"Gaines was a comic-book publisher by accident. The accident involved a motorboat on Lake Placid, and had killed his father, Max, who was the founder of EC Comics. The name stood for Educational Comics, and its proudest product was “Picture Stories from the Bible.” EC Comics also put out “Picture Stories from American History,” “Tiny Tot Comics,” “Animal Fables,” and “Dandy Comics”—nothing that would have attracted the attention of a psychiatrist. William had had no interest in his father’s business. He was studying to become a high-school chemistry teacher when Max died, in 1947, and at first he left the operation of the company he had inherited to others. But he soon became involved, and, along with his editors at EC (renamed Entertaining Comics), Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, he began producing cleverly drawn, literate, artistically self-conscious, and unapologetic pulp: “The Crypt of Terror” and “The Vault of Horror” (horror comics), “Frontline Combat” and “Two-Fisted Tales” (war comics), “Shock SuspenStories” (topical tales with O. Henry twists, the sort of thing Rod Serling would later do on “The Twilight Zone”), “Weird Science” and “Weird Fantasy” (science fiction). Gaines was a living symbol of the industry as Wertham had described it—and he had volunteered to testify. He sensed the seriousness of the threat that Wertham and the Senate committee posed, and he seems to have genuinely believed in the integrity of his product. But his testimony (partly because the effects of the Dexedrine he had been taking when he was preparing his statement wore off halfway through it) was a catastrophe. Many people, then and after, thought that Gaines destroyed the industry."