Punisher Battle Van Revisited 2020

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!