Dreams can come true! Even ones you didn’t know you wanted!

My time with Frank Castle and Microchip are golden to me. I got to play vigilante in my head for years and get paid well for the privilege. That I could exploit my pack-rat mind to show a true reflection of the heavy metal side of The Punisher was a bonus.

The man needs to get around. The people he deals with are a brutal bunch of stone killers. Thus when driving, he needs transportation that will get him from Point A to Point B in one piece.

I did not invent the “Punisher Battle Van.” Many years after that happened, it was Steely-Eyed Editor Carl Potts who assigned me the task of filling it up! Frank was a high-powered, high-capacity kind’a guy so I knew there should be a mini-gun in there. Bullet-resistant? Sure! A double-hull with Kevlar panels installed. A sliding bullet-resistant side window panel… You’ve got to get it out of the way, otherwise things just don’t look “street-legal.”

You guys know the drill—the only fantastic thing was something that could reach out to grab a bad guy and hold on. So in the art there’s a spiral thingie that is made of muscle-wire (tinitol) and can act like an octopus’ arms. Everything else was off-the-shelf gear that had some very neat metal work done to make sure it delivered when needed. The mini-gun was .223 scaled down from a General Electric 5.56mm chain gun—all Microchip had to do was machine everything just right! Then mount it on an electric sled that ran on tracks—have a pop-open roof hatch and a tv-targeting system that could aim the weapon from the driver’s seat and Frank could lay down a wall of lead with one hand while still driving! [That’s not ‘fantastic’ – that just means that after it’s built the hard part is finding a place where you can train… !]

Then… this:

My comrade-in-comics and recent YouTube interviewer, Dan Shahin, (whose long-form and revelatory reviews of the old and new are done in a very different and informed manner—I say: go look him up!) who is always on the look-out for uncredited-but-perfectly-legal appropriations of my work—told me he found this little honey at Target! [How appropriate!] So I hauled butt to my own Target and found a few.

I suggest you do too! Hot Wheels, a Mattel-owned mini-car maker of all sorts of die-cast fun [S-Scale, 1/64 for those who model railroad or care!] poured over the work I did (pre-dating the Punisher Armory back in late 1988) and struggled to make it work in small scale and plastic! They even included the roof-top blade antenna and the radar ball! Very nice!

©Disney/Marvel

©Disney/Marvel

I have often kidded around that us Marvel freelancers could be paid with toys instead of money… but no one has taken me up on either.

This just in, Man About World Bill Vallely, informs me there’s a black variant out there—it has a different placard and runs a little more money.

But, Just ask Frank Castle, basic black always works!