Dates
- Cover date
- July-August 1953
- Pages
- 36
Editions and covers
- Original editionSource ↗
Creators
Stories
- The Loathsome! · 8 pages
A doctor sends a deformed mutant child that was the product of her father's exposure to atomic radiation to be brought up in an orphanage. The women of the orphanage dislike her because she displays poor behavior. That evening the younger nurse sees the girl on the grounds stuffing notes into tree hollows. The following evening they confront the child demanding the note and the girl flees from them. She climbs up a tree branch, loses her grip and falls onto a spiked fence. As the note slips from the dying child, the older woman picks it up. It says "To whoever finds this note - I love you."
- Surprise Package · 7 pages
Martha was very suspicious of Leonard. She had this eerie feeling that something was different about him and she wondered if there were two of him. Soon she discovers that she was partially right; there were six of him! He had been making marionettes of himself to be with multiple women simultaneously. After she kills the marionette copy of him, she commits suicide.
- Progress · 1 pages
An inventor creates a revolutionary device that causes absolute silence in the area around it. This causes people to tune out outside noise and reinvent the lost art of reading books and conversation.
- The Reformers · 6 pages
A group of men called Reformers go to different worlds and try to blame all of those planets societal ills on comic books, alcohol. promiscuous clothing etc. They land on a particular planet and are shocked to find that despite having all these things, the society is not corrupted. That the people on this world can enjoy these things without becoming corrupted by them. The Reformers are frustrated and plan to cause discontent among the inhabitants. However their boss, Satan, assures them that can't happen since the world they are on is called Heaven.
- 50 Girls 50 · 7 pages
Fifty men and fifty women are chosen to make a 100-year journey to a far-off solar system in order to inhabit it and continue the population process well into the future. Each volunteer would be quick-frozen so that they could be thawed out at the end of the journey and ready for their job, which is a process that could only be performed once. Sid sees an opportunity to thaw himself out early and thaw a different woman out at intervals so he can romance them while on the trip and then refreeze them when he gets bored. However one of these women turns the tables on him by refreezing him.
Reprinted in
Weird Science (1980), EC Classics (1985), Vault of Horror (1991), Weird Science (1994), The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library (2012), Creepy Worlds (1962), Tales of the Incredible (1965), EC Portfolio (1971), The American Comic Book (1985), Weird Science Annual (1994), Foul Play! The Art and Artists of the Notorious E.C. Comics! (2005), Choke Gasp! The Best of 75 Years of EC Comics (2019), Home to Stay! The Complete EC Ray Bradbury Stories (2022), EC Archives: Weird Science (2022)