The recently-departed editor reshaped the 20th century from behind the scenes.
Once upon a time in another century, a man named Marvin Gaines died and left his business to his son William. William, or Bill, had to leave his education to go home and take over the family business, which was comic books. Marvin had, by some measures, invented the comic book back in the 1930s, but by the time he died in 1947, his company, Educational Comics, was a minor player in a dwindling field.
When Bill Gaines took over EC, he made several important decisions. First, he changed the name to Entertaining Comics, second, he deemphasized “Picture Stories From The Bible” in favor of things people might actually want to read, and third, he hired another young guy, a 22-year-old kid named Al Feldstein. Comic book legend has it that Feldstein got the gig on the strength of some drawings of spectacularly well-endowed women, because history is kinda crass if you look at it too close.
Because of that decision, American popular culture was irrevocably changed. Twice.
Feldstein quickly became Gaines’ right-hand man at EC, and together they wrote and edited stories that were head and shoulders above anything being published in the business. They experimented with narrative tricks and structures nobody else was trying, they let their artists go nuts instead of trying to impose a “house style” like every other comics company, they took on social issues like segregation and anti-Semitism. Their science fiction stories adapted the legendary Ray Bradbury, and wallowed in allegory and dark metaphor. Their crime and horror stories peeled back the facade of normalcy that defined early-1950s America, and exposed the twisted stratum of inventive murder and psychological darkness that lay just beneath all those suburban tract homes and idyllic small towns.
In short, their comics scared the living hell out of people. EC comics were the centerpiece of the infamous book Seduction of the Innocent, which fed a moral panic over the corrupting influence of comic books. In response, all the major publishers adopted the Comics Code, a strict list of rules governing content.
The Code, if you read it carefully, was designed to do one thing: put EC Comics out of business. Any distributor or retailer that agreed to only carry Code-approved comics could not then order any of EC’s titles, as the Code provisions are carefully designed to exclude each one of them. The Code ended up crippling the unique American artform that is comic books, halting their development for a good thirty years, give or take. American comics would look completely different today, but for the fact that the comics Al Feldstein was making with Bill Gaines were so good, the rest of the industry was willing to cripple itself if it meant taking EC down.
The magazine Al Feldstein edited for decades quite literally reshaped American popular culture by being universally read.
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After that, Feldstein and Gaines threw up their hands and quit. Comics, that is. Instead they focused their attention on a humor comic they were relaunching as a magazine. You might have heard of it: it was called Mad.
For those only familiar with its current incarnation, a reminder may be in order. It is no exaggeration to say that for two generations, Mad was America’s leading journal of media criticism. At a very early age, American kids learned that ads were bullshit, TV heroes were phonies, and movies were just selling you the same crap the ads were. Show me any influential writer or artist born between 1950 and 1980, and I’ll show you a former Mad reader.
Aside from being brilliantly subversive, Mad was funny as hell. The magazine had a rare and vital quality for a product marketed to children: it didn’t talk down to them, it treated them like smart people. If you were reading it in 1962 and didn’t know who Barry Goldwater was, it didn’t stop to explain it to you. It didn’t explain what the gay rights movement was in 1980, it didn’t explain the causes of the Gulf War in 1991, it just took these things as read; any sensible person would understand them, so keep up or get left behind. Al Feldstein’s editorial hand was the reason it was structured that way, and the ingredient that Mad‘s long-forgotten competitors lacked. He believed, as he’d believed at EC Comics, that you could sell smart material to kids, and he was right.
Mad was so good, and so widely read, that it was a major influence on almost every American comedian still alive. To oversimplify it, no Mad means no Saturday Night Live and no The Simpsons. If you like, sit down for a minute and mentally subtract from current American culture everything taken off, spun off, or ripped off from those two shows. Take your time; it’s a long list. And that’s still just a small subsection of the second- and third-order effects from Mad.
The magazine Al Feldstein edited for decades quite literally reshaped American popular culture by being universally read, just as the comics he edited in the ’50s reshaped American popular culture by being so good they got banned.
A lot of you reading this might never have heard of Al Feldstein; the celebrity death most folks are talking about this week is Bob Hoskins, because everyone recognizes movie stars and nobody recognizes editors. But everything you see when you turn on your TV, when you see the pop-culture jokes streaming across your Facebook feed, everything you grew up loving and laughing at… none of that would be what it is, if that 22-year-old kid hadn’t gotten that job in 1947. Take a moment to pay your respects.
i knew of the comic code and the 50s juvenile delinquent scare, however i did not role of al’s role in it.
great read, great article