Sunday Splash Page #423

"Monsters," in Punisher: The Tyger, by Garth Ennis (writer), John Severin (artist), Paul Mounts (colorist), Randy Gentile (letterer)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that in Garth Ennis' telling, the Punisher is the culmination of everything in Frank Castle's life. Not strictly the loss of his family. Not strictly Castle's 3 tours in Vietnam. Not even the final tour specifically, which Ennis and Darick Robertson depicted in the Punisher: Born mini-series.

(A digression. I occasionally see people say the end of Punisher: Born implies Frank made a deal with the Devil to survive the climactic battle at Firebase Valley Forge, because, as he's leaving the airport with his family, something is speaking to him about (paraphrasing) how, some day, it'll collect what it owes for keeping him alive.

I think it being the Devil is a bit too supernatural for Ennis' MAX imprint take on the character, and believe the implication is Frank unlocked something dangerous inside himself to survive. Similar to in the Avengers movie, when Stark suggests the Hulk was a manifestation of Banner's will to live, because the gamma radiation would have killed him otherwise. The monster saved Banner's life, but now that monster is loose on the world.

Frank Castle found something inside not only terrifyingly good at killing, but able to do so without remorse or hesitation. Something that would never relent. But having let it out once, it was never going to go back in its cage and stay there. Essentially, if Frank's family hadn't been killed, it would have been something else. Digression over.)

To that end, we have this one-shot from 2006. It begins and ends with Frank sniping some mob guys from a snowy rooftop, presented as his first as act the Punisher. The captions on Page 1 are, 'They'll blame it all on Vietnam. And they'll be right. And they'll be wrong.'

The meat of the story, however, is set during a summer sixteen years earlier, when Frank was a kid. It revolves around Lauren Buvoli, a girl Frank knows in the neighborhood, and Vincent Rosa, son of the local mob boss, though Frank doesn't understand that at the time. That's the needle Ennis tries to thread, showing us glimpses of Frank's personality or mannerisms that persist into his adulthood of extra-judicial mass murder, while also acknowledging there are lots of things a kid his age wouldn't understand.

So we see young Frank has a tendency to linger in the shadows outside the living room window and listen to his parents' conversations, which is how he hears that Rosa was also involved in something that got the Donegan girl into trouble. But when he asks the girl's little brother (after saving him from a bully), the kid can only say Rosa "made" his sister get a baby. He doesn't understand what that means, and neither does Frank. Frank sees a man on fire come tearing out of the factory where his father works, but doesn't understand it wasn't an accident, or what Lauren's older brother means when he asks how you hate someone that much.

Severin uses a heavy line, but with indistinct edges. Things are a little blurred or fuzzy, being pulled from Frank's memories. His father's eyes may be nothing but a thin line in one panel, Frank's attention seized by the burning man. Lauren's features are rounded and without blemish, shifted to something almost angelic in his remembering, while Vincent Rosa is definitely trying to imitate Dean Martin with his cigarette hanging loose and the curly hair done up. Mounts uses mostly soft tones, except for the violence, the fire, where the oranges and reds jump off the page in contrast to the more muted blues and blacks of men's work clothes and jackets.

The title of the story is reference to William Blake's poem, as Frank and Lauren are in an after-school poetry class taught by one of the priests. They read "The Tyger", and Frank interprets Blake's question of who created the "tyger" as suggesting there are things in the world not created by God. The priest naturally objects to the notion anything could exist God didn't make, but the notion lingers with Frank through that summer and apparently into adulthood. I'd say it depends on how merciful you envision your God to be. Old Testament God creating something like Frank Castle? Yeah, absolutely.

The one-shot isn't essential, except as part of the overall tapestry of Ennis' take on the Punisher, but it's a stronger story than The Cell, leaning less heavily on the brutality and shock value, and more on the idea there are those who prey on others. They may disguise it behind a winning smile or nice clothes, but they still regard you as food, and knowing that can be terrifying.

Well, it took over 7 years and 648 posts, but we finally made it through the alphabet. But as time - and the comics industry - wait for no one, now I've got to go back to the start and pick up all the stuff I bought since then. First, a special splash page project for the next 3.5 weekends.

Saturday Splash Page #225

"Cruise Liner Security," in Quasar #7, by Mark Gruenwald (writer), Mike Manley (penciler), Danny Bulanadi (inker), Paul Becton (colorist), Janice Chang (letterer)

Wendell Vaughn got hold of some alien bracelets that at one point belonged to Golden Age hero (and future Agent of Atlas) Marvel Boy. (Sort of. It's complicated.) At some point, he got tagged by an alien named Eon (that looks like a floating root wad with a face) to be the new "Protector of the Universe." And Quasar did protect the universe over the course of his 60-issue ongoing series, although he also died in the process. Maybe more than once.

(Dying fighting some big threat and then being resurrected later has kind of become Quasar's thing.)

I know the book has some folks who vouch for it. That writer Mark Gruenwald delved into a lot of strange corners of the Marvel Universe for locations and threats for Quasar to confront. The Stranger has an entire planet for the menagerie of unique beings he's collected. Maelstrom ends up being some great threat. There's a cosmic race with most of Earth's speedsters, that ends up being won by an amnesiac guy in ragged red clothes who appears in a lightning bolt and is supposed to Barry Allen after his big heroic death in Crisis on the Infinite Earths. I think Wendell ends up pregnant at one point?

That said, the only issues I own are the Acts of Vengeance tie-ins. They do act as a pretty decent intro to the set-up Gruenwald's established. Wendell Vaughn has his own security consulting firm, which needs clients, but the hero thing keeps interrupting. Eon's got him investigating sources of alien energy on Earth, because of some portent about an alien menace. (This actually leads him to Spider-Man, unknowingly rocking the Enigma Force, in issue 7.)

Wendell's a polite guy, as he spends much of his fight with the Absorbing Man trying to convince him these fights are a waste of time and getting the man nothing. (This does not work.) When he chases the Living Laser to the Moon, he knocks on Uatu's door (with a giant glowing hand) before entering. When the Laser jumps through a portal to escape and possibly kills that timeline's Thunderbird in the process, Quasar apologizes to Uatu for intruding. Uatu teleports him out without saying a word. Dick.

Overall, it paints a picture of Wendell as curious, conscientious and clever. He takes his time to try and figure out ways to quickly handle his opponents, rather than overwhelm them with sheer power. Which might work well on your standard Earth super-villain type, but maybe wasn't a great approach for the sorts of cosmic menaces a Protector of the Universe has to confront?

Random Back Issues #169 - Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #89

Dr. Strange is out of his head again. 

We're near the end of Strange's '90s ongoing series, a particularly tumultuous 30+ issues where his approach to magic and his look changed almost as often as his writers. An ongoing thread has been Wong's inability to let go of his beloved Imei, who died at some point. So Strange brought him to a place between Earth and the afterlife to say good-bye.

Then fucked off who knows where, leaving Wong floating alone in a swirling void of souls after he and Imei say their good-byes. Wong considers trying to enter the column of light that carries souls into eternity to follow her, but the living aren't allowed, Stephen reminds him, after Wong gets the bejeezus shocked out of him.

They return to Earth, to the Tempo building that housed the tech company a shade of part of Stephen's soul started during an earlier stretch of the aforementioned tumultuous run. Stephen was going to dismantle it, but changed his mind. Wong, who been swinging between being Stephen's pal and wanting to kill him, thanks Strange for helping him see Imei one more time. Strange, looking really damn goofy, is happy to have Wong's friendship again.

And then Stephen Strange bursts from his own skull like Athena from Zeus. He got ambushed something and nearly absorbed. The creature, which calls itself Afterlife, hates the living, but Stephen's too strong, so Afterlife decides to melt through the floor and go hunting. Strange, rather than give chase, summons the Eye of Agomotto to better understand his opponent.

By the time he catches up, Afterlife has stolen the energy of several people, and Strange's attempt to contain him in a field of 'white light, drawn down (at no small effort) from the seventh plane', doesn't seem to work, as its tongue punches through and tags him. Wong jumps in, trying to buy his friend time, and Stephen gets back on his feet. He and Wong use the magic deep in their souls, where they are highest and purest, and Afterlife changes into a gold cocoon.

It hatches, all the stolen energy return to its victims, and Afterlife is now some shiny golden thing. No, not a Super Saiyan, it's got butterfly wings and brown hair and is generally androgynous. Apparently it was an angel that used to walk the Earth helping those in pain, but prolonged exposure to all our crap poisoned it, and made it into Afterlife. It thanks them and disappears, having trashed the building. So much for keeping the business going.

Oh, and Victoria Montesi, who's been in some sort of slow-time bubble Strange made 30 issues ago so she wouldn't give birth to Chthon, is visited by someone who intends to speed the pregnancy along. See what happens when you put shit on the back burner, Strange? 

{4th longbox, 30th comic. Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #89, by J.M. DeMatteis (writer), Mark Buckingham (penciler), Kev Sutherland (inker), Kevin Somers (colorist), Jim Novak (letterer)}

Imperial Dreams - Tim Gallagher

Gallagher was part of a search in the mid-2000s to determine if the ivory-billed woodpecker still existed in a remote tract of swampy forest in Arkansas. They supposedly spotted some and later there was even a video taken, though that evidence is apparently disputed by many authorities and the broader consensus is seemingly the species is extinct.

This book, however, is about several trips Gallagher and a variety of other interested parties made to Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains in the early-2010s, searching for signs the imperial woodpecker, the ivory-billed's bigger relative, still existed. While there are scattered reports of sightings from the 1940s up to a few years before Gallagher's trips started, what real information we have on their habits, in terms of breeding, diet, social structure, habitat preferences, came mostly from a Norwegian named Carl Lumholz, who spent a couple of years in the 1890s riding a mule the length of the Sierra Madres, writing mostly about the people he encountered, but also the wildlife. So if we want to learn anything further about imperial woodpeckers, including whether there's a species to preserve, time was getting short.

SPOILER ALERT, Gallagher doesn't find any imperial woodpeckers. I imagine the book would have been somewhat different if he had. Probably more like what I was expecting. But if you can't find it, you can't find it, so the book focuses on the people and the place they inhabit. It's in some ways a history, as those mountains have long been isolated enough to be used as refuges for a variety of people. Pancho Villa hid out there from the American military for a time, some of the last holdouts of the Apaches in Mexico lived there. Gallagher travels through several villages he presents as not having changed in their ways of living in centuries. No electricity, no phones or anything like that. That isolation likely worked in the woodpeckers' favor, as basically all the evidence we have says they preferred old-growth pine forests at altitude.

Unfortunately, time marches on, and where there's old timber, there will be people trying to get to it and cut it down to sell. Which is what Gallagher thinks may have done the imperials in; the logging industry destroying a lot of their habitat. He speaks to a lot of people along the way, looking for any hints of places that might hold imperial woodpeckers. Which gives the reader a good sense of what a longshot this is, when the people he speaks with are in their 70s or older, talking about how they remember those birds vividly, but they haven't seen one since the 1960s or even further back.

The other thing that apparently moved into the region is drug cartels growing opium. Their looming threat hangs over the entire book. Gallagher often mentions people who advise him against going on this trip, or tell him he absolutely can't search beyond a particular mountain range, because that's Zetas cartel turf. There are more than a few encounters with men in SUVs or trucks, often with AK-47s, demanding to know what they're doing, or wanting to see identification. There are people he planned to speak with who are too grief-stricken because one of their relatives was abducted and murdered days earlier. To an extent, the book is Gallagher slowly coming to realize that risking his life to try and find this woodpecker might be a little crazy and/or stupid. 

'It's hard to say what motivated him to embark on such grueling and dangerous journeys. He had an excellent income from his dental practice, a nice home, and no children, so he and his wife could afford to indulge themselves. Instead, he chose to drive south with a few buddies and spend up to two months at a time roughing it in the outback of Durango, living on beans, booze, and tortillas.'

Overdue Movie Reviews #11 - Identity (2003)

A prisoner is being transported for a last-second hearing that may save him from execution, if the psychologist (Alfred Molina) can make a convincing argument. At the same time a disparate group of people find themselves stranded at a shitty motel in a downpour. Among them, an ex-cop turned limo driver (John Cusack), a family of three (the father played by John C. McGinley), a pair of newlyweds, a sex worker planning to open an orchard (Amanda Peet). Oh yeah, and a cop transporting a prisoner (Ray Liotta and Jake Busey, respectively.)

Then people start dying.

This may be the shortest of these entries, but I did give my copy of this movie to Alex years ago, then accept it back on an impulse when he was about to get rid of all his DVDs, so maybe that's to be expected. The movie revolves around a twist. Possibly two twists, though the second builds off the first. Once you know the first twist, there's not much else going for it. The characters are broadly-sketched outlines - actress disconnected from reality, hooker with a heart of gold, creepy convict, burnout ex-cop, cherub-faced little kid, etc. - so it's hard to say I feel any investment in their attempts to survive. Especially knowing the first twist.

The attempts to find the killer isn't really the focus, because the movie is busy dropping hints and clues leading towards the twist. Busey escapes and thinks he found a place to hide in another building he spied in the distance. Once inside that building and looking out the window, he's back at the motel. Dun-dun-dunhhhhhhh! And how is he on the loose at the motel, but another prisoner shows up for the hearing? Why do they all have the same birthday?

In practice, Cusack and Liotta spend a lot of scenes walking past motel rooms as rain pours over the gutters, while Peet periodically gets fed up with the suspense and runs into the rain to scream at the guilty party, whoever they are.

The ending is second twist, in that you thought there was a happy resolution but, surprise! It's not! You know what? Fuck beating around the bush, the movie is 23 years old. I'm spoiling ALL the twists. The people at the motel are personalities within the mind of the prisoner on death's row, (mostly) unwittingly fighting it out to see if an innocent one can survive. You think Peet was the last one standing and is going to have her orchard (inside this serial killer's head, but whatever), but no, here's McGinley's cherub-cheeked little kid, not blown up as the others suspected. Because the prisoner was traumatized as a kid, so that's where the murderous rage is. The kid engineered all the deaths and he kills Peet. In the real world, he now has sole control of the body, kills Molina and the transport driver. End movie.

Except, he's a pre-pubescent kid and she's a grown woman. He is standing there, holding some sort of rake, looking menacing, so it's not like he struck from the shadows. Beat his ass with a sack of your oranges. Or the limes, whichever. Give him a wedgie and then jam him headfirst into your fertilizer pile until he suffocates. Run over his throat with a wheelbarrow. Fucking do something other than cower, goddamnit!

Making Friends is Madness

By all means then, let that guy teach children. What could go wrong? 

Volume 4 of Soul Eater: The Perfect Edition, consists of the second half of the fifth volume and all of the sixth in the original release, and is focused entirely on the students at the DWMA trying to stop Medusa and her lackeys from releasing the Kishin.

Spoiler alert: They fail. The Kishin gets loose, takes out Black Star and Death the Kid in one hit each, then eludes Lord Death by getting beyond the bounds of the city that Lord Death's soul is tied to. that said, the way that the Kishin is portrayed is pretty cool. It apparently exudes madness so strongly that people start hallucinating once they get close, even while it's still sealed up.

Yeah, that right there? That witch-lady is hallucinating that experience but have your face tore off in weird, hand-shaped strands would be a trip for sure. 

However, most of the material in here revolves around two fights. In one, Dr. Stein and Maka's dad try to take down Medusa, the powerful witch behind all this. It's a back-and-forth fight with Stein's strengths running to close combat, but Medusa having abilities that make getting close dangerous. There's also the fact Stein's got more than a little bit of a dark side in him, and so Medusa's offer to join her might be more appealing than he lets on.

The remaining attention is on Maka and Soul's rematch with Crona, the Demon Sword. The last time around, Soul got badly injured protecting Maka, which caused some tension between the two of them. Despite Maka changing her approach to stop trying to cut her opponent and try bludgeoning instead, they aren't making much more progress. Crona shrugs off their best hits.

So Soul accepts the offer of the weird little demon representing the black blood he's infected with, confident he can get the power without the madness. But, because he and Maka are in "soul resonance" she's involved as well. Which is fine, because she thinks if she's crazy like Crona, she can reach them.

Which makes for a bizarre fight, Maka cackling and staggering about like a drunken boxer, getting stabbed with a sword in the middle of her forehead and just shrugging it off. It's a sharp change from how she's fought up to that point, where she's usually charging straight ahead, all business.

End result, this somehow gets her able to connect and slip inside Crona's soul. Which is a big desert where he confines himself to a tiny circle and won't answers questions his shadow asks. The shadow is his fear, or self-doubt? I'm honestly not sure. It seems to give up and, as it puts it, go on ahead. I'm not sure where it went. Like this was a spiritual death, some part of himself Crona couldn't accept or embrace because he's too afraid to be open with anyone, even himself, and so it's gone?

Anyway Maka barges in, obliterates the line, and makes a friend. So that's one thing that went right. If Medusa was actually dead, it'd be two things, but unfortunately there's at least one snake left.

Sunday Splash Page #422

"The Big Chair," in Punisher: The Cell, by Garth Ennis (writer), Lewis LaRosa (penciler), Scott Koblish (inker), Raul Trevino (colorist), Randy Gentile (letterer)

While Ennis was writing his MAX imprint Punisher ongoing series, he also wrote an assortment of one-shots and mini-series. The Cell takes place at an undefined point in Frank's story, where he surrenders himself to get into a prison with five particular mob guys, who are finally all together after many years.

Most of the story is spent on Frank engineering circumstances so he can get time with the five of them. Which involves manipulating the sadistic head guard - not difficult, the man's both aggressive and aggressively stupid - and igniting a race war among the prison population. The reveal at the end - coming after Ennis writes a bit where 4 of the 5 admit to something awful they each did, even by their standards, in the idea they need to confess to atone, but really feels like Ennis either going for shock value or to really sell us on the notion Frank should kill these guys - is these 5 are responsible for killing Frank's family. The consiglieri tried to whack the don, there was a lot of shooting without regard for anyone else in the vicinity by the hitman and the two bodyguards, people died.

The five die, although even in a MAX book, the violence is kept largely off-panel. Frank kills the brothers that were the don's bodyguards by beating them with a nightstick, but LaRosa just shows us the nightstick rising and falling as blood flies. He also continues to use Eastwood as a visual reference for Frank (and Danny Trejo for one of the bodyguards.) The don chokes out his consiglieri himself, but has a heart attack in the process. As he dies, Frank tells him that he can escape the prison whenever he wants, and go right back to killing criminals, until there's none left. Which is in conflict with what he told himself in The Slavers arc, that he knew he couldn't stop them, any more than he can the drug trade. He knows there's always going to be more of these guys.

Also, the don strikes me as a person that wouldn't really care what happens after he dies, but whatever. Frank's having a ball, I guess. "Look what you unleashed on your people, old man."

But it makes for a interesting tie to Punisher: The End, which Ennis did with Richard Corben. I don't own it, but I read it when it came out. Basically, some point much further down the line, the world is dying. Nukes, I think. Frank's been locked up a long time, but with everything falling apart, another convict helps him escape, hoping Frank will protect him long enough to find an underground bunker the wealthy have somewhere in the city.

Frank ultimately kills the people in the bunker, I think because they helped engineer all this. Even when they plead they've heard nothing from the other bunkers, meaning they might be the last of the human race. That done (and the convict who led him there also killed) Frank, dying of radiation exposure from the journey, heads back onto the surface, to spend his remaining time killing any other criminals he finds. There's no such thing as extenuating circumstances, no reprieve or possibility of redemption. That's something he told Micro in the first MAX arc, after Micro helped the CIA catch Frank to try and sell him on working for them. Frank ended up blowing Micro's head off.

At least in that sense, Frank does keep his promise. He keeps killing until all the men like that godfather are dead. Unfortunately, it's possible everyone else is dead, too. If so, to him, that just means there's no one left who requires punishing. The mission is complete, or he's dead. Which, in a sense, is also a way of completing the mission. Frank might not see it that way, but he almost certainly meets his own definition of needing punishing. During The Cell, he doesn't acknowledge that someone could be incarcerated and actually be innocent. He kills one guy simply because the man is a cellmate of the guy Frank wants to kill to ratchet tensions in the prison. Doesn't even know the guy's name, just kills him because he's in the way and in prison, so he must be guilty.