EC Comics' magnum opus: Master Race

[alicemacher]

"Krigstein's formal qualities as a storyteller—not the story's subject matter—make 'Master Race' a tour de force. He encapsulates the decade of Nazi terror powerfully but with restraint, never slipping into the Grand Guignol that made EC notorious. The two tiers of wordless staccato panels that climax the story have become justly famous among the comics literate. They have often been described as 'cinematic,' a phrase thoroughly inadequate to the achievement: Krigstein condenses and distends time itself."
--Art Spiegelman, "Ballbuster: Bernard Krigstein's Life Between the Panels," The New Yorker, July 14, 2002


Warning for anti-Semitism.


From Impact #1 (Mar.-Apr. 1955). Story by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, art by Bernie Krigstein.


Although it attracted little attention when first published, "Master Race" was an unusual story. It dealt with the Holocaust at a time when, a mere ten years after the war, almost no fiction media were ready to do so. (The Nazi genocide didn't even have a universally-recognized name yet; "Holocaust" wouldn't become common usage until the late sixties.) Then there was the art, which I'll let speak for itself.

Comments

[ozaline]

It's also included in We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust (IDW)