Wesofoz2's Comic Book Blogs

So I recently got my hands on a bunch of the Heavy Hitters Epic comics. These comics are fascinating to me for a couple of reasons. First, it seems to be Marvel's answer to Image comics and DC's Vertigo line.

We all know the early 90's were a wild time for comics and Marvel was bleeding out with the loss of the Image founding fathers. What astounds me is that for as many Heavy Hitters titles that there were, I can remember almost ZERO advertising for these books. I know they ran some ads in Wizard for the launch of the line, but beyond that, the only place I can find ads for these books are in OTHER Heavy Hitters books. I find nothing in the regular Marvel titles from the same era. 

That, speaks volumes to me. It makes it feel like Marvel PURPOSEFULLY, buried these books because they didn't WANT to be in the business of creator owned books. At the same time though, they didn't want to lose any more of their top teir talent. I can only imagine the song and dance Marvel gave some of these guys about the line and why they were pulling the plugs on these comics. 

So I bought a blind bag of 50 Punisher comics and ended up with a copy of Punisher Issue #61 from 1992. I don't know what leads up to it and I have no idea what happens after, but I think I am going to track down the rest of the story because I have SO many questions. It's not that it's written poorly or the art is bad or anything, but I just got dropped into the middle of an arc where apparenlty Punisher is now an African American male known as Rook and nobody seems to be able to tell the difference. Not even Luke Cage. Is he doing some sort of black face? Did he go through some sort of race change machine? How do they handle changing him back and what do the other characters say about it? 

I have to investigate this further.