Oh yeah, he's not The Punisher as in he's driving his Battle Van through the undergrowth, wearing black spandex with a skull on his chest and logging all his VC kills is his War Journal. But still, Frank Castle's presence serves to take you out of the story and he feels very shoehorned in. Also, Castle isn't just a side character that appears within the larger cast. In the issues of The 'Nam that I've read with him in, he's undoubtedly the star of the book and there's plenty of cheesy foreshadowing of his later life as The Punisher. It all just goes a bit too "Rambo" for my tastes when Castle's in the book.

Ultimately, his appearance in The 'Nam is a bit of a "rolleyes" moment for me...like when Anakin Skywalker runs into the young Greedo in that deleted scene from The Phantom Menace. It's just an unnecessary use of a character in some attempt to tie the story into later famous events. We know that The Punisher fought in Vietnam, but that doesn't mean we need to see him in a comic book that is supposedly trying to depict the infantry soldier's experience in as realistic way as possible.

Another thing to remember is that Frank Castle's appearance also marks the point where The 'Nam stops being a comic set in our world and becomes a book set in the Marvel Universe. That's not a good thing IMO.




Agreed. Although, I think the scripts and dialogue are actually more nuanced than you make out. But the pacing is good and the character's are so engaging that the book is definitely a real page turner, as I said earlier. But I do agree with you that the synergy between Murray and Golden was superb. Actually, the synergy between Murray and Wayne Vansant is also very good. I know that Murray liked to let the artist handle most of the story exposition with pictures, rather than doing it with dialogue.



OK, that's interesting to know. I don't think I'm familiar with his writing in anything other than The 'Nam.





Yeah, I really must try to get hold of some issues of Vietnam Journal. There were a fair few mini-series that accompanied the main book too, I believe. Back issues of it look to be rare on this side of the Atlantic though. I might need to get some issues shipped over from America.

A thought that never, ever, capital N Never, occurred to Chris Claremont!

I'm pretty sure I sold off all my 'Nam comics. It was a good series, what I read from it, which was mostly early issues and then the Frank Miller story that came much later.

Haven't read Vietnam Journal but have heard nothing but good things about it. I'll have to keep an eye out for the reprint. Or heck, maybe the originals.

When it comes to Mary Sues, Zatana's manager Jeff is the original Terry Long.

See I love those Checker volumes and have a couple. The thing with Sunday strips, is that they were meant to be read at intervals, so there is a fair amount of start and stops affecting flow when you tried to read them in a row. They were never intended to be collected and there was no though to going back and reading old ones to catch up, so each one has to catch you up/stand alone/and move the story forward, all in 6-8 panels where you cannot cramp out the art too much with text or the draw of the strip is gone. It affects what you can and cannot include in each strip and limits some of the storytelling choices. Daily strips can do it a bit differently, but Sunday strips have to be paced differently because of the larger gap between episodes. A daily strip can devote a single day to character moments, a weekly strip has to move the plot and have action and/or plot complication every installment. It is difficult to go back and read these with a modern eye, especially in the internet age where everything is accessible at a moment's notice, and it is easy to go back and read anything from the beginning if you have the inclination. When these were being created, not everyone was going to have access to each installment and they needed to be crafted so they were accessible at any given point and give the reader something to hook them moving forward. Sometimes there was an end point to the story in mind or to the plot at least, most of the time it was pretty much free-form improvisation in the dark to meet deadlines and keep everything moving. The thing with Raymond's Flash Gordon is that you can almost ignore the text and follow the story pretty well with just the art. When I read through a volume, I usually just look at each strip in succession getting the flow of the story via the visuals, then once I have looked at them all, go back and start reading them more slowly, a strip at a time to flesh out those story impressions. I agree, the plots and characters were very basic, but Raymond was on the ground floor of this type of story telling laying foundations others would build upon. Some people don't appreciate the foundations because they are just that, a framework that gets built upon and they prefer the final construction in its maturity and complexity. Others prefer the starkness of the foundation. Just like in music some people like the simplicity of an acoustic guitar while others only like electric with all the bells and whistles of effects and add-ons modern guitar craft has made available. Some like both. It's a matter of taste really. I love the early Raymond stuff, you not so much. Variety is the spice of life.

-M

Yeah, it's precisely that stop-start-stop to the flow that I found irritating. But I also realise that this is one of the inherent problems with the weekly newspaper strip format. Ultimately, these strips were never meant to be read one after another in quick succession. They were, as you rightly say, meant to be digested in weekly installments.




Well, I certainly appreciate the strip for how groundbreaking this kind of stuff was back in the day, but yeah...it's a little too basic for my tastes. As a rule of thumb, anything from the Silver Age onwards is enjoyable for me (and the EC horror and sci-fi titles of the '50s too), but Golden Age stuff is just too basic for me to enjoy on the whole.




Yeah, good analogy, I guess. I love listening to pre-WW2 blues and country music (along with a whole load of more modern stuff, of course), but I know from experience, scratchy old recordings by Robert Johnson or "Dock" Boggs aren't everybody's cup of tea these days. No matter how important to the development of modern pop and rock music they are.

I've been reading the first omnibus of Claremont's Uncanny, the fifth Batman Showcase (Batman 216-228 and Detective 391-407) and a trade collecting The Joker.

With Uncanny I'm up to Jean and Beast getting separated from the rest of the team after they escape from Magneto's Antartica base. The pacing seems a little odd, and I'm not real clear on how the fill-in (maybe 109?) fits in with the story at large, but it's pretty enjoyable so far. I do not care for Cyclops at all.

I read all the O'Neil stories in the Showcase first (love his JLA and Venom) and am now going reading the Robbins stories. I think I prefer the Robbins stories slightly, as O'Neil's aren't as great as I expected, and but this is one of my favorite runs. I do wish there were more established villains than just Man-Bat, though.

I've read the first three issues of The Joker and it's about what I expected. It's not bad, but it feels more like extended back-up stories than an actual series.