Confronting the Ways We Dehumanize Individuals in EC Comic’s 1953 Story “Counter Clockwise”

Writing about the pivotal comic “Judgment Day!”, which debuted in EC Comics’ Weird Fantasy #18, Daniel Yezbick points out that while EC’s works “trafficked in largely repetitive, openly grotesque, and often sexist power fantasies,” they also “became one of the few voices in any medium with the chutzpah to present openly subversive morality plays that regularly questioned concepts of liberty, equality, faith, and justice.” Through this subversive nature, they used their works, from horror to science fiction to realistic narratives, to, as Mike Benson writes, “make moral statements about bigotry, prejudice, and racial inequality.” While Al Feldstein and Joe Orlando’s “Judgment Day!” address these issue head on, others such as Feldstein’s “A Little Stranger” and Feldstein, Orlando, and Bill Gaines’ “The Green Thing!”, do it underneath the surface. Today, I want to look at Gaines, Feldstein, John Severin, and Bill Elder’s “Counter-Clockwise” which appeared in the same issue as “Judgement Day!”

“Counter-Clockwise” begins with a large panel showing a man and his son encountering an alien being that has emerged from a ship. The father holds a gun out, pointed towards the approaching being. The son, Ron, narrates the story, and and insert panel on the first page flashes back to the father and son…