His name is Frank Castle. A battle hardened Vietnam veteran, he was took his family for a picnic in Central park.
Suddenly, senselessly, his family was killed right in front of his eyes, by cowardly mobster scum.
His wife…
His children…
Remorselessly gunned down, with no regard.
But he seems surpisingly happy about it!
In 1990 Toybiz began it’s long relationship with Marvel comics, beginning with the Marvel Superheroes line. Before Marvel Legends brought super-articulated action figures that were as close to 6 inch humans as a toy is likely to get without being majorly creepy into our homes, they made…something a bit inferior. Toynology hadn’t quite hit modern-day advancements. With a grand total of 7 points of articulation, the first wave of Marvel Superheroes was not going to be setting the bar too high. But it was pretty cool. For the time. If your expectations weren’t too high. And you didn’t overthink them. And you didn’t have a time machine to take you into the future to show you what toys could be. And you didn’t live in Japan.
It had been over half a decade since the Secret Wars line died after a grand total of two waves and a handful of characters, and having new Marvel figures immortalized in plastic was very welcome. They were not without their problems, however. Hulk (a focus of an upcoming column, for sure) was a wee green little thing who could only move his arms as a singular unit, up…down…up…down. Captain america’s shield, in a word, sucked. Action features were pounded into the toys in order to appeal to…somebody. But they were new Marvel toys that were in rough scale with Secret Wars, and that was all that mattered.
And to have a Punisher figure, after years of reading his comics, was frankly (har har) awesome. Secret Wars Wolverine could slice and dice Punisher while he had a full clip emptied into his gut. Punisher could finally fight Super Powers Batman in a continuity shaking crossover that would only end in Batman using POWER ACTION MAKEPUNISHERCRY ATTACK
So it was definitely cool. But…
Why was Frank so happy?
Was this the remorseless criminal-killing nutbag we had grown to love in Punisher, Punisher War Journal and guest appearances in every single comic ever produced? Grim, gritty, hardened by life, scarred by war and pain and loss? He seemed reasonably well adjusted. He seemed so happy and perky that he could easily have teamed up with Archie Andrews and the rest of the Riverdale gang.
But that would have just been ridiculous.
Even more incongruous was the fact that he came with no less than 4 weapons designed to blow away the criminal element. A handgun for closer combat, a machine gun to wipe out groups of goons, a grenade launcher for maximum destruction, and a Tommy gun in case he ran into Bonnie and Clyde. And while dealing out this death and destruction, he kept this smile plastered on his face. And it’s not a creepyoogy Joker smile, it’s more a “would you like some ice cream, kid?” smile.
Well would you, kid?
This was a Punisher that save a bunch of money by switching to Geico.
A Punisher that just got a letter from an old friend.
A Punisher that just got a date with the cute girl at the bookstore, that he’d been thinking abut on and off for a month or so.
A Punisher that just watched (inserthappyfeelgoodmovieofchoicehere)
A Punisher that just wanted to be…your neighbor.
And…so on.
(Note: I would have taken pictures of him with his weapons but all the weapons from the 90’s figures are in two big boxes in my basement and it would require Indiana Jones to help me dig through it all. And he was busy. Plus there was a big spider down there. And not the cool irradiated kind. I mean the Lord of the Rings kind. I may have to let him have the house.)
Punisher the toy also had some kind of strange cap-firing mechanism on his back. Similar to COPS. They smiled a lot for no reason also. Coincidence? I think not.
Punisher the man had no such cap-firing mechanism on his back. Good thing. It’s hard to find rolls of caps that big.
He could also bend his elbows, so double bonus.
A better Punisher was later made in the Spider-man cartoon line, and finally Marvel Legends brought two different flavors of hyper-articulated Franks to us, but for the first time he was imortalized in plastic, Frank seemed appropriately happy about it.
And you can’t blame him. Who among us could say we’d feel any different?
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