Judgment Day! (EC comic story)

Feldstein, Al, story, and Joe Orlando, art. "Judgment Day!" Originally published in Weird Fantasy #18 (1953); reprinted Incredible Science Fiction #33 (1956).[1]

Discussed by Qiana Whitted, ch. 4 of EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U Press, 2019), itself reviewed by Dominick Grace, SFRA Review 51.2 (Spring 2021).[2]

Grace asserts that this chapter would be the most relevant for an SF audience, and this holds true for this wiki. Chapter title: “‘Battling, in the Sea of Comics’: EC’s Invisible Man and the Jim Crow Future of ‘Judgment Day!’” Grace's opening on the chapter:

This famous story recounts the visit of Tarlton, representative of the Galactic Republic, to the planet Cybrinia, to determine whether its robot inhabitants, descended from (if robots can indeed descend from ancestors) robots first built on Earth. Tarlton discovers that there are two robot classes, orange and blue, and that the blues are treated as distinctly second-class, despite being identical in manufacture to the orange robots, except for the colors of their external shells. Tarlton determines that the robots are not yet ready for admission into the Galactic Republic. Probably unsurprisingly to readers today, but very much controversially when the story first appeared (this issue was the basis of the Comics Code Authority’s attempt to bar EC from reprinting the story in 1956), Tarlton, who has worn his space suit throughout the visit, is revealed in the final panel of the story to be Black.[3]

This story would have been one of EC's “preachies,” with a clear message and earnest tone, one we might compare in those regards with classic Star Trek's “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (season 3, episode 15 [10 Jan. 1969]), with its battle to extinction of a race divided into people black and white vs. those white and black.[4] For the subsidiary question lightly raised by Grace, of robot descent, see the issue of robot evolution in the Futurama episode "A Clockwork Origin."

RDE, finishing, 5Nov21