384 ChaPter^7
Bill Gaines first published Mad Magazine in 1952. He had been in the com-
ics industry for some time already, and his work featured satire, wry humor,
clever puns, and inside jokes about the bad taste of people who actually read
the books he published. Gaines, in fact, got into hot water for his books, both
Mad and other horror comics he published, when, in 1954 he had to appear
before a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Deliquency, which was investigat-
ing links between comic books and deviant behavior [much like video games
and Goth music would be attacked in the aftermath of the Columbine shoot-
ings of 1999]. Gaines, like many others we have discussed, stood his ground.
When asked if he believed a child could be hurt by something read or seen
in one of his comic books, Gaines said “I don’t believe so” and said he would
limit what he put in his books “only within the bounds of good taste.” When
one senator asked if a comic cover which showed a man with a bloody axe
holding a severed woman’s head was in good taste, Gaines replied that it was,
but that if the man was “holding the head a little higher so that the neck
could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little fur-
ther so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody,” then that would
be in bad taste. Mad did not feature severed heads, but it surely skewered the
people who ran society. It took satirical shots at presidents, politicians, movie
stars, and other cultural icons. It ran a regular feature titled “Spy vs. Spy”
which spoofed the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and Soviet Union. And
it, until just a decade or so ago, had no advertisements at all in it, so it was
free to lambaste any person or company it wanted. Gaines, like Hefner, made
significant contributions toward creating the “other” 1950s, a culture that cel-
ebrated non-conformity, racial integration, peace, adventure, sex, and freedom.
What they began would blossom in the next decade, but the 1960s counter-
culture would never have been born without the jazz musicians, folkies, artists,
Beatniks and others from the previous generation.Competing Visions as “The Torch is Passed”
As the 1950s came to an end, the country looked much different than it had
at the end of World War II. Culturally, as we have seen, the U.S. might have
remained a conformist society, but there were so many alternatives to the
dominant values of 1950 that it was obvious some major changes were brew-
ing, and they would erupt in the 1960s. Economically, the country was at its