Animation, Comic Books, Media and Other Random Stuff
This is one of those fabled comic stories that one reads a lot about but rarely ever sees, like EC Comic’s Judgement Day or the infamous Foul Play. This Jack Cole story, Murder Morphine and Me is notorious because one panel in particular (and you’ll know which one when you see it) was cited by Dr Wertham as an example of why comic books were causing the degeneration of youth in the 1950s. 
Here’s another infamous EC Comics‘ story from Shock Suspenstory #6 drawn by Wally Wood. While I think it tries to show how evil the Ku Klux Klan is and was probably wild for an early 50s story, but is probably tame by today’s standards. Even so, it is a rare story (not for EC though) where evil triumphs over good.
One sad thing about the election of President Barack Obama to the White House is that the membership of the Ku Klux Klan has again been on the rise. It seems that the a lot of scared white folks (not just) in the south, are fearful that a black president will… who knows what these looneys are scared of.
This is another EC Comics story with a racial theme, this time dealing with Holocaust survivors and the tormentors and what would happen if they confronted each other after the war. This story appeared in one of EC‘s New Direction books, issue 1 of Impact and seems to have been quit an influential comic story too and there is a surprising twist at the end.
This is perhaps the most controversial and infamous EC Comics story ever written and one that came to the attention of Dr. Frederic Wertham and was cited by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency . And we always thought that us Aussies took our sport seriously.
This is another EC Comics story that deals with race, which was a very tricky subject in the 1950s. It sort of reminds me of the old Spencer Tracy movie Bad Day At Black Rock, only without the towns people trying to kill our hero.
This tale based on a Ray Bradbury story, is quite an infamous EC Comics story from 1953. Actually most stories from EC Comics were infamous in one way or another. This particular story was written not long after the Kefauver hearings into comic books and juvenile delinquency, when pretty much everything that was being published by EC was very heavily scrutinised by the censors. This one story initially was not approved by the Comics Code Authority due to the final panel, which really says more about the people who deemed what could be published and what could not, than about EC themselves. This is not a very articulate explanation that I have done so I have linked to Wikipedia who explains the controversy better than I ever could. I have also selected a relevant extract below to help support my explanation.
“Judgment Day”
Gaines waged a number of battles with the Comics Code Authority in an attempt to keep his magazines free from censorship. In one particular example noted by comics historian Digby Diehl, Gaines threatened Judge Charles Murphy, the Comics Code Administrator, with a lawsuit when Murphy ordered EC to alter the science-fiction story “Judgment Day.”[14] The story depicted a human astronaut visiting a planet inhabited by robots as a representative of the Galactic Republic. He finds the robots divided into functionally identical orange and blue races, one of which has fewer rights and privileges than the other. The astronaut decides that due to the robots’ bigotry, the Galactic Republic should not admit the planet. In the final panel, he removes his helmet, revealing himself to be a black man. Murphy demanded, without any authority in the Code, that the black astronaut had to be removed. As Diehl recounted in Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives:
“ This really made ’em go bananas in the Code czar’s office. ‘Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us’, recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. ‘I went in there with this story and Murphy says, “It can’t be a Black man”. But … but that’s the whole point of the story!’ Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. ‘Listen’, he told Murphy, ‘you’ve been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business’. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I’ll sue you’. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. ‘All right. Just take off the beads of sweat’. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. ‘Fuck you!’ they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form.[15] ”
For more about this story visit this site.
September 27, 2010
Millsie
Blah Blah Blah 2.0 