Adventure into FEAR with the Man-Thing #16
No cover blurb is needed on this twenty cent Bronze Age beauty!
The issue title is “Cry of the Native” and, while not a bad issue by a long shot, it reads like a fill-in. Gerber is writing, Mayerik is drawing, and it directly references recent issues, but it has a very self-encapsulated vibe. Native American activists dressed in tribal gear firebomb a bulldozer to protest the construction of an airport on part of the Everglades.
When a guard shoots the young leader of the raid, things blow up into a full-scale riot. With the Occupy Wall Street and BLM movements now already a fading memory, it is once again strange to see “youth protests” presented as a timely issue in a comic. I don't mind it though. These things seems to be cyclical. My only hope is that the next time we see youth take to the streets they aren't goosestepping.
In fairness to Gerber, he doesn’t present the counter-protesting construction workers too badly. It would have been easy to make them coarse, lowbrow bullies. Instead, they are just regular working stiffs who want to provide for their families. All, that is except for one specific roughneck who seems to really hate Man-Thing—which has of course been empathically drawn to all the raging emotions. Yeah, that guy dies horribly. Uh, spoilers!
Very cool issue. It's Gerber, baby!
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