"Gaines got his empire from his father, publisher Max C. Gaines, who died in a motorboat crash in 1947, when Bill was a 25-year-old NYU education student. Having inherited his dad’s nearly bankrupt company, Educational Comics, Inc., the legatee renamed it Entertaining Comics, and switched from publishing his father’s favorite title, Picture Stories From the Bible, to such corpse-strewn pulp as ”Ooze in the Cellar,” Crypt of Terror, and Vault of Horror. According to the recent book Completely Mad, he dreamed up his stories by staying up all night on diet pills his doctors prescribed to counter his compulsive eating, while gorging on sci-fi and Grand Guignol fiction. Despite the medication, Gaines stayed large; he contained multitudes-slob and nabob, hedonist and workaholic, and iron-fisted dictator of budgets figured according to what he called the ”Boogerian Constant,” a law he declined ever to define. He paid contributors faster and better than anybody in the comics business-but strong-armed them to sign over all rights to their work. When Mad cartoonist Sergio Aragones reportedly provoked a 1960s Paris street mob to rock Gaines’ limo, shrieking, ”Feelthy fat capitalist!” there was something underlying the joke. Yet, Gaines was paying for the trip, just as he frequently flew the Mad staff on revels all over the globe at company expense. Could he be Santa? Or Stalin with a sense of humor?"