Stories and Themes
Creators Gaines and Feldstein made cameos in the stories "Cosmic Ray Bomb Explosion" (14, July–August 1950), "7 Year Old Genius" (7) and "The Expert" (14) and "The Ad" (14).
Issues 14 and 15 in 1952 ran EC Quickies, a format featuring two similarly themed stories, each three or four pages, in the space usually devoted to a seven or eight-page story.
In Weird Fantasy 17 (1953), Al Williamson illustrated "The Aliens". Three aliens head for Earth to prevent a nuclear war, but they arrive too late. Amid the devastation they find a copy of Weird Fantasy 17. When they read "The Aliens", they see that it had predicted their arrival. On the last page they see a picture of themselves looking at a comic book with a picture of themselves looking at... ad infinitum.
Quite possibly the comic's most controversial story was published in issue 18 in 1953. "Judgment Day" featured an astronaut who comes to a planet populated by orange and blue robots who hope to join the Galactic Republic. As he tours the planet, the astronaut, named Tarlton, realizes that blue robots are treated horribly and given fewer rights than the orange robots, despite the fact that they are identical except for the color of their exterior. Tarlton decides that because of this, the planet will not be allowed in the Galactic Republic. In the final panel Tarlton removes his helmet, revealing that he is black. This story was chosen for reprinting approximately three years later in Incredible Science Fiction, which resulted in an argument that caused Gaines to quit comics altogether.
Read more about this topic: Weird Fantasy
Famous quotes containing the words stories and, stories and/or themes:
“I’m the only woman reporter they have, so I get all the meat boycott stories and all the meatless food stories.... Actually, I’ve only cooked three meals in my life. The most uncomfortable place for me in the whole world is in a kitchen.”
—Theresa Brown (b. 1957)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)