Punisher Annual 1

Gruenwald·Cullins·DeZuniga·Wright
The High Evolutionary: Pet Project
The year is 1930 and we find Herbert Edgar Wyndham working late in an Oxford University physics laboratory. He is examining an old parchment containing maps of DNA that was giving to him by a tall strange man in Geneva. The head of the physics department, Professor Reardon, drops in on him and to Wyndham's surprise hides the old parchment. Reardon lectures Wyndham about his grades and that his scholarship is at risk of being rescinded. Wyndham feels he has little patience for the elementary lessons the faculty at Oxford teaches him but the facilities are the best in England. So Wyndham decides to show Reardon and the other professors what he has been working on so that they may consider permitting him to determine his own curriculum. He shows them his prototype of a genetic accelerator, a device designed to speed up the evolutionary process. The professors are in disbelief so Wyndham shows them his DNA diagrams of rats he has been working on. But in the course of conversation, the professors feel that Wyndham is mocking them. Unfortunately with Wynham's temper, he gets expelled.

Wyndham moves back home and his mother decides to move in with her sister in order for Wyndham to rent out the family home so that he can finance his experiments. He mentions a third parchment of DNA diagram that he has not yet translated but feels confident that his experimental process will no longer be fatal. He uses his genetic accelerator on his dog (Dempsey the Dalmatian) and transforms him into a human-dog like creature. After the experiment, the creature escapes. Wyndham goes after the creature but suddenly he hears a gunshot. He finds the creature dead, shot by hunters who mistaken the creature for a deer.

Months later, we find Wyndham in a flat in Paris with Jonathan and Merriam Drew along with their baby daughter Jessica. Wyndham apparently wrote Jonathan asking if he'd be interested in pooling resources together in order to set up a little research facility. It appears that Jonathan and Wyndham have been old friends from the Geneva Science Conference over the years. The Drews offer a tract of land Merriam just inherited from her maternal uncle and a renovation for a laboratory is suggested by Merriam. Wyndham also offers to sell his mothers house to raise enough capital to buy apparatus they would require. After the champagne is poured they make a toast. Jonathan Drew: "Here's to setting science on its ear. "