1. In 1933, Gaines devised the first four-color, saddle-stitched newsprint pamphlet, a precursor to the color-comics format that became the standard for the American comic book industry.
16 Facts About Max Gaines
1. 2.
Max Gaines was co-publisher of All-American Publications, a seminal comic-book company that introduced such enduring fictional characters as Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman.
3.
Max Gaines went on to found Educational Comics, producing the series Picture Stories from the Bible.
4.
Max Gaines authored one of the earliest essays on comic books, a 1942 pamphlet titled Narrative Illustration, The Story of the Comics.
5.
Max Gaines Ginzberg was born in New York City to a Jewish family.
6.
Maxwell Charles Gaines was described as a "hard-nosed, pain-wracked, loud aggressive man".
7.
At age four, Max Gaines had leaned out too far from a second story window and fell to the ground, catching his leg on a picket fence.
8.
Max Gaines had been a teacher, an elementary school principal, a munitions factory worker, and a haberdasher.
9.
Deducing that packaging such strips together could create promotional publications, Gaines contacted Harry L Wildenberg, Eastern's sales manager and his direct superior.
10.
Undaunted, and with Wildenberg's blessing, Max Gaines produced Funnies on Parade, an eight-page newsprint magazine reprinting several comic strips licensed from the McNaught Syndicate and the McClure Syndicate.
11.
Later in 1933, Max Gaines collaborated with Dell Publishing to publish the 36-page one-shot Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, followed in 1934 by Famous Funnies, which ran for 218 issues and is considered the first true American comic book.
12.
In 1944, Donenfeld bought out Max Gaines and merged National and All-American into a single company.
13.
Max Gaines used the proceeds from the sale of All-American to establish another comics line, Educational Comics.
14.
Max Gaines soon expanded the line with humor and talking animal books such as Land of the Lost, Animal Fables, and Ed Wheelan's Fat and Slat.
15.
Max Gaines replaced the juvenile humor books with titles pitched to an older audience and strongly influenced by his own love of popular culture.
16.
In 1985, Max Gaines was posthumously named as one of the honorees by DC Comics in the company's 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great.