Like it says in today's review, Jim Lee was once scheduled to draw a Punisher/Nick Fury team-up graphic novel. If you've read any comics from the time, you may even recognize the promos they ran for it, featuring full, finished pages from the story:
Here's how they described it, in one of their previews:
In New York, a new international drug pipeline appears, one that may have connections in high government offices. In the process of his war on crime, Punisher discovers it.
At SHIELD headquarters, high-tech weaponry is being stolen. It appears the same international organization is selling those weapons overseas.
The Punisher and Fury discover that the pipeline leads all the way to Southeast Asia and one mastermind. They set out to find him. When they cross paths in Hong Kong, they form an uneasy alliance.
Col. Fury wants to capture the criminal leader and bring him to justice. In the process, he hopes to uncover leads that will cripple other tendrils of the drug trade worldwide.
The Punisher wants to kill the mastermind, cutting off a major source of lethal drugs.
The mission becomes personal when the hunted man turns out to be Walter Maddox, an old friend of Frank Castle, from his stint in the Vietnam War.
By the time they reach the drug source in Cambodia, Fury and The Punisher are at each other's throats. They will come to blows before they decide how to deal with Maddox. And after the finish with each other, they have an army of mercenaries in their way.
Because Jim Lee's star was on the rise, Marvel wanted to give him as much time as he needed to do the book, and so never gave him a deadline. Unfortunately, they also kept giving him lots of other cool things to work on, so the pages were produced at a slow pace. Eventually he was moved to Uncanny X-Men (when it was coming out twice a month), then canny X-Men, then he left to form Image, and so the story was never completed beyond the layout stage.
Lee did finish 20-some pages of the 62-page story, and handed them in. Scans of 13 of them have surfaced over the years (not counting the cover, which was used for posters and promos and trading cards, nor the two colored pages), so we can at least see how things were going.
Here's Walter "Blackheart" Maddox, breaking into a SHIELD station:
Punisher attacking a night club:
Punisher prepping for battle:
And Nick Fury going undercover to bust the arms dealer:
The pages were handed in to Marvel, but they've apparently walked out of the office at some point over the years, meaning there's more than this to be seen, but whoever has it knows enough to realize they'd be in a lot of trouble if they ever made that possession public.
Weirdly, despite its cancellation, the comic did have one moment of influence on the outside world: in 1993, Capcom released a Punisher arcade game, with Nick Fury being the improbable Player 2 character, despite the two having no other connections in the comics at the time.
It also features Bonebreaker and Pretty Boy as bosses, thanks to their one appearance in that single story arc.
