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EC, MAD and Beyond: Al Feldstein
"If I did, I'd probably be a lot richer," he laughs, "because at the time, I had at my disposal boxes of mint copies of everything we were doing. I would take two copies, one for bound volumes of my work that I kept as a record and one to bring home to my kids. I never kept back issues, which of course in later years proved to be idiotic because they became so valuable. Who knew back then that they would become collectors' items?" He noted that in recent years record prices have been brought at auction for Bill Gaines' file copies. "The interesting thing about Bill Gaines' collection," he says, "was that it was never saved because he thought they would be valuable. Twelve copies of each issue were wrapped and put away first in his desk and eventually stored in a vault strictly for the Post Office's second class postal requirements. He wanted a record that he had complied with the postal requirements for text pieces and minimal advertising." Of course it's not only the comics that have done well at auction. "I noticed that one of my science fiction covers recently sold for something like $8,000 or $10,000, some ridiculous amount. I think I got paid $35 or $40 for it," he laughs. "Who knew?" Feldstein says he continues to see a lot of enthusiasm for the EC recreation art that he's painted, and his originals are also doing very well. Far from the swirl and hubbub of New York, he lives and maintains a studio in Montana, with a mile and quarter of the Yellowstone River rolling through his property. There, numerous subjects from animals to people to vast landscapes are captured in his many works since he retired from MAD. Meeting Bill Gaines Feldstein first met Bill Gaines when Gaines was taking over the business following the death of his father. The two immediately hit it off and drafted a contract to create a teen comic entitled Going Steady With Peggy. The three-issue contract Feldstein signed even gave him a chunk of the speculative profits of the comic. The teen market was starting to fade, however, and Gaines may have re-thought his contractual generosity, so Going Steady With Peggy never happened. He agreed to tear up the contract and work on other titles together. Trend Setters "I would ask Bill, 'Why are we following trends?' Simon and Kirby would start a trend. Everyone would follow," he says. "The innovators always last. When the teenage market started to soften, Archie still lasted even though everything else was getting hurt. Same with the romance market. The Simon and Kirby books lasted longer than the imitators," he says. "Bill and I used to go to Roller Derby together a lot. We chatted about the things we loved when we were kids. I remembered listening to Arch Obler's Witch's Tale, Lights Out, and The Inner Sanctum. I said 'Why don't we do real Gothic horror in comics?' I admit that there were dabblings in that genre - there was Adventures into the Unknown, for one - but it wasn't what I had in mind. That's how I got the Crypt-Keeper and Vault-Keeper started. Bill was a little cautious. He wanted to try them out. So he introduced them in Crime Patrol and War Against Crime (with The Crypt of Terror in Crime Patrol and The Vault of Horror in War Against Crime). That's how we got started in the horror business," he says. The EC Family Feldstein says the EC staff and freelancers quickly became more than just creative people doing business together. "It was a family of mutual admiration and chiding and suggestions," he says. "It was a creative atmosphere. It was really a lot fun to be working for us. [As a result of his experiences as a freelance writer and artist] there were many things that I instituted with Bill. Every artist would get paid the day he brought his artwork in and a new job would be waiting for him. He would not have to take his portfolio around and go looking for another job to feed his family. We kept our artists occupied. If there were any changes, we had a board so they could do them right there. Later on with MAD and the New Direction titles at EC, the writers got paid the day their script was accepted. That was something I personally pushed. Comics for some reason or other had very little respect for writers. They would get paid $5 to $7 per page for writing and the artists were getting $25 to $30 for artwork. I felt this was ridiculous. If it wasn't for the written word, a good story, there wouldn't be any artwork worth a damn. You can have Frank Frazetta doing a fantastic page of artwork, but it's not going to entertain people on a story level without a good story. This was especially true with MAD, where we needed innovation, creativity and new ideas every day. I eventually got the writers on a par with the artists." Feldstein was also excited by his own development as a writer. An important change was marked when he began working with Ray Bradbury's short stories. "When I started to adapt Bradbury's stories to comics, I was so impressed with his writing that I started to emulate it in my own captions and dialogue for our original stories. I got a little wordy, but he was very effective. I really think I did him justice with the adaptations, and the artists certainly contributed to that. He was very pleased with the results. I have collections of his works that he autographed for me with very sweet comments that I treasure. I never met him. We never talked directly. Some day I really should get in touch with him just to reminisce," he says. An important part of the EC family's ambiance was that it wasn't all business. Some of the fun of it was just that: fun. "We had a rather gullible stockroom boy named Anthony," he says. "He was an interesting neighborhood kid who came in to help out with the mailings, the Fan-Addict Club and subscriptions. He was a nice kid. One day Bill, Johnny Craig and I had this idea that we were going to ride Anthony on this twin brother of Bill's called 'Rex.' We said he was a nasty character and that if he came into the office Anthony should steer clear of him." Rex was identical to Bill except for an ear-to-ear scar that crossed at the mouth. "We would put a rubber cement scar on Bill and then 'Rex' would come storming into the office when Bill Gaines was out. He would mess up the place, snarl at everybody and steal things. He drove Anthony crazy. It was something that went on for a long time. He never quite figured that Rex only showed up when Bill was away," Feldstein says. "One day, back when there were wire recorders, we recorded Rex's voice snarling at Anthony about something. We called from one of the other offices, Bill answered the phone and gave it to Anthony, saying 'It's Rex.' This snarling voice got on and yelled at him while he was there with Bill in the office. This convinced the kid that there were two different people because Bill was sitting there looking at him," he said. "We had a great time." Problems for EC From the start, though, distribution wasn't good. Though Feldstein says there were 300,000 or more copies of each issue, they were hamstrung. "We were with a second class distributor, Leader News. They were very weak," he says. And weak turned worse when the Senate hearings on the influence of comics on adolescents came about. Leader News had also been publishing EC knock-offs and went into bankruptcy. "Bill was really caught," he says. "He owed people money. That was really it for us as a publisher other than MAD, which Bill was able to get into a better distributor, American News Company." The successful titles of EC's "New Trend" line that included Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and others were killed with the advent of the Comics Code. Gaines tried to keep them going with the "New Direction" Code-approved titles, but they were faced with the same distribution problems. Because of that, Feldstein says, they didn't ever really had a chance to establish an audience. Next came the Picto-Fiction titles, with their illustrated stories in a magazine format, but none of the titles were successful. From the entire EC line, only MAD survived. Though forgotten by many fans, this line did leave at least one memorable legacy. "If you're really an astute fan, and you're looking for through some of the Picto-Fiction where I wrote more than one story, you'll see I used the pseudonym Alfred E. Neuman. This is prior to me taking over MAD. When I decided to use this grinning idiot as the MAD mascot, even though Harvey had played with the face, I gave him my pseudonym," Feldstein says. Humor in a Jugular Vein "MAD was a special kind of magazine,'" he says. "It was a satire and social commentary magazine, and I directed it that way when I took over. [It] reinforced the beliefs that young people had but weren't seeing in print elsewhere. We were putting it into print." "Back when I first took over, I was determined to give the creators credit. I started working on the first masthead, but I didn't want to change it every issue, so I wrote 'The Usual Gang of Idiots.' It's still there," he laughs. After a long tenure, though, he felt it was time to call it quits. "At the end of my contract in May of 1984, I decided to retire. I felt that MAD was not long for this world unless something was done, and I could not budge Bill on the changes I thought were important," he says. "There had been a slide. We had reached a peak of about 2.8 million copies per issue. When I left, it was down to 1.75 million," he continues. "It really grieves me to see it today under 300,000, which is where I picked it up from Harvey when I first took over in 1956." The time at EC and MAD gave him the opportunity to work with an amazing array of creators. Of them, who did he really like working with? "Everybody on the staff. I didn't work with any people I didn't like or didn't feel were professional," he says. He does have a problem, though, with the lack of credit he has received. "I've lived with this Kurtzman cult even though I took over the magazine in 1956 and turned it into a rather American icon of social criticism, I was never able to undo cult attachment of Harvey. There were articles written about us in the '70s about our effect on the 'Make Love Not War' population, the burning of bras, the tearing up of draft cards and so on. They never once credited me, but said it was done by Harvey Kurtzman. Harvey stopped doing MAD in 1956 and this stuff was taking place in the '60s and '70s. It was a problem for me from an ego point of view," he says. "Now that I go to conventions and I'm trying to straighten out the history, I go around saying that Bill Gaines and I had a cash and credit arrangement. He paid me cash and he took the credit," he laughs. Beyond EC and MAD Asked to pinpoint a few favorite pieces of work, he says he doesn't really have favorites among his stories. "At this point, 47 to 50 years later, I don't remember which were my favorites. I know that as I did each story I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good job. Some were a little formulaic and on some we took the easy way out, but some were very clever and well constructed. Some I was very proud of in terms of the ones we called our 'preachies,' which were pleas for tolerance, racial equality and justice. We were doing things that weren't done in comics in those days," he says. As for the enthusiasts, original Fan-Addicts and newcomers alike, what would Feldstein tell them of the enduring legacy of EC comics? "I'd tell them they're crazy for spending the kind of money they're spending on collecting them," he laughs, "but only because I'm jealous." |
