William Gaines

William Maxwell Gaines (March 1, 1922 – June 3, 1992) was an American publisher and co-editor who inherited and reoriented his father's comic book company into Entertaining Comics (EC), spearheading the "New Trend" of genre titles focused on horror, science fiction, crime, and suspense from 1950 onward, and co-founding the enduring satirical publication Mad in 1952.

After Max Gaines's death in a boating accident in 1947, the 25-year-old William Gaines assumed control of Educational Comics and, with editor Al Feldstein, shifted away from didactic "pre-trend" material toward more provocative anthologies such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Science, and Crime SuspenStories, which emphasized graphic storytelling, moral twists, and social commentary illustrated by top artists including Wally Wood and Jack Davis. These titles achieved commercial success but drew scrutiny for their violent and lurid content, culminating in Gaines's April 1954 testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, where he defended comic books as harmless entertainment while controversially asserting that depictions of severed heads could be rendered in "good taste."

The hearings, influenced by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's claims linking comics to delinquency, accelerated the formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954–1955, which imposed strict prohibitions on horror elements, excessive violence, and genre titles, effectively dooming EC's core lines as distributors refused non-compliant books. Gaines adapted by converting Mad—initially a comic edited by Harvey Kurtzman—from newsstand comics to a black-and-white magazine format in 1955, evading the Code and enabling its evolution into a cultural staple of irreverent parody that critiqued advertising, politics, and media for decades, outlasting EC's collapse and influencing subsequent humor outlets.