Cruel Universe #11

[cyberghostface]

Comments

[metadronos]

A rather on-the-nose allegory for Trump's ICE, but of course I agree with the message. Sadly, unlike the Condor government minister in this story, Trump will most likely go to the grave never having had to pay any real consequences for any of his crimes, ICE-related or otherwise.

[dan_ingram]

As I grow older, I grow increasingly annoyed with messages like "Don't discriminate because you might be affected!"

[metadronos]

One of the 1950s EC social justice stories had that same problem. In Shock SuspenStories #5, the leader of a small group of thugs, which tries to scare a Jewish couple into leaving their neighbourhood, and ends up killing them when they set fire to their house, learns from his mother that he was adopted. His birth parents were -- you guessed it -- Jewish, which makes him Jewish too. So of course now he's all "Oh God, what have I done?" On top of that, when word gets around of his ethnicity, his fellow thug friends turn on him and beat him so he'll leave the neighbourhood.

And in Shock SuspenStories #14, a racist father, frustrated at his daughter refusing to stop seeing a Mexican-American man, gathers up some buddies and tells them a false story about her boyfriend trying to rape her. They put on their white robes and hoods (of course), haul the boyfriend (so they think) out of a pitch-black house, and beat their victim to death... only for the ringleader to find, in a twist possibly inspired by the opera Rigoletto, that he's just murdered his own daughter.

I suppose we could interpret such a moral very generously as "We're all part of the same group, the human species, so if you persecute people because they're different from you, you're only hurting humankind collectively, which includes yourself." But that argument only works if the intended recipients themselves see all humanity as one, which they obviously don't,

[super_fly]

The main problem is, while saying "because it's wrong" should be enough, it seldom works on those who need to learn it unless it affects them or someone they care about directly.

And they're certainly unlikely to be swayed into some deep soul-searching by a thinly disguised allegory.

[beyondthefringe]

Awful, but maybe a little too straight-forward on the nose. I was expecting some bigger twist to go along with the banality of evil, the leopards eating the face karmic backlash, etc. I know you can only do so much in like, 8 pages, but this was the sort of issue I've always had with the classic horror comics as well.

[thanekos]

Yeah, they'll eat themselves eventually - maybe they'll eat a lot of other people first and shit the earth afterwards before they do, but uh " long moral arc of the universe " or whatever.