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Director John Landis ("The Blues Brothers," "Animal House") will direct a bio-pic about Mad magazine/EC Comics publisher William M. Gaines.

The high point of the film is likely to be the Kefauver Hearings, which took place in 1954 in the wake of the publication of Dr. Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, and which tried like Wertham's book to blame postwar juvenile delinquency on comic books. Gaines refused to apologize to the legislative inquisitors and paid the price in the press where he was vilified as America's most amoral publisher and in the marketplace where EC comics fell victim to the hypocritical Comics Code, which Gaines refused to follow. Fortunately Mad survived and Gaines remained associated with the groundbreaking satirical magazine that influenced generations of artists and comedians until the day he died in 1992.

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Here's a teaser for "Batman Gotham Knight," a collection of animated Batman shorts that serve as a sort of prelude to the next live-action Batman film "The Dark Knight."

A number of different anime directors contributed to the shorts, which will appear on DVD later in the year.

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After a great run of Frank Frazetta pieces, Golden Age Comic Book Stories turns its focus to romance tales by the great EC cartoonist Al Feldstein.