"Times call for measures" goes the proverb. I rarely reprint a complete story here at the Dojo and when I have done so it's either in public domain or from some impossible find fanzine. I'm putting forth one of comicdom's most famous stories today, one from EC Comics. Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein co-wrote and Bernard Krigstein drew it. The time was 1955 and the menace of Adolph Hitler was barely a decade in the past, nearly as long as America has been contending shamefully with its most recent "leader". I'd imagine most who visit this blog have read "Master Race", one of the most powerful and well-crafted stories ever published in the format. If you have, I'd recommend it's not a bad time to revisit it, and if by chance you've never encountered the story, then by all means don't let my meanderings stop you for another second.
See you on the other side.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Under the dynamic Jack Davis cover is a story which elegantly and (no pun intended) masterfully guides the reader through a frightening tale of an evil man who meets a justice of a sort at long last. Krigtstein's storytelling, his control of time and space and his fidelity to keeping the reader's eyes exactly where he wants them, makes "Master Race" a compelling eight-page read. Apparently, it began as a typical six-page EC yarn, but Krigstein wanted a few more pages to tell this important tale properly and adding those two pages caused a deadline to be missed and a delay of a year before the public was able to encounter this response to the Nazi menace which defined the 20th century.
I own this story scuds of times. It gets included in nearly any EC anthology because of its quality. And as we've learned to our chagrin, it's terrible message never seems to go out of date. Below are just some of the tomes in which "Master Race" appears. These are just the ones I own.
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