William Maxwell Gaines

William Maxwell Gaines (born March 1, 1922 in Brooklyn ; † June 3, 1992 in Manhattan ), called Bill Gaines, was the founder of MAD magazine and editor of several comic series that should convince artistically and are more aimed at adults than at Children judged.

biography

Bill Gaines was born the son of Max Gaines , who was the editor of All-American Comics at DC Comics and who was one of the first to think about selling comics on the street.

During World War II , neither the US Army nor the US Coast Guard wanted Bill Gaines, whereupon he asked his local military office to draft him. He was employed as a photographer with the troop in Lowry, Denver . When he was transferred to Oklahoma , where there was no photography unit, he was assigned to the kitchen duty there.

Initially stationed at DeRitter Army Airfield in Louisiana , Gaines was first transferred to Marshall Field in Kansas and then to Governor's Island, New York . After retiring from service in 1946, he returned to New York University to complete his degree in chemistry . In 1947 his father was killed in a motorboat accident on Lake Placid . Instead of becoming a chemistry teacher, Bill Gaines now took over the family business, EC Comics , with "EC" standing for both Educational Comics and Entertaining Comics .

He found his job publishing horror, science fiction and fantasy comics as well as realistic war comics, as well as two satirical titles, MAD magazine and Panic . His titles, u. a. Tales from the Crypt , Shock SuspenStories , Weird Science and Two Fisted Tales contained stories that were above the usual comic level. His horror stories were by no means stupid collections of gruesome images, but rather subtle stories with a surprising plot and satirical claim, the motifs of which often came from well-known authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft , while his science fiction and fantasy caricatures focus on racism or made fun of the belief in progress. Many later famous illustrators first appeared in public through Gaines' books . B. Wallace Wood , Jack Davis, or Will Elder .

MAD was also the first comic that made fun via his own genre and drew a number of imitations of themselves, such as the also by EC Comics published Panic . However, since comics were aimed at children until then, Dr. Fredric Wertham's publication Seduction of the Innocent the US Congress draws attention to Gaines' comics and those that were based on his model. EC Comics was almost ruined by the measures. As a result, at Gaines' suggestion, the Comics Magazine Association of America was founded, which Gaines initially also chaired until he lost control to the publisher of Archie comics John Goldwater .

In order to get around the restrictions and keep his highly-courted editor Harvey Kurtzman , Gaines made MAD a magazine. Although Kurtzman left MAD Magazine a year later, this marked the beginning of a long and successful editing career for Gaines.

Gaines ran his company in a very unconventional way. So he gave Larry Stark , one of his fiercest critics, who would later become one of the most famous theater critics in Boston , a lifetime subscription . And although the earlier EC Comics had advertised, he did not allow advertising in MAD Magazine during his lifetime . He also had an equally negative attitude towards merchandising .

Although MAD was sold for tax reasons in the early 1960s, Gaines remained the editor until his death and thus became a buffer between the editorial team and the publisher. Since he stayed out of the production process, he often only noticed errors shortly before printing. He tried to bind the workforce and to influence the working atmosphere. He achieved this, among other things, through the MAD Trips , during which he had the permanent staff and the most consistent of the external authors fly to one place in the world every year. The first such trip was to Haiti , where it was found that Mad Magazine had a single subscriber there. Gaines, accompanied by the magazine's writers, draftsmen and editors, extended his subscription to his subscriber in Haiti .

After his death, Gaines' name became longer and longer in mentions in MAD up to William Mildred Farnsworth Higgenbottom Pius Gaines IX Esq .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Barron: William Gaines, Publisher of Mad Magazine Since '52, Is Dead at 70 ( en ) The New York Times. June 4, 1992. Retrieved May 28, 2012.