Sunday Splash Page #420

"Dead Duck Pond," in The Punisher (vol. 6) #19, by Garth Ennis (writer), Steve Dillon (artist), Matt Milla (colorist), RS and Comicraft's Wes (letterers)

The Punisher was originally an antagonist for Spider-Man, a guy who took it upon himself to punish criminals by killing them, tricked by the Jackal into thinking Spidey was a criminal. After that was cleared up, Frank Castle hung around, scuffling with Spider-Man and Daredevil over his lethal approach. But the U.S. loves a guy who shoots people we think "deserve" it, especially if he uses high-powered firearms, so he got an '80s mini-series, which, well, what I remember of it, Mike Zeck's art was really good.

Then Punisher got an ongoing series. And another, and another. And maybe also a quarterly series. Yep, the '90s were banner decade for punishing, but things got stale, so then you got the stunts. Frank is badly injured and gets a surgical procedure that gave him black skin. Went crazy and killed Nick Fury, had amnesia for a bit. Then he died, and there was an "angel Punisher/supernatural hitman" bit. We, uh, we don't like to talk about that.

Then they gave the character to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon for a 12-issue maxi-series under the Marvel Knights imprint. They took it back to basics, just Frank targeting a crime family, but with a dark comedy twist that let them get away with depicting some excessive violence. Like the issue where Ma Gnucci and her guys hunt an injured Frank through a zoo, and Frank uses the animals to thin out their numbers. Culminating in him punching a polar bear to get it pissed off enough to swat a guy's head clean off his shoulders. Or Ma Gnucci hiring the Russian, a mountain of a guy, who also happens to be president of the Smolensk Daredevil Fan Club and dies, as I believe Wizard put it, choking on man-boob. Wizard loved that maxi-series.

And I guess the fans did, too because Marvel, never one to pass up a chance to run something into the ground, gave Ennis and Dillon an ongoing Punisher series, also under the Marvel Knights label. Except all Ennis could really do was be more extreme with the absurd aspects. So the Russian survives suffocation and decapitation because some military agency put him back together. Oh, but the procedure gave him huge boobs! And the Russian loves them! Or Spider-Man shows up, gets immediately knocked out by the Russian, and the "team-up" is Frank holding Spidey up as a punching bag. Or Frank and Wolverine fight a gang of little people, and Frank runs over Logan with a steamroller.

The one person who might pass for a supporting cast was the pitiful Detective Soap, part of the task force assigned to catch Frank in the maxi-series, now passing info along to Frank and generally being the butt of every joke. I think at one point a story strongly implies, if not outright says, Soap picks up a hooker in a bar that is actually his mother.

The other writers who occasionally took a turn weren't much better. Example, Tom Peyer wrote an arc about a guy outfitting taxis with all sorts of lethal weapons, so it's essentially the Punisher in Twisted Metal. Frank steals one of their taxis, but because he didn't pick up the Daily Bugle's editorial cartoonist, and said cartoonist is black, the Bugle soon has a cartoon about racist cab drivers. The bad guys recognize Frank Castle from a caricature. Like there are at least 2 million scowling, dark-haired white guys in New York City.

Ennis came back after that for the remainder of the book's 37 issue run. Sometimes with Dillon on art, but sometimes Tom Mandrake or Darick Robertson. The only issues I have are this one, where Frank runs into his old neighbor from the maxi-series Joan the Mouse, and issue 28 (by Ennis and Mandrake) where Elektra keeps killing the guys Frank is targeting before he can. I read somewhere once, that was the only Marvel comic that referenced the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz Elektra: Assassin. It's only a brief reference Frank alludes to in terms of what he's able to learn about her, but apparently every subsequent Elektra writer just kind of decided to ignore that book.

Basically, Marvel Knights Punisher is the comedy bits of Hitman, minus any of the meditation on brotherhood, the human capacity for self-justification, or the cycle of violence. It's just Frank killing lots of criminals, and sometimes it's presented as absurd, so you should laugh.

Saturday Splash Page #222

"Opaque," in The Ray Annual #1, by Christopher Priest (writer), Oscar Jimenez (penciler), Chip Wallace (inker), Pat Garrahy (colorist), Starkings and Comicraft (letterers)

The Ray got one Annual, in 1995. The theme for DC's Annuals that year was "Year One," which for a lot of characters I assume meant a flashback to some tale in their earlier career. In Ray's case, Priest said it had been one year since he learned the truth about himself, and maybe the reality of the life he was living was setting in.

The crux of the story is Ray trying to stop an airliner from crashing. He didn't stop the crash, but he managed to control it enough to save most of the passengers. 112 people, alive because of him. But as Ray sees it, 18 died, also because of him.

Because the one who attacked the airliner was Death Masque, the computer program Ray built and forms with his powers, that's gained independence. Death Masque wanted to teach Ray a lesson, specifically about being concerned with anyone other than Masque itself. Ray's old friend Jenny was coming into town on that airliner, and Ray, worried about the rift he was sensing between them, planned to propose.

The issue is a little confusing, as it hops between the aftermath of the crash and the events leading up and including the crash. Ray's considering getting drunk for the first time, his father shows up and unsuccessfully tries to give him a pep talk. Death Masque pretends to be Happy Terrill once he hears Superman is lingering around the crash (because every passenger is certain they saw Superman saving the day, which Ray is almost relieved about), and asks if he would speak to Ray, because Ray looks up to him. Superman initially declines, then appears to reconsider. Except wait, it was actually Happy using his powers to disguise himself and Ray kicks his ass, revealing him to be Death Masque. Except Ray thinks that's just another trick by his dad. Then Jenny, who Ray notes wasn't among the survivors, shows up, because she missed the flight entirely.

At that point, I wasn't sure Ray's grief wasn't causing him to hallucinate. Or, since she responds to his proposal with "Good-bye," if he wasn't replaying some earlier conversation in his head that actually lead to her being on the plane. Like, that's why she died, moving away from him, and he made one last-ditch play, Death Masque objected, and she died. And then Superman actually does show up, except Ray thinks it's his dad again and well, *gestures to the top of the post* When Ray wakes up, the two of them talk about how hard it is to live up to people idolizing you, but it's something you have to consider, blah blah, Ray doesn't get drunk.

I'm still not sure if we're meant to read the fight as Ray really beat Death Masque, so all his later fears and whinging that he can't do it was wrong, or that Death Masque threw the fight to sell his trick that this was really another manipulation by Happy. Considering Ray loses every other single time they fight directly, I assume the latter.

The point seems to be that Ray still hasn't moved on from his childhood. He's still trying to date the girl that was his best (only?) friend. When the grief over everything gets too much, Ray tries to return to his childhood home, which someone else owns and inhabits now. He's idolizing Superman instead of trying to be the best Ray he can. I don't think that was a necessary story, considering the point of the mini-series was for Ray to embrace his new reality and move forward, but Priest seemed to think it was relevant. Seems undercut by all Death Masque's manipulations.

Maybe Priest just wanted to write Jenny out, since she never appears again. I don't think he really replaced her in the supporting cast. Ray's main girlfriend ends up being a future cop who gives him instructions how to return to his time, and it turns out Ray saved her when she was a little kid and gave her those instructions to give to him, which implies a fairly large age gap, and we mostly see them interact in a future where Vandal Savage did shape Ray into a ruthless corporate type.

But if the point was removing useful voices around Ray so, "ask Vandal Savage for help," seems like a good plan, then mission accomplished?

What I Bought 3/25/2026

It was 90 here yesterday, but I will not turn on my air conditioning. Not yet. Plus, it's barely into the 50s today. Lousy Smarch weather. Here's two comics from this week.

Fantastic Four #9, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - 

The FF get their tails kicked by Evil Sue and run with their tails between their legs. Galactus gets left behind. Ha! Regular Sue tries to reason with Evil Sue, since fighting her isn't working. Talking doesn't work either. In fact, Evil Sue decides she ought to make another just like her, and Johnny barely manages to cut in before his sister gets the same brain surgery.

Oh, and Earth is being attacked by aliens of some sort. I don't know what they're supposed to be; Ramos just draws them as big purple things with sort-of grasshopper legs. Don't really think that should be such a serious problem just because the FF aren't around. The Avengers and the X-Men deal with aliens, too!

I have to wonder at Evil Sue's motives for wanting to make Regular Sue just like her. If she can do everything, if the rest of the FF are useless, if Galactus is no match for her, what does she need a duplicate for? I kind of hope this isn't a Killing Joke, where she wants to prove anyone that goes through this will end up acting like she does.

I'm toying with the possibility she wants to die, and figures another Sue like her is the only thing strong enough to do it. A death wish wouldn't really track with her notion that she no longer feels guilt, but unless Evil Sue has a very different educational background from Regular Sue, she's not a brain surgeon. How could she be sure she burned out the right part of her brain? She admits she's holding back, that she lets Sue hit her with some attacks to see if she'll go for the kill. She's playing with the rest of the team, just throwing things at them to keep them busy while she tests Regular Sue.

I guess that could just be villain ego. Get to the end and find out Evil Sue is just like Doom, she like monologue and show off too much.

Generation X-23 #2, by Jody Houser (writer), Jacopo Camagni (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - Laura is this how you make friends?

All the teenagers with powers were kids being experimented on in the facility where they currently live. But, as the apparent leader, who calls himself X-Infinite, tells us, one of the test subjects got loose and released some kind of vapor that killed everyone. And X-Infinite is the only witness. Not suspect at all! 

The handful who didn't die stuck around and call it home. They tend to have several powers, as a result of being experimented on, and they all refer to themselves by their experiment numbers. X-73, X-92, and so on. More concerning, X-Infinite insists on referring to Laura as "X-23", despite her repeatedly saying her name is "Laura." Not concerning!

Scout participates in a little training exercise with the others - just enough to give us some general sense what their powers are - until X-73 suddenly starts generating heat. Or fire. Either way, he's not immune and despite Laura's encouragement - to the extent, 'You have to control it!' qualifies - he blows up. And when she wakes up, X-Infinite says she has to answer for his friend's death.

I don't feel like Houser is being particularly subtle that something isn't on the up-and-up with X-Infinite. On the other hand, he isn't wrong that maybe they're safer in this secure facility than accepting Laura's offer to join whatever mutant school is currently available. If they don't think of themselves as mutants, or even if they do but don't particularly want to get missed up in X-Men nonsense, that's their business. Laura doesn't need to be proselytizing. 

Brains: A Zombie Memoir - Robin Becker

Jack Barnes is just another victim of a zombie apocalypse, or maybe not. Even if he shuffles like a zombie, moans inarticulately like a zombie, and wants to eat brains like a zombie, Jack still thinks like he did when he was alive. Unfortunately, given he was an English lit professor, he thinks in overwrought terms, thinking of himself as a spokesperson for his kind, when he's not comparing his situation to popular culture, which he tends to sneer at.

Barnes travels to Chicago, with the idea of meeting Howard Stein, credited as the guy who created the virus that caused all this. Surely his creator will recognize how monumental a zombie who can think and write is! In what he surely sees as a promising development, Jack encounters other zombies who retained different skills, forming a makeshift family of sorts. Joan, a nurse who's retained those instincts and can sew zombies up as their bodies degrade. Guts is a fast zombie. Ros (short for Rosencrantz, as Jack dubbed him) can speak.

(Although the book is fairly inconsistent about what zombies are capable of in general. Even though Jack remembers how to start a car, he can't make his body do it. Neither can Ros. But Jack and another zombie figure out how to start and sail a ship later on, and the group figures out how to put on waterproof gear before hiding in the bottom of Lake Michigan.) 

I imagine you need a character with Jack's inflated sense of self-importance to drive the script. A guy who alternately thinks of himself as a Moses, or a civil rights leader, or a new Adam when he brings along a pregnant woman he bit. I can't imagine any of the others, if they had been the one to retain that level of cognition, deciding the thing to do is find the guy who created the virus and convince him the undead are some new race that needs to be accorded equal rights. Maybe Ros or Joan would try to find Stein and see if he had a cure (other than a bullet in the head), but I doubt it.

So Jack's personality is essential to how things play out, the urge to make some great mark, to leave a record. Hence his memoir. That said, reading his delusions of grandeur can get tedious. I rolled my eyes a few times, thinking this guy needed to get over himself. Maybe it's supposed to be funny, his earnest writing about how proud he feels of Guts, scampering off to bite someone's ankle, or discussing how the undead are really the next evolutionary step, then rambling about brains for a paragraph.

Occasionally he sees the way his body is decaying and he can't bear to look, or he thinks about his wife (who he ate) and misses her deeply. Maybe it's meant to be him making the best of his situation. He got bit, he turned, nothing he can do about that. So, put a positive spin on it. The cold doesn't bother him! He doesn't need to breathe! Zombies could be a net positive for the planet, helping dispose of the people nobody wants around!

'"You shot my friend," Ros gurgled.

Annabelle looked up. "Dude, you can't talk," she said.

"Says who?" Ros said. Annabelle looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders and attempted a grin. A dollop of my cheek fell off at the dimple. Joan would have to repair that when we got back.'

A Little Turnover in June

Well, I was expecting a drop-off in the books I'd buy from the solicitations for June, and there is the possibility of that. Certainly it feels like the circle of publishers is continuing to shrink, but I found a couple of things I might buy, which is something, at least.

What's new? There's another It's Jeff book from Marvel, Brand New Jeff Week, although the Gurihiru team isn't listened as the only art team, which may be a caution. DC is releasing a new book, The Deadman. I find Deadman sort of interesting, but I can't really tell from the solicit whether W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo's meditation on life, death, and everything else is going to be up my alley.

Mad Cave has the first issue of Junk Punch, by Paul Tobin and Carlos Olivares (with a back-up story by Colleen Coover), about a world where people have all sorts of strange compulsions. The main character's, as you may guess, is hitting people in the groin. Is that going to help her solve a string of other compulsion-related crimes? Actually, I'm more curious if this compulsion strictly relates to male genitalia, or she just hits anyone in the groin, regardless of the equipment.

What's ending? Ahoy says the final issue of Babs: The Black Road South will be out in June, but given issue 3 didn't show up this month I suspect that will not be the case. If you think of it as a one-shot, It's Jeff! would also be ending in June.

And the rest: Batgirl has Cass investigating a murder, but also she's missing memories. Fantastic Four has Reed and Johnny traveling back in time to stop an alien who decided it would be easier to conquer Earth in the past. Marc Spector: Moon Knight and Generation X-23 are both on their fifth issues. Moon Knight's doing a focus on the Asgardian drug dealer Achilles Fairchild, while Laura's still attacking the X-Facility. Moonstar has Dani either saving her parents or the world, which definitely feels like one of those things where whatever choice she makes, she'll second-guess it.

Is Ted OK? is having a big reveal in issue 5, setting up the finale, where we will finally learn whether Ted is in fact, OK. Meanwhile, D'orc is contending with a lava dragon and a fortune teller. 

The First Wives Club (1996)

Elise (Goldie Hawn), Brenda (Bette Midler), and Annie (Diane Keaton) were old college friends who reunite after another friend commits suicide in apparent depression over her ex-husband marrying a much younger woman. Something the trio can relate to, as all three of their husbands - played by Victor Garber, Dan Hedaya and Stephen Collins, respectively - likewise threw them over for younger women. So they decide to get revenge on the guys who used them up and spit them out for a newer model.

I think I got curious to watch this after it came up in someone's retrospective on Diane Keaton after she passed away. And I think Keaton gets the best role of the three leads. Brenda seems to mostly be dealing with things by trying to maintain the connection with her teenage son, and keeps worrying about her weight. Midler kind of defaults to sarcastic all the time. Elsie is confronting the lack of roles for women in Hollywood once they reach 40, basically fighting mortality in service of her ego. She's bitter (understandably), but in an entitled way. She's owed the starring role in the hot young director's new film (the director played by young Timothy Olyphant, was not expecting him.) 

Annie, meanwhile, is this overly cheerful, stammering Polyanna who makes excuses for everyone and tries to get everyone to get along. Not the free spirit types Keaton often played so much as someone willfully ignoring reality in favor of, not so much a more pleasant alternative as a blander one. Then, every so often, she snaps. You get a glimpse of it in her therapy session, where she resists her doc's orders to hit her with the foam bat, but once she goes for it, hits her three times in rapid succession. She's a bundle of energy and expression, locked down tight by years of trying to coddle her husband's insecurities.

Sometimes it breaks free in quieter ways, when Elise and Brenda convince her to sing aloud. Sometimes it's explosive, like when she gets tired of the other two attacking her for trying not to take sides in their argument and shrieks that they're both selfish and storms out.

No wonder her ex-husband turned what was supposed to be him asking for divorce into one last roll in the sack, then asking for the divorce. She must be dynamite in bed.

*beaten to death*

Ouch, jeez, I'm just kidding. I did expect I'd laugh more than I actually did, though I didn't know going in it kicked off with a suicide. There were a couple of scenes - their trip to a lesbian bar to enlist Annie's daughter in their plan - but it's not so much a movie that makes you laugh as one where you grin at a good one-liner. But it also has a lot to get done in 100 minutes. Establish each woman's current situation, get them together, get them started on revenge (while periodically returning to developments in their individual lives), the part where things hit the rocks between them, the reconciliation, the eventual turning of their plan to a higher purpose.

Maybe I was too invested in them pulling off their plan to laugh at their failures along the way. 

What I Bought 3/21/2026

I'd like to congratulate Afroman for beating the bullshit defamation charges filed against him by all those cops. If they didn't want to be immortalized in a bunch of music videos mocking them for looking for "kidnapping victims" in the pockets of a man's coat, maybe they shouldn't have done it in the first place. Also, "Lemon Pound Cake" made me laugh so hard the back of my skull hurt.

D'Orc #1, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (color artist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - The remains of another harvest festival gone awry.

So we got a medieval fantasy land split between light and dark, which as the map helpfully included on the inside cover shows are basically reversed mirrors. The land of light has an island on the northwest coast called "Heaven's Spleen," the dark lands have an island in the southeast shaped very similarly called "The Goblin's Teet." I thought it was spelled, "teat", but maybe the point is goblins are bad spellers?

The stretch of land in-between is called The Scar, and the two sides fight there constantly, making it a no man's land inhabited only by the title character. Whose name is not actually "D'orc", but we never learn what he's called, because as soon as he makes the mistake of explaining his parentage to two parties, but sides try to destroy him. Which suits his bloodthirsty talking shield just fine, but D'orc (sorry, kid) really just wanted some food.

So it's off to a tavern, where he gets involved in another brawl, this time trying to defend a poor chicken waiter from two fighters from each side. In the process, he loses control, does a Captain America with his shield and - decapitates the chicken. Whoops. The actual decapitation is off-panel, but we see the aftermath, although Bean's still is not going for realism, so it's not graphic or particularly horrifying. It's not even graphic in the way, say, Skottie Young's art can be.

Which is fine, the chicken's only sort of dead. Why the shield having a soul trapped inside it makes it a "death shield", and this allows the chicken's headless body to move while its spirit floats nearby? Not sure. I guess because Bean says so. He really wanted the visual of a headless chicken running around? I suspect that'll be D'orc's situation soon enough.

The gist seems to be, D'orc would just like to live his life, staying out of the either/or battles of the two sides. Or better yet, the two sides could stop being so bent on destroying each other and stop fighting. But everybody hates a centrist, so both sides are going to kill him. And he's likely going to get increasingly frustrated, or desperate, and destroy both sides just to survive. Maybe he'll meet someone that will ask his real name along the way?