In the history of the American comic book, perhaps no other figure is as important as M. C. Gaines. Born in 1896, Maxwell Charles Gaines would go from being a salesman to one of the pivotal figures in the comic industry. Many credit Gaines as the father of the American comic book as we know it today; others at least credit him with being its midwife. At any rate M. C. Gaines certainly had a hand in its creation. As if that was not enough, M. C. Gaines is also the man who recommended an unpublished comic strip called Superman to Detective Comics Inc. and he was the founder of both All-American Comics and E. C. Comics as well.
Prior to 1933 newspaper comic strips were sometimes published in anthologies. These anthologies often sold quite well. It is perhaps for that reason in 1929 George Delacorte (later of Dell Comics) published The Funnies through the New Fiction Company, a publisher of pulp magazines. The Funnies was the first periodical dedicated solely to comic strips; however, it was not, strictly speaking, a comic book. It was tabloid in format, roughly the same size as the comics supplements which accompanied American newspapers. The Funnies was originally 10 cents an issue. The price was reduced to a nickel with issue 25. With issue 36 The Funnies ceased entirely. It would be up to someone else to develop a periodical dedicated solely to comic strips that would be a success.
In 1933 M. C. Gaines was a salesman for the Eastern Color Printing Company, a company which printed many of the Sunday comic strip supplements for newspapers across the nation. M. C. Gaines, Leverett Gleason (later a comic book publisher in his own right), and Eastern Color sales manager Harry L. Widenberg observed sheets of comics being printed on seven by nine inch plates. They figured out that sheets from these plates would make a tabloid sized book when folded. Widenberg experimented making books of comic strips and discovered that a standard newspaper sized sheet could be cut to produce 16 pages worth of material. They also learned that comic strips could be reduced in size and still remain legible. Widenberg worked out a deal with the McNaught and McClure Syndicate to reprint several of their more popular comic strips, including Mutt and Jeff and Joe Palooka, in this new format (essentially, the modern day American comic book). Gaines then made an arrangement with Proctor and Gamble to provide them with comic books to use as premiums. Ten thousand copies of Funnies on Parade: a Carnival of Comics were printed for Proctor and Gamble. And all 10,000 copies went almost immediately. Fresh with the success of the Proctor and Gamble promotion, M. C. Gaines persuaded Eastern Color that there was a good deal of money to be made in providing comic books to manufacturers as promotional items. And Gaines proved to be right. He was soon selling 100,000 to 250,000 copies of comic books to such companies as Milk-O-Malt and Kinney Shoes Stores.
The success of comic books as promotional items convinced M. C. Gaines that people might actually be willing to pay for comic books. As an experiment he took some of the books intended as premiums and distributed them to newstands to be sold at 10 cents apiece. Gaines' assumption that people would actually buy comic books proved correct; every copy he had distributed to newstands had sold. With proof that the comic book was a marketable commodity, Eastern Color then turned to George Delacorte (the man who had published The Funnies) to publish Famous Funnies, the first regularly published comic magazine. Famous Funnies started in 1934 and ran until 1955. It was not long before other publishers entered the field and soon comic books were to be found on newstands everywhere.
Not only was M. C. Gaines largely responsible for the modern American comic book, he was also responsible for the first comic book dedicated solely to one character. Gaines struck a deal with the producers of the radio show Skippy to print a comic book based on the character. The comic book, Skippy's Own Book of Comics, was given away as a prom