Punisher 'Road Metal' Vignette...

This was a short 12-page story of Marvel's The Punisher that I wrote, pencilled, and inked. It would have been around 1995.

I titled it 'Road Metal', and the Punisher went undercover as a biker in a bike gang to rescue a kidnapped boy. When I got the original pages back from Marvel they had written 'vignette' on each page. A vignette can refer to a short story, so I'm assuming my story was still called Road Metal and they just wrote vignette on there to classify it as a backup story. I dunno.

My editor said it was slated for publishing in an upcoming Punisher comic. However, shortly after this I 'left my old life behind', stopped working in comics, and went out on my hitchhiking walkabouts, changed my life, and never really came back into the comic book fold.

Since I left my old address behind, I never received free copies of whatever book this appeared in. I've never seen it published and I cannot seem to find reference to it online. If anyone here knows which Punisher book it's in, I'd appreciate you letting me know.

I was paid for it... but back then Marvel did pay for some stories on spec, even if they later did not get published. It's a tricky decision whether to post it online here as published or unpublished; for now I'll state that it was paid for, intended to be published, I was told it would be published... but I'm not sure if it was actually published. So in fairness I'll state the status as unpublished until I'm sure either way.

Update: I spoke with Carl Potts after uploading this page. During the years I was working for Marvel, Carl was the executive editor at Marvel. I would usually deal with my regular editor assigned to Punisher, but would often talk with Carl too. He now says that my regular editor made a lot of screw-ups back in the day, and it's almost certain this story never saw publication. Especially if I can find no evidence of it anywhere online. So I guess this story was a lonely, sad, neglected, lost little orphan that never saw the light of day. *sniff*

It's unfortunate, because throughout my previous years of Punisher projects, I was never happy with my art for those stories; I had a lot of improvement to do. By the time I did this, my final Punisher story, I was getting to the stage of liking my Punisher art, being proud of how far it had come.