EC tried to put on a brave face and launch comic books in new directions like Piracy, Pschoanalysis. With Impact #1 (January 1955), the emphasis was on surprise or twist endings. In “The Master Race”, Bernard Krigstein gives us the tale of an old man who fled Germany during World War II and lives in […]
Read More »
Another tale about drug use from EC’s Shock SuspenStories #12 (September 1953): The Monkey. This one is a pretty brutal take on a young man who goes from marijuana user to heroin addict within a year. He ends up stealing from his parents who discover his habit. He storms out after hitting his father with […]
Read More »
Ah, another socially relevant, moral-driven Shock SuspenStory! “… and so shall ye reap!” appears in Shock SuspenStories #10 (June 1953) and tells the tale of a young man on death row who ruminates on his life choices at the same time that his parents do. The parents’ reflect in a positive way on how they […]
Read More »
In EC’s Weird Fantasy #18 (January 1953), the now-infamous story of “Judgment Day!” appears. This tells the story of an astronaut from Earth who lands on a planet populated by sentient robots to see if the planet is ready to enter the great Galactic Republic. After being taken through the orange robot’s society, the astronaut […]
Read More »
As with Twilight Zone and Star Trek, the best EC stories had social consciousness as an under-pinning. Shock SuspenStories #5 (July 1952) features just such a tale, titled simply “Hate!”. Written (of course) by William Gaines Jr and Al Feldstein, it features a jew-hating neighborhood in America and focuses on John Smith, the “protagonist”. John […]
Read More »
In Action Comics #167 (February 1952), the Tommy Tomorrow feature has a story called “The Man Who Stopped Space Flight”: an eccentric “Earth isolationist” scientist develops a mechanism to halt all space flight in the solar system. Tommy foils the plan and teaches the scientist the error of his ways by pointing out all the […]
Read More »
In February 1945, Comic Cavalcade #10 reprinted “Tomorrow, the World”, a 17-page story based on the 1944 movie of the same name, which, in turn, was based on the 1943 Broadway play of the same name. It’s a pretty powerful story of a Nazi-influenced Germany boy coming to live in America with his uncle and […]
Read More »
The war was still going strong in January 1945 when “Johnny Everyman” stories began to show up in DC’s World’s Finest Comics. In Worlds’ Finest #17, the installment describes the story of Ralph, an African American soldier and a friend of Johnny Everyman, as he returns to the United States a decorated war hero. Johnny […]
Read More »