The glory days of gore: At Time.com, Richard Corliss looks back fondly on Bill Gaines' EC Comics and the golden era of horror:

"The horror comics offered grown-up, or at least adolescent fare — which is why it was popular with kids; they wanted a passkey to the forbidden, the extreme, and in these campfire tales they could feel scaredy-brave both by subjecting themselves to horror tales and by daring to read something that might be condemned by their parents. Which suggests a financial oddity: EC’s main audience was teen and young adult males — the target demographic for today’s advertisers. Yet the average New Trend magazine contained no more than three pages of outside advertising. The revenue came almost entirely from readers."