EC Comics’ “The Monsters!” Causes Us to Confront Ourselves

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written about a few of the stories from EC Comic’s Weird Fantasy series in relation to race. I noted how “The Green Thing” addresses the racist trope of contagion and of tainted blood, and I discussed how “Counter-Clockwise” uses positioing to place the white reader in the position of those that they discriminate against. Today, I want to continue this thread by looking at another science fiction story in Shock SuspenStories #1, a series that EC started to showcase the various types of comics they produced. Each issue contained a horror story, a war story, a crime story, and a science fiction story. “The Monsters!” appeared in the first issue from February and March 1952, almost exactly one year before the monumental story “Judgement Day!” in Weird Fantasy #18.

Like the other stories I have examined, Joe Orlando, Bill Gaines, and Al Feldstein’s “The Monsters!” uses science fiction to examine racism and white supremacy, as only EC Comics does. The story turns a lens on the white reader, much like “Counter-Clockwise,” calling upon them to look at them selves in the mirror and face their own reflections. “The Monsters!” accomplishes this through, as usual, the use of extraterrestrials that point out the racist thoughts and hypocrisies that the white readers hold so dear. This assertion may seem absurd at first glance…