Issue(s): Fear #12
Cover Date: Feb 73
Title: "No choice of colors!"
Credits:
Steve Gerber - Writer
Jim Starlin - Penciler
Rich Buckler - Inker

Review/plot:
Hi Jim Starlin.

This story, despite being by Gerber, is in the mold of the first issue of Fear with the Man-Thing where the monster basically unwittingly rights wrongs. I guess the fact that it's Gerber is why it's a little more complicated and deals with a social issue.

There's a black guy, Mark Jackson, on the run from a racist white policeman named Wallace Corlee. Jackson flees to the Man-Thing's swamp.

The Man-Thing actually finds Jackson and bandages his wound.

Jackson tells the Man-Thing that he was framed. But we later learn that Jackson was lying and he did actually kill the sheriff he's accused of killing, although the cop's racist attitude as well as societal conditions might be mitigating factors. In any event, Corlee continues to pursue Jackson even though he's under the Man-Thing's protection (neither character in this story, in my opinion, is freaked out enough by the giant heap of swamp muck that is walking around).

Jackson is shot after the Man-Thing finds out that he was lying, but then the Man-Thing decides that Corlee needs to be punished too so he gives him a big old hug (skull eyes are a Starlin thing, right?).

Not as zany or weird as you'd expect from Gerber, and not as interesting, really.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Essential Man-Thing vol. 1

DC's Spectre tended to also have skull eyes dating back to the early Golden Age.

If you're interested, Jackson's first name was given in page 12, panel 4; page 18, panel 6; and page 19, panel 1.

Thanks, Matthew. Glad to see i missed it three times.

It would have been even better if it was in one of the panels you reproduced! :-)

The name and character of Wallace Corlee is based on the infamous segregationist governor of Alabama George Corley Wallace, also a three-time candidate for the U.S. presidency (1968 on the American Party ticket, 1972 and 1976 as a Democrat) and who would be paralyzed and wheelchair-bound by an assassin's bullet during the '72 campaign.

In a less important, but probably more oft-heard way, George Wallace is also referenced in Lynyrd Skynyrd's morally ambiguous Sweet Home Alabama: "In Birmingham they love the governor (boo boo boo)".

@Andrew- As a "Southern Man", I'm very familiar with that! Also of note is the George Wallace mini-series, broadcast I believe shortly before Wallace's death, directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring Gary Sinise as the embattled governor and Angelina Jolie (!) as his wife/political surrogate Lurleen.