And THAT is why EC comics were justly famous, and justly controversial. To publish something like this in the early fifties boggles the mind.

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:(

Well at least poor Hank doesn't rise from the grave as a zombie or anything...

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Not until Blackest Night, that is.

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Oh, how amusing unintended irony can be.

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The Blackest thing?

Yeah, I caught that just after I pushed the post button.XD

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It makes this image take on a whole new meaning.

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"Across the universe... it's time to stick it to The Man."

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Chills.

It's anvilicious to modern tastes, sure, but like they say on TVTropes... some anvils have to get dropped.

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So much motto.

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oh yeah, one of my faves. Another fave is "The Patriots" (Shock #2). Upset that a man isn't acting respectfully at a parade of returning soldiers, part of the crowd attacks and beats him to death.

His wife informs his attackers that "He ... he ... he wanted to come down ... to greet his old outfit ... sob! They ... they ... they did the best they could putting his face back together after the shell tore it off! Sob ... only when he smiled ... it looked like he was sneering!"

When someone asks why her husband didn't take his hat off when the flag passed, she responded "He ... he didn't know! He couldn't see it! He was ... blind!"

Yeah, those lovely EC twists :)

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It's...distressing to think that not too long ago, this story was believable, not terribly ham-handed and over the top...

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Sometimes you have to shout just to be heard. But hey, at least they managed to find a bit more nuance by the time they got around to the wonderful "Judgement Day!"

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My point was less commenting on the generally anvilicious nature of the story, but despair at the fact that within living memory much of the free world was at such a place that the most unlikely part of this story is that the soldier made his impassioned speech about how much the town had disgusted him.

Or, to put it more succinctly, my problem wasn't the anvil being dropped, but rather that it needed to be.

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I remember this from the old community. This was definitely one of their better ones.

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Yeah, this one, the robot one, and the one with the blind guy as mentioned above.

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...Dayum. Powerful stuff. I could see it coming from several pages away, but still.
I've often thought that one of the tragedies of prolonged, intense war is that it frequently requires temporary liftings of the taboos and social boundaries that have built up over the years. Out of necessity, people fight together who would normally never even speak to each other - unlikely friendships are made, tolerances are formed for things previously thought intolerable. By banding together against a common enemy, people come close to achieving a genuine common purpose and understanding - and then the war ends, and they go back home to a country where things have NOT changed, where the old barriers and prejudices still hold sway, and that brief understanding either vanishes or is submerged in the struggle to fit back into society. It's very sad.

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Except that's not usually what happens.

Not for nothing did World War I feature the song "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Paree". Harry Truman once considered joining the KKK as a political move in the 1930s...but didn't, because of their hate of Catholics, whom Truman had served with in WWI and had come to view differently from direct experience.

Women gained new confidence and foot-holds from their independence gained during WWII, where they served in theaters of war AND took on many male-dominated roles at home. Roles many women were loathe to give up when the war finished.

The Korean War led to Truman completely desegregating the armed forces. Hell, Sidney Poitier's movie "All the Young Men..." was about this very topic. By Vietnam, things changed dramatically.

Wars don't end racism or intolerance or any such thing...but they DO have an influence. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil rights movement got a huge boost following World War II (remembering that landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1950 and 1951). But expecting people to suddenly and utopically change isn't realistic. Lasting change comes slowly. But take heart that it DOES come.

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I wasn't saying that NO change occurred, simply that changes in war often happened faster than people back home in peacetime were willing to admit afterwards. I mean, the difference between the Rosie-the-Riveter types of WW2 and the nice little housewives of the '50's is pretty dramatic, and while the armed forces may have been desegregated, places back home certainly weren't. THAT'S the sort of stuff I mean, not that there was no change at all.

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Great story reminds me much of the film "the best years of out lives", about returning WW2 vets.

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Didn't catch this one in the old comm - really good one.

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