who are just incredibly funny. They have never been able to do anything successful in print."”

“Gaines says he misses the old days when he was an active plotter in the editorial side of his operation. With the success of MAD, he was forced out of editorial into the business end of the company. He sold the magazine to Warner Communications in 1960 and has stayed on as publisher. His fondest memories, he says, are the days when he and Al Feldstein were putting out four comics a week. "We had a western love comic called `Western Romances' and we did a column for the lovelorn called `Chat with Chuck,' " he mused. "We were Ann Landers types but unfortunately we didn't give her kind of answers. God knows what stupid things we said. It was a lot of fun in those days, being involved in the creative process. Once MAD came along it was business for me. Business isn't that much fun but I guess you have to have both.”

“Gaines was a comic-book publisher by accident. The accident involved a motorboat on Lake Placid, and had killed his father, Max, who was the founder of EC Comics. The name stood for Educational Comics, and its proudest product was “Picture Stories from the Bible.” EC Comics also put out “Picture Stories from American History,” “Tiny Tot Comics,” “Animal Fables,” and “Dandy Comics”—nothing that would have attracted the attention of a psychiatrist. William had had no interest in his father’s business. He was studying to become a high-school chemistry teacher when Max died, in 1947, and at first he left the operation of the company he had inherited to others. But he soon became involved, and, along with his editors at EC (renamed Entertaining Comics), Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, he began producing cleverly drawn, literate, artistically self-conscious, and unapologetic pulp: “The Crypt of Terror” and “The Vault of Horror” (horror comics), “Frontline Combat” and “Two-Fisted Tales” (war comics), “Shock SuspenStories” (topical tales with O. Henry twists, the sort of thing Rod Serling would later do on “The Twilight Zone”), “Weird Science” and “Weird Fantasy” (science fiction). Gaines was a living symbol of the industry as Wertham had described it—and he had volunteered to testify. He sensed the seriousness of the threat that Wertham and the Senate committee posed, and he seems to have genuinely believed in the integrity of his product. But his testimony (partly because the effects of the Dexedrine he had been taking when he was preparing his statement wore off halfway through it) was a catastrophe. Many people, then and after, thought that Gaines destroyed the industry.”

“Gaines was not a stupid man, but, as Hajdu points out, he was in the position many liberals find them-selves in when they set out to defend the freedom of artistic expression: he claimed that comic books that treated social issues in a progressive spirit were good for children, and that comic books that were filled with pictures of torture and murder had no effect on them. If art can be seriously good for you, though, it follows that it can be seriously bad for you, and that is the point at which censorship enters the picture. The committee was not interested in debating the merits of comics that treated social issues in a progressive spirit; it was interested in the claim that horror and crime comics were merely anodyne entertainment, and they twisted Gaines like a pretzel.”

“As Gaines must have realized too late, it was absurd to defend comic-book art by a standard of good taste. Disrespect for good taste was one of the chief attractions comic books had for pre-adolescents. Grossness is a hot commodity in the ten-to-fourteen demographic. Gaines, Feldstein, and Kurtzman were justifiably proud of their ability to reach that market with a superior gross-out product. That’s what Gaines, in his post-amphetamine fog, meant by “good taste.” It’s not what most people mean.”

“Where, in a concept of Cold War culture, does the panic over comic books fit? As Hajdu points out, Communism was never a real issue in the controversy. Since comic books were attacked in the Daily Worker (as weapons of American cultural imperialism), Gaines at one point suggested that criticism of comic books was anti-American, another argument that did not go far with the senators.”

“Bill Sarnoff: A couple of incidents kind of show the type of fellow he was and that we knew and loved. The first was back in about 1975, a little earlier than that, when Warner Communications took over the big building in Rockefeller Plaza and a lot of the divisions were moving into the building. And I went over and I asked Bill, I said, "How would you like to move Mad magazine with the rest of the company?" And he said, "Well, if you were a grown child, would you like to live with your parent?"”

“Bill Sarnoff: Warner has-had and has-a unique management philosophy, wherein the executives are rewarded enormously well when they perform enormously well. And I went to Bill and I said, "Gee, uh, Bill, I'd like to work out some sort of profit sharing arrangement with you. Not taking anything away. Whatever you're getting you're getting. But this is just added to it. We'd like to introduce something where you have a possibility, as Mad does better, that you'll be rewarded even more meaningfully." And he said to me, "Bill, I'm really not interested." [small laughs] I said, "Really, Bill, there's no hidden agenda here." [big laughs] "This is only-this can only be good for you. Please believe me, only be good." And he said, "Bill, I'm really not interested." And I said, "Well, okay. You know, if it doesn't make sense to you. But, could you tell me why?" And he said, "Sure. Because that philosophy assumes that I'm not doing everything I can to make Mad as good as it can be. And I tell you that's never been the case, and it never will be the case. So if you think that by giving me a profit incentive I'm gonna work harder, you're absolutely wrong and you've got the wrong guy here." And that's the kind of guy Bill was.”

“Maria Reidelbach: He was impossible and he was impossible in many ways. He ate impossible amounts of food. He was impossibly disheveled. His laughter was impossibly loud and long. At first, I thought it couldn't be genuine, but it was. And Mad, in the middle of the 1950s, when the competition was getting bigger, glossier and more colorful, it was ridiculous to launch a small black and white newsprint magazine that dared-no, it delighted in poking a finger at the American dream. It was suicide not to take advertising. It was impossible. Yet, forty years later, it's hard to name another magazine that's had the impact that Mad's had on American culture. Bill immensely valued Mad's artists and writers, yet he was stubborn about artist's rights; refusing to bend just a bit. He was just impossible. He cared an inordinate amount for an extraordinary number of us. About our health and our love lives, our joys and our sorrows. How could one man have such love in him? It was really impossible.”

“Lyle Stuart: At a certain point there were some nuts. One was a psychiatrist, one was an attorney and these nuts felt that comic books were what ruined America. This is before Ronald Reagan, before Nixon. So the Senate committee decided they could get a lot of publicity, a lot of mileage out of investigating comic books. Everybody ran for cover and I, who was then Bill's business manager, suggested that he volunteer to be a witness. And he was the only person who volunteered to be a witness to defend comic books. And we stayed up all night and wrote a speech that is now a historic speech. And he delivered it very well. And when he was through, there was some antagonism on the part of the attorney for the committee because inadvertently we had offended him. These were the days when you were either pro-Franco or anti-Franco depending on how you felt about the Catholic Church and so forth. And Bill ended the speech saying "Let's not make this country another Russia or Spain."”

“Joe Raiola: Bill was an atheist, and I used to talk to him about this because you know it occurred to me that as atheists went Bill was a very religious atheist. I remember one day I went to his office [and] said, "You know, you are a religious atheist. Because you don't believe passionately. You don't believe as much as people who do believe, believe. And you look kind of like a guru, kind of like a perverted or deranged Zen master. I think you're a religious person after all. I don't believe this atheism bit." And he said, "Please, will you please get the hell out of here."”

“Joe Raiola: [T]here was one story that really best typified my relationship with Bill. Like I said, we disagreed on everything. I'm skinny, he's fat. He's hairy and I'm bald. And I'm a healthy guy. I'm into nutrition and vitamins and vegetables and bean sprouts. And Bill would eat anything that moved. I mean this is a guy who ordered steak by mail and got cases of frozen beef in his apartment. So one day Bill calls me into his office. He says, "I want you to go downstairs to the corner of 53rd Street and Madison. It's gotta be 53rd and Madison. It's gotta be the southwest corner. There's a hotdog vendor on that corner. I want you to get me two hotdogs with mustard, sauerkraut." I said, "Bill, I can't do that." I said, "Bill, not only can't I do it, but you don't want me to do it." He said, "Why don't I want you to it? I'm hungry." I said, "Because you know I'm a vegetarian. You know it would be against everything I stand for. It would be against my principles. I am a man of integrity, Bill, like you are. To go down and buy you hotdogs and bring them to you... you would have no respect for me. So you don't want me to buy you these hotdogs." And Bill said, "Wrong!" He said, "Not only do I want you to buy me these hotdogs, but Joe, you are the only person in the office I could trust to bring the hotdogs back without eating them."”

“Nick Meglin: Bill Gaines had a logic unique unto himself. For instance, he could stop everyone from their work at any time, to try to hunt down the culprit who made a dollar twenty-seven personal phone call to Des Moines without recording it. When John Ficarra made him aware that the time devoted to this investigation-the actual cost per hour for eight of us to search through our address books, calendars, appointment books-could cover the cost of a three hour call to Tibet, he just snarled and said, "I had to assemble you here anyway to talk about our trip. This year I'm taking you all to Switzerland and Paris." And so, thirty artists, editors and writers trekked through the wonders of Europe, all on the dollar twenty-seven we saved tracking down a phone call to Des Moines.”