William Gaines - End of EC

End of EC

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 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.