Eventually, Marvel started up a MAX imprint, essentially comics with content that wasn't for kids. Nudity, graphic violence, various slurs and profanity. All on the table, and Garth Ennis got to write a Punisher book under this label, which meant no more cartoony violence about feeding people to zoo animals, no more goofball Russian with huge melons, no more arcs making fun of how stupid and useless costumed heroes are compared to a Hard Man with a Gun, Doing Hard Things (the most tedious of Ennis' various hobby horses.)
Ennis set Frank Castle loose in our world, more or less. There are no superheroes, no superpowers, save Frank's impossible ability to never kill anyone he doesn't intend to. Well, that and money, but that's always a superpower. In addition to the various organized crime types, the Punisher deals with crooked U.S. generals, slave traders, unscrupulous corporate scumbags, a group of women he made widows. Although that last group all died at the hands of their old friend, who they fed into the metaphorical woodchipper of marriage to a sadist mob guy. Ennis is very good at setting up antagonists that are horrible enough I'm fine watching Frank Castle extra-judicially murder them.
It probably also helps that many of them are connected to the levers of power in one way or another that my cynicism tells me that people like them - and they surely exist in this world, in one form or the other - will never face any real consequences from the legal system.
But it's the version of Frank Castle that Ennis presents here that interests me. In Ennis' telling, it's not just one thing that makes Frank Castle the Punisher. Not just his military service, not just his family's death at the hands of a mob shootout. Nor was it an immediate thing, like flipping a switch, but a gradual accumulation of factors until Frank felt he had to act. As one character in "Widowmakers" remarks, 'You're a soldier, so you gave yourself a mission.'
Some versions of Batman strive to eliminate all crime, so no little kid will lose their parents because they took a shortcut through the wrong alley, and may even think it an achievable goal. Ennis' Frank Castle does not, his outlook realistic in a very nihilistic way. Near the end of "The Slavers," when, having obliterated one operation, Frank thinks to himself that he could never stop it entirely, any more than he could stop the flow of heroin, or the tide from coming in. All he could do, was maybe make them pause for a moment. Frank gave himself a mission, but it's one that only ends with his death. (Or the human race going extinct, as in Punisher: The End.)
It's a difference Ennis explores in "Widowmakers", where we also have Jenny Cesare, out for revenge against her sister and her friends, and Detective Budiansky, who has a rep as a cop who ignores regs when he thinks someone needs to act. But when Budiansky seems like he wants to murder someone in revenge for his wife being shot (but not killed), all it takes is Frank asking if Budiansky wants to end up like him for the cop to withdraw. He still has someone to lose. Jenny gets her revenge, but with all the people she was after dead, she has nothing left. She's not going to go on killing criminals forever like Frank, but she can't see anything else. Frank has no one to lose, and in his mind, what he does isn't revenge, it's killing people who need killing, however he defines that, wherever he comes across them. There are always more, so the mission continues.
And while it's a mission Frank chose initially, it's one he's locked into now. He might be able to take a break for a time, but he knows that at some point, he would see something in the news that would make him take action. And he knows what that means for himself. Even if he wanted to live a normal life, he can't. He's too fundamentally changed now for all that. His life - maybe existence is the better word - is all about death. Too many bullets are in the air around him for anyone to survive his presence for long. And that plays out in the series. There are 10 stories in Ennis' 60-issue run, and no character other than Frank lives past a 3rd story. Three strikes - if you're lucky - you're out
Micro and the CIA guy who hopes to recruit Frank die in the first arc, though the CIA guy's assistants, O'Brien and Roth, make it out more or less intact. More than you can say for mob schmuck Nicky Cavella's lackeys, Ink and Pittsy. Cavella and Roth's luck runs out in their next appearance, "Up is Down and Black is White." O'Brien survives that, as does her ex-husband, CIA prick and general scumbag Rawlins, but neither make it through "Man of Stone," and neither does General Zhakarov or his top guy, Dolnovich (like Rawlins, key fixtures in the third arc, "Mother Russia," though none of them actually met Castle then.)
Barracuda survived one encounter, but made the mistake of accepting the chance at a rematch. The generals who pulled the strings on Rawlins and Barracuda didn't meet the Punisher in "Mother Russia" or "Up is Down and Black is White," but once they do, it ends swiftly. Yorkie Mitchell shows up in 3 arcs, but only in flashback in the third, because he got killed. Budiansky only shows up in one arc, ditto social worker Jen Cooke. They get far the fuck away from Frank and everything he represents at the first opportunity. Even Nick Fury doesn't risk the odds, appearing only in "Mother Russia," and "Valley Forge, Valley Forge."
Near the end of "Long Cold Dark," after Frank describes a scene of O'Brien looking briefly free of the demons that haunted her, he says, 'Memories like that, I try to kill. But you can do something with it, if you like.' Castle tries very hard to take emotion out of the equation, whether because it makes him sloppy, or because it makes him realize what a hellish prison cell he's made his life. The fact he still has that memory to relate to O'Brien's sister speaks to his inability to bury that part of him. Ennis likes to present things that drag it out of Frank.
Children in danger a couple of times, ones Frank can save the way he couldn't save his own. Nicky Cavella trying to throw him off by digging up the bodies of Frank's wife and children and pissing on them. Maybe even the generals sending a team of elite U.S. soldiers after him in "Valley Forge, Valley Forge." Guys who believe in serving the same things Frank believed in once. Threats, certainly moreso than the mob guys, but not one Frank can declare needs punishing. But also not a threat he wants to allow to stop him. That's what makes it a little different. With the children, or Cavella's nonsense, Frank's response is simply violence, but more brutal. Rather than calmly shoot someone, Frank dismantles them. Barracuda is left as something barely recognizable as human.
The soldiers, he can't do that, and there's only so far even he can go against that many highly trained guys that he won't kill. Ultimately, he doesn't really fight his way out, so much as survives for being unapologetically what he is. The generals try to pretend at still being soldiers, or caring about anything but saving their own asses and their post-career seats on various corporate boards. Frank is the Punisher, full stop. He doesn't compromise, he doesn't quit, he doesn't pretend. One of the soldiers, upon seeing the remains of an attack the Punisher made, compares him to the Xenomorph. 'I admire its purity.' And for the most part, he's not wrong. Even the Punisher's compassion often expresses itself through violence.
The book went through several pencilers over 60 issues. Lewis Larosa, Doug Braithwaite and Lan Medina each drew one arc. Goran Parlov drew three (with Howard Chaykin drawing the first part of "Long Cold Dark" for some reason, his work looks nothing like any of the others, let alone Parlov's), and Leandro Fernandez drew four arcs. I think Fernandez is the best of them. Larosa and Medina each lean a bit too much into photo reference. Budiansky sometimes looks exactly like Sam Jackson, and Larosa is clearly cribbing from Clint Eastwood for Castle, to the extent it gets distracting.
Parlov's art is exaggerated and cartoonish enough it feels like it would have been a better fit for the Marvel Knights book. The Punisher is running around with forearms like Popeye in some of those panels, and the level of violence Punisher and Barracuda inflict on each other isn't far from what Punisher and the Russian did (though Parlov's art makes it look more brutal than Steve Dillon's, though maybe that was just the more lax hand a MAX book got.)
Leandro Fernandez seems to strike a nice balance over the course of "Up is Down and Black is White", "The Slavers", and "Man of Stone." His characters look tough, or craven or arrogant or whatever, but in a grounded way that you could see real people looking like that, without any obvious famous people being lightboxed into the panel. He can do the shocking or graphic violence, make a person who truly looks like they've been through hell, but not go so over-the-top it knocks me out of the story entirely. (There were some panels Parlov drew where I had to stop and sort of shake my head. "What did I just see? Jeez," kind of thing.)
Brown's colors likely help with that. He tends to keep the figures in more muted tones, often almost washed out skin color. These are not people who go around in daylight. It's their surroundings that are lit up, like the world is on fire, which makes for a stark contrast.
Ennis left the book in 2008, after 60 issues. Surprisingly, Marvel didn't cancel the series and renumber it. Instead they kept it going and Gregg Hurwitz became the writer. I gave him two issues and concluded I really didn't need to read any more Punisher comics. And that's stayed true for the 18 years since, but Ennis wrote some other Punisher stuff at the same time as the ongoing, so that'll occupy the next two weeks.
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