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Max Gaines
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Max Gaines | |
| Birth name | Maxwell Charles Gaines |
| Born | c. 1890s |
| Died | August 20, 1947 Lake Placid, New York |
| Area(s) | Publisher |
Max Gaines (born Maxwell Charles Gaines in the 1890s; died August 20, 1947) was a pioneering figure in the creation of the modern comic book. In 1933, when Gaines devised the first four-color, saddle-stitched newsprint pamphlet, a precursor to the color-comics format that became the standard for the comic book industry.
He later became co-publisher of All-American Publications, a seminal comic-book company that introduced such enduring fictional characters as Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman.
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The notion came to Gaines one day when he was cleaning his mother's attic, and he started reading a stack of old newspaper comic sections. When he approached Eastern Color Printing with his idea, he learned that Eastern was already doing comic strip reprints in tabloid-sized promotional giveaways. Gaines suggested folding the tabloid yet again to increase the page count to 64 and publishing in a magazine format. The next step came when Gaines experimented by putting issues on trial newsstands with ten cents on the cover.
Gaines was the first to distribute through newsstands. His Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies offered reprints of Sunday newspaper comics. Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics featured reprints of Reg'lar Fellers, Dixie Dugan, Joe Palooka, The Nebbs, Keeping Up with the Joneses, Somebody's Stenog and Hairbreadth Harry.
In 1938, Gaines and Jack Leibowitz began publishing comics with original material under the name All-American Publications. At the time, Leibowitz was the co-owner with Harry Donenfeld of National Allied Publications, the precursor company to DC Comics, and Donenfeld financed Gaines' creation of All-American. All-American published several superhero/adventure anthologies such as All-American Comics and Flash Comics, as well as other titles. For a time, All-American and National shared marketing and promotional efforts as well as characters. Several of National's characters (Starman, Doctor Fate, The Spectre) appeared alongside All-American's Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Hawkman in that company's hit title All Star Comics.
Gaines' relationship with Donenfeld and National waxed and waned over the years. By the early 1940s, the All-American titles were branded separately and no longer featured National-owned characters. In 1944, Donenfeld bought out Gaines and merged National and All-American into a single company.
Gaines used the proceeds from the sale of All-American to establish another comics line, Educational Comics. EC Comics continued All-American's Picture Stories from the Bible and added new titles such as Picture Stories from American History. Gaines soon expanded the line with humor and funny animal books such as Land of the Lost, Animal Fables and Ed Wheelan's Fat and Slat. Many of these books carried a slightly revised publisher logo which changed the "Educational" in EC to "Entertaining."
Tragedy struck at Lake Placid, New York during the summer of 1947 when Gaines, his friend Sam Irwin and Irwin's son were struck by a speedboat. Gaines died in the accident, but saved Irwin's son by throwing him into the back of the boat at the last second. The operator of the speedboat was not prosecuted, possibly because she was the daughter of a prominent local judge. (Source: New York Times, August 21, 1947.)
Max Gaines' 25-year-old son, William "Bill" Gaines, inherited EC and changed the direction of the company. Although it continued to advertise and sell back issues of "Educational" titles, Bill Gaines concentrated on publishing new Entertaining Comics. He replaced the juvenile humor books with titles pitched to an older audience and strongly influenced by his own love of popular culture. These spanned several genres as he made a transition from romance (Modern Love) and Westerns (Gunslingers) to science fiction (Weird Science), horror (Tales from the Crypt) and satire (Harvey Kurtzman's Mad).