The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street is all too believable and that makes this a great episode.
Sadly it's true, humans are given to believing whatever in the hell they want...and the more paranoid & delusional their beliefs are, the more quickly they turn those beliefs into a conspiracy against 'the other guy'. Democracies are lost that way and so are lives...I'm thinking of recent events in early January. At the heart of these witch hunts gone viral is usually some dumbass loud mouth, who likes to point fingers and make others duck for cover.
...And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. Rod Sterling
Sadly it's true, humans are given to believing whatever in the hell they want...and the more paranoid & delusional their beliefs are, the more quickly they turn those beliefs into a conspiracy against 'the other guy'. Democracies are lost that way and so are lives...I'm thinking of recent events in early January. At the heart of these witch hunts gone viral is usually some dumbass loud mouth, who likes to point fingers and make others duck for cover.
...And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. Rod Sterling
That may seem like a meaningless detail, but the episode was filmed just before comics experienced their Superhero resurgence of the "Silver Age".
So, comics at the time (1960) featured 3 major types that were "on top": Westerns (which were beginning to decrease rapidly in popularity), Romance & Sci-Fi.
(Superheroes were at an all time low from the end of WWII to the early 60's, although the "Silver Age" officially started in 1956 with a new version of The Flash appearing in DC Comics, and the Congressional comic book hearings of 1954 had put a huge damper on most Crime comics, while there were still some Funny Animal & Humor comics around but...)
Sci-Fi comics were the leading type at the time - and most featured alien invasion or infiltration stories (all capitalizing on the UFO craze at the time)!
So this episode holds it's own little spot in comic book history.
Your friendly, neighborhood, comic book historian,
Capt.