Inside the Guide: Overstreet HOF – M.C. Gaines

Pioneer, publisher, promoter and advocate Maxwell Charles Gaines is known for creating the idea in 1933 of repackaging the Sunday newspaper comic strip into the format we recognize as modern comic books and distributing them to the newsstand. Comic strips had been collected into books since the 1800s, but he felt by folding a full tabloid page of eight or sixteen pages down twice to produce a 32-page or a 64-page comic magazine that it could be sold for 10¢, even during the Great Depression.

He tried first with Funnies On Parade, then with Famous Funnies, A Carnival of Comics, both done as promotional comics. Famous Funnies, Series 1, was the following step. The next issue, also #1, dated July 1934 was distributed as the first newsstand comic magazine. The series lasted until 1955.

In 1938 Gaines (with Jack Liebowitz) started All-American Publications, which was a separate company co-marketed with DC Comics. In 1944, DC bought out Gaines, who then started a new line, Educational Comics (EC). He died in a boating accident in 1947.