On the transformative issues of social justice, the gang at 225 Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan was always ahead of the curve.

The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott?

Thirty-two months before that seminal event in the American Civil Rights movement, Al Feldstein and Joe Orlando produced "Judgment Day," a science-fiction parable about a segregated society in which the blue robots sit at the back of the bus.

The 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till?

Three years before the African-American teenager was beaten to death for speaking to a white woman in Mississippi, Wally Wood illustrated "The Guilty," a 7-page story in which an innocent black suspect is shot to death by a racist small-town sheriff.

And the 1954 hearing in which U.S. Army counsel Joe Welch famously demanded of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

Two years earlier, Bill Gaines published "The Patriots," wherein an anti-Communist mob kills a stoic spectator at a military parade because, blinded in the Korean War, he fails to salute a passing flag.

These prescient, provocative, controversial stories did not appear in the pages of The Atlantic, Esquire or The New Yorker.

They were delivered in electric, 10-cent jolts by EC Comics.

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"The most aesthetically radical and politically daring comic-book company of the past 100 years," argues Ben Saunders, who heads the Comic Studies' program at the University of Oregon.

"This is a subversive strand of pop culture. And it's gorgeous, some of the finest artists ever to work in the medium."

Saunders is the curator for "Aliens, Monsters, and Madmen: The Art of EC Comics," which opens May 14 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene.

Although he planned the exhibition for years, he's still surprised by the power in these 60-year-old images and stories.

"This material is painfully relevant. Agonizingly relevant," Saunders says. "I wish the spectacle of racist cops shooting African-Americans in the back was part of the bad old days. But it's not.

"And if you told me in 2010, when I was putting this show together, that a pathological, narcissist billionaire would actually look like he was the nominee of choice for the Republican Party for the office of president, and that person would be encouraging racist violence at his rallies, I would have said that's never going to happen.

"The beating up of people who disagree with you at political rallies? I was naive enough to think America had outgrown that."

Before EC - Entertaining Comics - was boxed in by censorship, Congressional hearings and industry paranoia in the mid-50s, Bill Gaines and his fellow provocateurs were endlessly inspiring.

"To this day," underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson wrote in 1986, "I've yet to meet any artist, writer, etc., of my generation who wasn't permanently influenced by EC Comics."

On exhibit in Eugene this spring are many of the reasons why.

The original art includes Frank Frazetta's cover to Weird-Science Fantasy #29, considered by many the most memorable illustration in the history of comics; several complete EC stories, including "Judgment Day"; and Johnny Craig's severed-head cover from Crime SuspenStories.

That's right, a severed head. Dangling from the fist of an ax-murderer. Asked by a Senate subcommittee if the carnage was in good taste, Gaines - who would publish MAD magazine for almost 40 years - assured his interrogators it was:

"I think it would be bad taste," Gaines argued, "if he were holding the head little higher so the neck would show with the blood dripping from it."

They took few prisoners at EC. They pushed the envelope on horror, satire, mayhem, artistic freedom, shock endings, even American romance.

The final panel from "Judgment Day"

"Marriage in the EC crime comics always means someone is going to get killed," Saunders notes. "Forget 'Leave it to Beaver.' It's 'Leave it to Cleaver.'"

But at their impassioned best, EC's artists and storytellers - Gaines, Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman - also brought a razor-edged morality and sharp wit to the injustice they found when they returned home from World War II.

"In what is officially a children's medium," Saunders notes, "there are stories about the Ku Klux Klan, stories about corrupt law enforcement, the evils of McCarthyism, and anti-racism science-fiction parables.

"That complicates our understanding of what the 1950s were. The '60s don't erupt out of nowhere. What if the 1960s really began in 1952, with the publication of Shock SuspenStories and MAD?"

Because Gaines was the rare publisher who placed the original art in a warehouse, not a paper shredder, some of the most compelling evidence of that thesis will summer in Eugene.

And what is on display is not just the illustrative chops of Al Williamson, Wood and Frazetta but a pivotal moment in 20th century popular culture that Saunders ranks with Elvis Presley's arrival at Sun Studio and the Kennedy-Nixon debate.

The civil-rights struggle is "the historical narrative, the great burden of the American conscience, in the '50s and '60s," Saunders says, "and EC participated in that narrative."

With a verve and style that will, I hope, continue to inspire the cartoonists watching the carnage in this presidential campaign.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com