The Comics Journal Library Volume 10

About the Author

Gary Groth is the co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books. He lives in Seattle. Michael Dean lives in Seattle, WA. He has been an editor at The Comics Journal since 1999. In addition to his pioneering work on the "serious" EC war comics, Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) created the all-time greatest satirical comic (with Mad), the most widely-read adult comic strip (with "Little Annie Fanny" in Playboy), and one of the earliest graphic novels (with the 1959 The Jungle Book). William Maxwell "Bill" Gaines (b. 1922, d. 1992) inherited EC Comics in the 1950s. Under his stewardship, it shifted focus from "educational" to "entertaining." He began publishing and editing (and often, co-plotting the stories in) genre comic books, including Tales from the Crypt, Mad, and more. He hired creators such as Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, Wallace Wood, and others; thanks to them, EC comics are considered one of the medium's high water marks. He testified infamously at the Senate Subcommittee for Juvenile Delinquency, which led to the Comics Code and the censorship of many of EC's titles. In response, Gaines turned Mad into a magazine, and published it for the next forty years. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 1993. Albert B. Feldstein (1928-2014; Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 2003) was a triple-threat writer, artist, and editor, renowned for his work on such titles as Weird Science, Tales From the Crypt, and Mad magazine. He received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.