Issue(s): Punisher #19
Cover Date: May 89
Title: "The Spider"
Credits:
Mike Baron - Writer
Larry Stroman - Penciler
Randy Emberlin - Inker
Marc McLaurin - Assistant Editor
Carl Potts - Editor

Review/plot:
The Punisher is trying to raise money to help a veterans counseling organization that is being closed due to budget cuts.

To do it, he's selling a package of heroin to drug dealers, killing them when they come to buy it, taking their money, and then putting it up for sale again. But things go wrong when a Vietnamese woman from an apartment across the hall where the Punisher is doing his trade gets involved.

The latest dealer turns out to have done some nasty stuff in Vietnam, and he thinks the lady was from the village where he did it, come back to get vengeance.

The woman is killed, orphaning a daughter. The Punisher tracks the dealer to where he's hiding in Australia, at an opal mine in the desert.

It's Australia, so we do one of these:

You have to admit it is a pretty good knife if it can be used to deflect throwing stars, though.

In the end, the Punisher decides to give the money to the daughter instead of the vets.

Larry Stroman's art is stiff and weird (overly rendered?), but this is a standard Punisher story and it's fine. I commented this a little in a Punisher War Journal story that i placed between this and last issue of the main series, but it's a little weird to go from a four part "Kill the Kingpin" story that ended with the Kingpin saying that their truce will only last 24 hours back to a random continuity free one-and-done. Nothing wrong with it, but not what i would have expected. When i first saw the cover i thought maybe Punisher was hiding out in Australia from the Kingpin, but it's nothing like that.

If you're looking for evidence that violent stories like this might encourage people that are already a little unhinged, here you go:

And while i'm including scans from the lettercol, here's more promotion of the Dolph Lungren Punisher movie.

The contest they refer to was for readers to vote on who would be the best actor to play the Punisher in a movie. Lungren came in third after Schwarzenegger and Stallone (and Ronald Reagan came in fourth).

Quality Rating: B-

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

That letter is all types of messed up - but also kind of hilarious, with at least three different variations on how to censor d**m blanking bleeping curse words.