Punishing you with an excess of links

Time for a little word association game to guess where I've been for the past week. I'm going to give you a bunch of words and/or phrases, and you have to tell me the first thing that pops in your mind, ok?

• Endless travel
• Vendor booths
• Twelve hour days standing and walking
• The Walking Dead
• Comic books

That's right, I was at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con Redford I aRt Festival!

Regular readers should know by now that my wife is a fine art photographer after linking to her on-line shops now and again. This last weekend was our local art show that she happens to also be the artist coordinator for. That means that I got to man her booth while she hob-nobbed with the other artists in attendance. That's where the twelve hour days come in.

Immediately following that, I'm off on a three day/four state sales trip through the Midwest for my dayjob. That takes care of the endless travel and the walking dead.

And the comic books? Wouldn't you know it that the fellow artist in the booth next to my wife's had a husband who was cleaning out his shortboxes. Word travels fast that I'm a comic book guy, and he brought me up a gift of Batman #436-439 before the show was over. You gotta love the generosity and camaraderie of an artist community. Thanks again Ralph!

Overall, the show was a big success due in no small part to the great effort of the RPAC commitee to bring a respectable art show to our little hamlet outside of Detroit.

And since I happen to know someone high up in the organization, I've requested they not do it on Comic-Con weekend next year, so I'm pretty sure they'll put my request at the top of their to-do list for 2011.

Anyways, I'm back, but without a scanner until Thursday so no new review until later on in the week. What I can do, however, is this. Take it away Randomizer...

...and that book is The Punisher (Vol. 1) #3 from March 1986, published by Marvel Comics!

So this here title is one of the touchstones of my collection, as I'm pretty sure that this is the first title that I ever speculated on and ended up buying multiple copies of. I only bought two, so I wasn't that bad, but then again a month later I bought 5 copies of X-Factor #1. So much for restraint.

Before this mini-series started, I had never read an issue of anything with the Punisher in it before. All I remember is that awesome Mike Zeck cover to the first issue featuring the Punisher with his back to the wall, two guns blazing in a hail of gunfire. That's a cover I'm sure I'll remember until the day I die. That issue also started me on a path of collecting all of his previous appearances in Amazing Spider-Man, but for whatever reason I looked for them in reverse order. By the time I got to Amazing Spider-Man #129, it was well out of my price range. Live and learn, I guess.

His later attempts at ongoing titles never paid off for me, and I didn't collect his titles again until Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon came on board. That's a conversation for another day, so let's dig in and reread an issue from his original mini-series that I haven't reread in probably twenty years. I'm curious as all get out to see how it compares to the modern day Punisher. See you in a day or two for the review.

UPDATE: And wouldn't you know it, as soon as I got this post written I hopped on over to it's a Dan's world to see what he had to say today (as he's a quality daily blogger) and he's got this same issue highlighted as his Crazy Cool Classic Cover. Make sure you bookmark his sight and check him out, as he's good folk (and he's been known to comment around these parts on occasion).