BHOC: MARVEL TALES #106

Marvel’s long-running line of reprint titles was slowly diminishing as the 1970s reached the end of the decade and the mainstream newsstand outlets that were the lifeblood of comic book sales began to steadily be replaced by a greater reliance on the nascent network of comic book specialty stores. The idea behind such reprint titles initially was that they were an easy way to generate some small amount of revenue and to increase a publisher’s presence on the stands, thereby crowding competitors’ product further off. Marvel had a robust reprint program throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but by 1979 it was beginning to wind down. The one long-term survivor of this program was MARVEL TALES, which continued to be published all the way into the 1990s.

At this point in time, MARVEL TALES was reprinting issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN that were only a relatively small number of years old. Consequently, we were getting up to the point where I was able to read some of these reprinted stories as back issues owned by comics-reading friends even before I got to their MARVEL TALES appearances. But this particular story wasn’t one of them. It’s a key issue in retrospect, featuring the introduction of not just the Jackal, who would be an important addition to Spider-Man’s gallery of villains for a time, but more crucially, the Punisher.

The Punisher was writer Gerry Conway’s take on the many characters who had been popping up in popular men’s paperback fiction series, most notably Don Pendleton’s The Executioner. There were dozens of these guys, so clearly there was an audience for hard-boiled “man-against-the-mob” fiction. Films such as the Death Wish series likewise contributed to the popularization of the lone-hard-man-with-a-gun-meeting-out-justice-in-a weak-and-corrupt-system genre, and Marvel was never shy about drawing from whatever was making waves in popular culture. Reportedly, Gerry wasn’t really thinking about the Punisher as anything more than a new player in Spider-Man’s world, but looking at how much thought and attention the writer gave him and you have to assume that he hoped for more.

This early Punisher, as illustrated by artist Ross Andru, was a bit different from the character as he’d come to be known later. for one thing, Andru gave him a very distinctive face in his earliest appearances, one that can be seen on the page above. It’s pretty clear that he had somebody specific in mind as his model for the character, but successive artists shaved down some of the rough edges of Frank Castle’s visage, making him just a bit more generic. We also don’t get much on the Punisher’s origin in this story. We learn that he’s waging a one-man war on the mob, but not why. He mentions that he spent years in the Marines, but nothing further about his background. He’s also got a tech supplier called The Mechanic, but that’s about it. And as this was a Comics Code comic book originally published in 1973, the Punisher mostly uses fantasy weapons such as a “concussion rifle” rather than any genuine or overtly lethal ordinance. But it all looked close enough that readers of the period got the idea.

He’s also a bit of a knucklehead in this initial appearance, in which he throws his lot in with the obviously-sinister Jackal to kill Spider-Man, whom he believes was responsible for the murders of Gwen Stacy and Norman Osborn. Gerry hasn’t entirely decided who and what the Jackal is going to be apart from a new mystery villain, so his dialogue and motivations here don’t quite smoothly line up with what we eventually find out his backstory to be. But most of the Marvel books of this era were produced in a very jazzlike way, with creators just making stuff up on the fly issue after issue. Anyway, the Punisher is gunning for Spider-Man, and Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson wants pictures of the newspaper-selling vigilante, so Spidey is out looking for him as well. The two meet and tussle, but the web-spinner clearly has the upper hand. At least until he’s cold-cocked from behind by the Jackal and plummets off the top of the building they’re fighting on. Spidey saves himself easily, but round one is over.

The Punisher is also sloppy enough at this early point in his development to keep a plate with the identity of its manufacture screwed onto one of the high-tech weapons that he discards during his fight with the wall-crawler, which gives Spidey a clue as to where to look for his foe next. But it turns out that the Jackal has already cut off that loose thread, having killed the Mechanic when the Punisher’s back was turned. Of course, when the Punisher shows up just after the wall-crawler, he assumes that Spidey is the guilty party, causing the two men to go at it once more.

But the book is short on pages by this point, so it’s a quick win for Spidey. With his opponent webbed up, the wall-crawler tries to reason with him. The evidence at the scene indicates that the Jackal is the one who killed the Mechanic, not Spidey, and the weapon with the nameplate that brought the web-slinger to the scene wasn’t left by the Punisher, so it too must have been the Jackal’s doing. The pissed off Punisher vows to hunt down the Jackal–but nothing ever comes of this threat. Despite the loss of his supplier and ally, the Punisher never does have another encounter with the Jackal, at least not during the 1970s. As the issue closes and Spidey swings away, we close in on the Jackal , who realizes that he’s going to need to find another way to rub out the wall-crawler before he can take over the city. Which, as I said, doesn’t really jibe motivationally with what we’ll later learn is the Jackal’s origin and backstory. But that was all somewhat par for the course for this period, when a good portion of the audience was impulse buyers who wouldn’t follow the storylines quite so closely from issue to issue. You could get away with a lot more looseness back then.