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.

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. 

Sunday Splash Page #421

"Working Man," in The Punisher (vol. 7) #19, by Garth Ennis (writer), Leandro Fernandez (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Dan Brown (colorist), Gent (letterer)

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.

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 #151

"Down the Barrel of a Gun," in Spectacular Spider-Girl #2, by Tom DeFalco (writer), Ron Frenz (writer/penciler), Sal Buscema (finished art), Bruno Hang (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

A 4-issue mini-series from 2010, where New York City is in the middle of a gang war between Black Tarantula and an old-school Maggia guy enhanced with cybernetics. No, not Silvermane. This guy calls himself Silverback. I guess DeFalco and Frenz thought Silvermane would have to be dead by now or something.

Mayday promised her parents she'd stay out of it, but it's not sitting well with her. But she's got enough problems as it is. There's a horribly-dressed weirdo named Wild Card who keeps kicking her ass and telling her to stay out of the conflict. I mean, the outfit is bad. Like he's trying to fight her by making her go blind. Her clone/sister April is really getting into her Mayhem identity, and is actually working for Silverback.

Oh, and Frank Castle came out of retirement (that he spent in South America, where he still periodically fucked drug lords up) because Silverback was a guy he left crippled as a message before ending his war on the mob. Years of reading Garth Ennis' Punisher leave me unable to see Frank doing either of those things. Not ending his war on the mob, and certainly not leaving a guy alive as a message. "People scare better when they're dying," is definitely a philosophy the Punisher subscribes to.

The story has a feel of DeFalco and Frenz clearing the decks. They probably know this is one of the last Spider-Girl stories they're going to write, and they try to definitively move the old guard off the board, both characters that existed before Spider-Girl, and ones that didn't, but are supposed to pre-date her. Silverback and the Punisher bite the dust. Black Tarantula opts to leave New York with Arana, basically removing him as an issue. Peter (once again) accepts that he needs to trust his daughter can handle things. Even the two goons of Silverback's that are based on DeFalco and Frenz (I guess they didn't de in the wilds of Jersey) end up turning state's evidence in the hopes of being able to start new lives in witness protection elsewhere.

Silverback turns out to be a puppet of another villain, and that villain gets killed by Mayhem. Which sets up April's continuing descent into a "lethal protector" type as Mayday's biggest issue. Especially combined with her desire to assert her individuality as the true, only daughter of Peter and Mary Jane, which would come to a head in Spider-Girl: The End.

And with that, Summer (and Fall) of Spiders draws to a close.

He's Murder in the Kitchen

It's almost Thanksgiving here in the U.S., and that means it's time to ask the question on everybody's mind:

How good of a cook is Frank Castle?

What do you mean, that wasn't on your mind and never has been? You won't spare a thought for poor Frank Punisher's (tip o' the cap to Jay and Miles Explain the X-Men for that name) culinary skills? Who else is gonna make Thanksgiving dinner for him? His family? They're dead, you know. You're so insensitive.

OK, OK, we all know Frank isn't celebrating Thanksgiving with anything other than shooting some guys trying to hijack TV shipments on their way to the big box stores for Black Friday. But the man has to eat something other than the smell of gunpowder and cordite, and C-4 does not have enough fiber for a man his age (however old Frank is these days.)

I think we generally see the Punisher eating MRE rations, or indistinguishable stuff out of cans. I know in Ennis' run he went to a pub at least once, because he was eating in a dark corner when that news broadcast came on about Nicky Cavella digging up his family's bodies. But at some point, before all the punishing, the guy lived a relatively normal life with a family*. They would have family meals, because that seems like the kind of family they were from his memories, and he must have cooked occasionally, if only to give Maria a chance to rest.

So, what's in Frank's kitchen repertoire? I'm assuming he knows how to make chili, or stew. All American men are supposed to know how to make those. Even I know how to make chili, and I'm about two steps above Homer Simpson somehow causing a fire make Corn Flakes. I'm sure he knows how to grill burgers or hot dogs, his dad would have taught him that. Scrambled eggs, toast, probably grilled cheese sandwiches, stuff like that.

That's pretty straightforward stuff, but I dunno, I feel like Frank would know some surprising stuff. The Tyger established that he like reading poetry, and that his mother encouraged it, over his father's half-hearted objections. Frank seems to be an only child, I could see his mother trying to pass on things she knows, Frank patiently listening and absorbing. Maybe he can make pie crusts from scratch, or he knows how to make really good cannolis, something like that.

Although I could see the argument that Frank makes these things technically perfect, but the food lacks soul or some other ineffable quality. Like he follows the recipe to the letter, but lacks that inventiveness or instinct that causes him to make a slight alteration that enhances the experience. I'm kind of like this, except I stick to recipes as closely as possible so I don't fuck up and waste a bunch of food. If I'm going to burn x amount of time cooking, I better get something edible out of it! Utilitarian, but it works, which was probably Frank's approach.

* It just occurred to me, I have no idea what Castle did for a living between when he came home from Vietnam/the Middle East/whichever American military boondoggle his origin is tied to currently, and when his family died. Was he still in the military, but as an instructor at a boot camp? Did he have a civilian job?

Never Research the Fates of Minor Characters

In Random Back Issues #50, I mentioned I wasn't sure what Cammi had been up to since Dennis Hopeless let her go back into space at the end of Avengers Undercover, and that I was a little leery of trying to find out, because Donny Cates probably killed her during his Guardians of the Galaxy run.

Well, I did end up looking into that weekend, and well, Donny Cates didn't kill her in his Guardians of the Galaxy run. She popped up in that Drax series CM Punk wrote, and then in Asgardians of the Galaxy, a book I had blessedly forgotten existed. And then Dennis Hopeless killed her in Revenge of the Cosmic Ghost Rider, which is, when you think about it, Donny Cates' fault, because he created that stupid character.

I mean, a Ghost Rider in space? OK fine, the '90s Guardians of the Galaxy series established that was a thing, and Jason Aaron's Ghost Rider was all about how there were a bunch of Ghost Riders just on Earth. But then you write him as a) working for Thanos, and b) so nutty I thought it was supposed to be Deadpool. Which would at least make sense for a) if you figure those two characters each have a thing for Death.

But no! Cosmic Ghost Rider is actually Frank Castle. Yes, the guy who kills murders and drug dealers for killing or even just preying on people works for the guy who killed half the people in the universe. Because he decided he couldn't kill him, so if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Which sounds so entirely contrary to Frank Castle, I'm not sure where to start, but it makes me think Donny Cates and whoever lets him write for a living should probably be ostracized (in the Athenian sense of being exiled for 10 years.)

And from what I can tell looking online, Cammi let her soul be sent to Hell to save Frank's (wasted effort there), and then when he got her out, her soul was devoured by some other thing, and now it runs around in her body.

So, Hopeless offed her so Frank can. . . be angry about someone who got killed and want to kill the one responsible? Frank Castle's already like that, all the time. It's his entire existence, killing people because he's mad his family got killed. He doesn't need more deaths to be angry about.

Back when Avengers Arena came out, I knew I would've been one of the folks angry with it if Hopeless had offed one of the characters I really liked. Meaning either Cammi or Darkhawk. They dodged that bullet, but when you're a third-tier character or worse, it's always just a matter of time before somebody offs you for cheap dramatics.

Random Back Issues #49 - The Punisher (MAX) #44

Well if they did that, then there wouldn't be any more Punisher comics, and you wouldn't like that would you? Oh, you would? Well, take your complaints to Marvel, I'm just a blogger.

Get with the good times, it's Garth Ennis' Punisher run! So consider that your obligatory violence and profanity warning. Today we're looking at the second chapter of the Widowmaker arc, where five mob widows decide that if all the men are too incompetent to kill the Punisher, they'll do it. The only progress on that front here is that they figure out one of them is dyslexic, so she's no help going through the police reports. But, she can fuck the guy that's going to give them weapons, so hey! Teamwork! Also, they conclude Frank has a bit of a white knight complex when it comes to abused women (having read up on his actions in "The Slavers" arc three storylines ago), and that's how they'll trap him.

But the story starts with Frank visiting a suburban home where the parents film porn, using their children. Frank is understandably not happy about this, and well, you see how it turned out for those two. He at least insisted they show him the set-up in the basement, while the kids stay in the living room, used a silencer, and called the police to come collect the children after. Ever the optimist, Frank thinks the daughter might be young enough to have a chance. As for her two older brothers, Frank has 'a sinking feeling. . . I'd be seeing them again in twenty years.'

I'm most surprised Frank thinks he'll still be alive in twenty years.

Part of what Ennis does in this arc is compare and contrast Frank with some other would-be vigilantes. One is a cop, Paul Budiansky, who Lan Medina clearly based on Samuel L. Jackson. It's not quite Mike Deodato using Tommy Lee Jones as the model for Norman Osborn, but it's real close. Paul ignored orders and went into a school where a student was killing other kids with machine pistols, and shot the kid. Now he has to meet with a psychiatrist, who Paul feels is just trying to use him as material for his next book, and that he's only here because his Captain is mad he bucked orders and can't find another way to fuck with him.

He also says telling people they're traumatized might keep them from dealing with their problems, one panel after insisting he will deal with this by having nightmares and drinking whiskey. That's about what I'd expect from a Garth Ennis character, and I can't tell whether we're supposed to think that's macho bullshit, or cheer Budiansky on. Probably the second, after he concludes by telling the doc she's 'just another racist bitch.'  

At least he has his wife for support and to assure him he's nothing like the Punisher. Sure hope nothing traumatic happens to her! He might not have enough whiskey to go with the nightmares.

The other vigilante is after the five widows themselves, for reasons that aren't made entirely clear for another couple of issues. The only progress on that front, is a guy tries to pick her up outside a cafe and she blows him off, telling him he seems like a nice guy, and that's why she doesn't want him anywhere near her. Also, she's listening in on the widows plan from the next table over.

As arcs in this series go, it's one of the weaker ones. It's 7 issues instead of his usual six, and there really isn't enough there to justify it. Wedged in between the "Man of Stone" arc that preceded it, and the rematch with Barracuda that comes next, it isn't nearly as strong.

[8th longbox, 230th comic. The Punisher (MAX) #44, by Garth Ennis (writer), Lan Medina (penciler), Bill Reinhold (inker), Raul Trevino (colorist), Randy Gentile (letterer)]

Punisher Season 2

Out of boredom as much as anything, I watched Season 2 of The Punisher on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. Probably spoilers because who cares? It's a Punisher series, you know how things end. People get shot in large numbers.

It was OK. I didn't exactly like that the season starts with the girl on the run and mysterious religious guy who kills a lot of people, which I was interested in, only to be sidetracked onto the whole mess with Billy Russo, Agent Midani, and Billy's extremely unprofessional therapist/psychologist Dr. Dumont. There are points you almost forget the "pilgrim" is supposed to be out there, somewhere, hunting them down. The urgency he showed in killing a crapload of people, in staging an Assault of Precinct 13 on some podunk-ass sheriff station, vanishes like a fart in the wind the moment things move to New York City.

Also, the way Pilgrim never answers anyone's questions gets really irritating. Mostly because no one ever calls him on it. They ask his name, or where he's from, and he just walks away or asks a question of his own. You think someone would point out how rude that is.

I was intrigued by the idea Billy didn't remember exactly what happened to him or why. In fact, I'm not sure he ever actually remembers that Frank smashed his face into glass because Billy was responsible for killing Frank's family. That could have been an emotional scene. Or a hilarious one, depending. Billy just being gobsmacked to learn he did that.

Agent Midani seems marginally more competent than she did in Season 1. I mean, she eventually figures out something is up with Dr. Dumont, and manages to not die against a furious Billy Russo. I'm not sure what to make of her decision to switch from Homeland Security to the CIA at the end of the season. A decision made apparently because she hated having to play by rules and laws. 

I know that in a Punisher story, there's going to be a certain amount of support for ignoring laws and human rights, given that the main character is a mass murderer. Like that saying about how all war movies are pro-war (which I don't think I agree with, necessarily). The characters that should ostensibly object - Midani, Detective Mahoney, probably Karen Page who shows up again in one episode - all come up with some convoluted reason or another not to. 

(Well, Mahoney may not have excused it, so much as he was too beat to shit to stop Frank escaping, and he didn't want to just shoot a man in the back. Surprising turn from a cop.)

Not sure you want a situation where Frank's success doing whatever he wants in turn encourages other characters to behave similarly. At least, not when that involves joining the CIA, with its history of destabilizing governments, assassinations, abducting people and throwing them in hidden prisons.

At least Curtis, Frank and Billy's old Marine friend, has a valid reason to work with Frank. He's terrified of Billy, and doesn't appreciate Billy gathering up disgruntled veterans and convincing them to pull heists.

An Ambivalent Punisher Review

I watched all of Netflix' Punisher series over the last two weeks. Originally, I hadn't thought I would. I wasn't sure I would be up for a guy with guns just running around killing whoever he deems to deserve it over a broad class of people. As it turned out, the series stuck to a more narrow revenge theme, rather than some "war on crime" story. Let's pause for stations identification, and for a SPOILER warning, here on the RML Network. SPOILERS, they'll ruin your day if you want to watch this show free of someone else's notions (which I was mostly able to do).

The Punisher is presumed dead. Frank has settled into a life as a mostly silent construction worker under an assumed identity, believing he's killed everyone involved in his family's murder. Wrong! And those people were also involved in ruining the life of David Lieberman, who has gone into hiding under the alias "Micro", and wants Frank's help to stop these people so he can rejoin his family. There's also Homeland Security agent Dinah Midani, back from Afghanistan, trying to track down the U.S. soldiers responsible for murdering a friend and contact of hers there, a murder Frank Castle might know something about, if only he weren't dead. . .

Like the second season of Daredevil, there were almost enough plates spinning to keep me from noticing pacing issues. That said, around episode 10, when they do that old bit where they show the same event in flashback from multiple characters' perspectives, I started to get impatient.

There is a lot of time spent on Micro spying on his family through cameras installed in their house, and Frank spending time with them, initially in a power struggle with Micro, later because he cares about them, and it's probably pleasant for him to recapture a sense of domesticity. It's a good idea if you want the audience to care about Frank, rather than him living alone in some basement, just eating beans all the time, stepping out periodically to kill some drug dealers. Show more of the mostly good person he was before, don't show him executing people so much. And it mostly solved my concern about watching this man run around killing whoever he deems a criminal whenever he feels like it, because that barely happens. Outside of him killing a few guys at the very beginning - who we're told were involved in his family's murder - I think everyone Frank kills is, at the moment of their deaths, trying to kill him or some other innocent person.

Still, there came a point I was sitting there wondering when I was going to see Frank Castle kill some of these bad guys. I kept thinking of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. "Now eventually, you are going to have some punishing in your Punisher series, correct? Hello?"

That said, Jon Bernthal as Castle and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Micro have decent chemistry. Micro has this sad-eyed hangdog air to him, while Frank is gruff and awkward, frequently resorting to a raspy scoff when he doesn't know how else to react. Bernthal's Frank Castle can still care about people, he hasn't buried that part of him, but he tries to, and no longer seems to know how to react. I do like that he acknowledges that his family life wasn't always sweetness and rainbows. Even if it makes sense those are the memories that would keep coming back to him.

There's a series of threads running through about other soldiers and how they've adjusted or are struggling to adjust since they left the service. Frank has an old corpsman friend (played by Jason R. Moore) who has a discussion help group going, and his old Marine buddy Billy is a big shot running a private security firm. One of the people in Curtis' group is a young man who feels like he misses being in combat, and feels abandoned here. That ends badly.

It was interesting as contrast with Frank, not just in terms of what he lost once he returned home, but the sense he has that he left something behind on those tours of duty. There are parts of him he couldn't get back, and so he's never felt whole, even once he was back with his family. He left something behind, and something else followed him home. All these people suffered in some way or the other, and many of them continue to suffer after. Frank seems to have given up really trying to go forward with his life at the start of the show, he's just existing. Some of the people in the group are lost, others are trying to move ahead if they can, but aren't sure they're getting anywhere.

That said, the point at which Lewis decides to start striking back violently at society was a mistake. It felt too cliched, another soldier striking back at an entire subset of people he holds responsible for the dislocation he feels. Another mirror to play off Frank. But by the time it reached that point, I was invested in seeing Frank get the people he was after. Frank taking time to deal with Lewis was an irritating diversion. He was on one plotline, which I wanted to reach the conclusion of, and then was wrenched onto a different plot for two episodes. I preferred Curtis' discussions with his group serving as a parallel to Frank's story.

I couldn't decide if Dinah Midani (Amber Rose Revah) was unlucky, in over her head, or just incompetent. She's driven, but it seems as though everything she tries fails. Every clever scheme or attempt to get the upper hand backfires, often with people dying as a result. I thought she'd make the big save at the end, but couldn't even manage that. She mirrors Castle, someone out to avenge lost loved ones, but also too caught up in it, charging ahead blind to other dangers. Castle has Micro to at least try to pull him back, Midani didn't have anyone effective at that, only people who were good at telling her what she did wrong after the fact. I think she's also meant to make Frank face the things he did (under orders that he didn't know were actually bullshit), but I thought that got lost in the shuffle much of the time. So is she a different cautionary tale for Frank, like Lewis, or am I giving the show too much credit?

When the show does decide it's time for violence, it goes for it. People's faces gets beaten into bloody pulp, eyes are gouged out, a lot of people get stabbed multiple times. Definitely felt like another level from the violence in the other Marvel Netflix shows. Which, if you are going to do a show about a guy whose whole shtick is he violently kills lots of criminals, I guess you shouldn't hold back on said violence. Credit on that score.

Paul Schulze plays a pretty contemptible, arrogant villain in Rawlins. The kind of guy who was handed everything and believes that was his birthright. When things stop going how he wants, he loses all composure, maybe too much. Scenery chewing going a bit far. I can make explanations for him acting like that, but again, I'm not sure I'm not giving the show too much credit.

I don't think I ever got really fired up and excited during the show. Except near the end, when Frank gets at Rawlins, that might have been a "Fuck yeah!" moment. Otherwise, there were a lot of quieter scenes I enjoyed, conversations that were pleasant to watch, which is not what I would have expected, but that's the extent of it. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. I could watch it and have it mostly hold my attention for 50 minutes at a pop.

The Punisher (1989)

Because a coworker asked me to try and keep a body count, I watched the 1989 Punisher movie. I have strange coworkers.

The movie was in the box of stuff my dad loaned me a month ago, part of a discount action movies disc. You know, eight crappy films on two DVDs for some really low price? I'm not at all sure why he would buy it, or why he would think I'd want to watch any of it, but I've come to realize I can't always follow his tastes.

For the record, the body count, by my best estimate, is 98 confirmed on-screen deaths. Not bad, I guess. It doesn't count the 125 or more kills he racked up the previous five years, since we didn't see those. I did count the flashback of his family dying, since we got to see that. I didn't count Detective Sam Leary (Nancy Everhard), since the last we saw of her, she was only getting pistol-whipped as the mob rescued Frank. I can't confirm her death, because she drops out of the film entirely after that.

In some ways, it wasn't as bad as I expected. Then again, some of the particulars of a Punisher film are pretty simple. Give him a family killed by the mob. Make him frighteningly determined to kill criminals, but protective of children. Give him a reliable source of information. Using a down-on-his-luck drunk actor was a curious choice, but he adds some color.

It's also a very '80s action movie, which isn't necessarily great for the idea of Frank Castle I have in my head now (pretty much Ennis' version). The one-liners felt out of place, the use of a motorcycle struck me as impractical (it attracts too much attention, and severely limits how much firepower you can carry). I found it curious the big white skull on his shirt was too far, but using a remote control truck with a bottle of hooch to get Shake's attention was OK. I don't really care for either of the cops, Leary or Berkowitz (Lou Gossett Jr.), but I guess they needed some way to get the backstory and emotional depth into the movie. One that didn't rely on Dolph Lundgren, I mean. Some of the faces he makes cracked me up. Especially the one as he surrenders to the cops. Oh well, I wasn't expecting much from him, and that's what I got.

I was impressed by the conclusion of Castle and Gianni Franco's (wasn't expecting to see the evil doctor from The Fugitive in this movie) partnership. Frank agrees to help Franco recover his child from the Yakuza, but promises to kill Franco as soon as that's accomplished. Except you presume the boy will be there at the time, so how were they going to work around that? I figured there was no way they'd have Frank kill the guy in front of his son. I expected them to weasel out of it. Send Tommy away, have Lt. Berkowitz show up and kill Franco because he got the drop on Frank, have Franco accidentally kill himself while trying to get Frank.

But no, Frank actually did kill Franco in front of Tommy, albeit after Franco made a very game attempt to kill Frank, and after Tommy came to Frank's aid. I honestly couldn't decide what to make of Frank giving Tommy the chance to kill him as revenge. Frank's reasoning - that if Tommy gets it out of the way now, he won't grow up to be his father - was a little dodgy. We have no indication Franco acted as he did out of some childhood revenge anger. It's more likely Frank's deathwish coming through than anything, but I have a hard time seeing him encouraging a child to kill someone, even under those circumstances.

Of course, right after that, he tells Tommy he's a good boy, and had better stay that way, because Frank will be watching. Which makes Frank out to be Robot Santa from Futurama, essentially.

Are They Stuck In One Of Those Cycles?

I picked up some back issues yesterday. Nothing that finished out a run, but I did move considerably closer to wrapping up Hitman. I was reading #53, I think, when Tommy attends the funeral for Tiegel's grandfather, and pauses to pay his respects at Sean Noonan's grave. He talks with Sister Concepta, and she brings up what Tommy did to the people who killed Sean. Namely, he attended the wedding of the daughter of the Gallo family, and killed her and every wiseguy there (he did spare the priest). Tommy argues he did it because Sean meant a lot to him, and it was the only way he knew to make things right.

The sister is not impressed. She argues there were children there who lost their parents because of Tommy, and who will think this is how the world works. I don't quite know what she means, because I'm not sure how much the kids would understand. Do they know Tommy did it for revenge, and so the kids will learn that the way to deal with loss is anger, and if they're angry, they should kill the people they blame for the loss. Or is it the idea that the world is a chaotic place, where people can be killed at any moment, for no reason a child can discern or understand?

It makes me wonder what those kids grow up to be, in Ennis stories in general. In his Punisher works, there were definitely children left behind after Frank Castle got done with their fathers or mothers. At one point he attacked a funeral, and a small boy was the only one who saw him drive up, and drive away. That kind almost certainly lost someone close to them that day, assuming they weren't there to mourn the deaths of everyone close to them already. Do they become like their absent parents, or the men who killed those parents, or something else entirely? Maybe they're better off without mob types as parents. I suppose there's no reason they can't be wonderful, loving parents, and inhuman monsters to everyone else on the planet.

We did see Marc Navaronne near the end of Hitman, whose father was killed by Tommy, and who subsequently was set to kill Tommy. But Marc was already being trained to kill before his father crossed paths with Monaghan, so I don't know how much credit or blame could be placed on Tommy for how Marc turned out.

I think in the Punisher's world, those kids probably grow up to be crooks, because part of what Ennis worked with there was that Frank was fighting an endless war, that there would always be more criminals, and Frank knew that, and to a certain extent, accepted it. Not accepted in the sense he stopped killing, but he knew crime would continue on beyond his end, and so he'd do all he could until then.

In Tommy's world, I'm not so sure. You could argue those kids Monaghan orphaned will wind up in the same business as their parents. After all, despite Sean's best efforts, Tommy wound up a killer, and even if Pat wasn't a killer, he was still an arms dealer. But Tommy worked to protect Maggie Lorenzo and her unborn kid because he thought they deserved a chance for a good life. As a result of his (and Natt's, and McCallister's) actions, Maggie and her boy won't grow up in the Cauldron, and I think the kid will turn out OK. That's just conjecture, but it feels like the point is Tommy tried to do that good thing he was looking for, and it worked out. So maybe people aren't doomed. Though there's obviously a difference between a child and mother saved by Tommy, and a kid orphaned by Tommy, but Hitman isn't nearly as bleak as Punisher.

Quick Trigger Finger, Even For Castle

Anyone find it strange that Frank Castle killed the Puppet Master so quickly in Heroes for Hire this week? It's not a surprise he killed him; this is the Punisher we're talking about. But his insistence that Puppet Master would never talk is a bit odd. Frank gets criminals to spill their guts to him all the time, and those crooks have to realize they're going to die the moment they run out of useful information. Yet they talk anyway. Who's to say Puppet Master wouldn't have done the same, just to keep himself alive until some more folks could show up to protect him from Castle? Everything he'd say could be lies, but the lies might tell them something, and there might be some truth in there as well.

It makes me wonder if Frank wasn't still under someone's control, that being Puppet Master's mysterious boss. Masters had refined and updated his controlling techniques, but that might also make them usable for someone else. Maybe he let his employer in on too many trade secrets?

What's Frank Castle Get Out Of The Afterlife?

Late in 2008, Marvel released a Punisher: War Zone mini-series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. In it, there's a sequence where Frank asks the fellow who's been after him why he thinks Frank would be haunted by the people he kills. His next two lines are 'I send them to Hell. I sleep just fine.' I saw the page originally in one of Chris Sims' "Ask Chris" columns, and I've been thinking about it periodically since then. Last week, it struck me as strange that the Punisher basically admits he believes in Hell. I've been sorting out my thoughts on that since then.

My thinking was Frank is focused, but also very practical about what he does. He tries to bury the emotional part of himself, because it'll make him stupid and get him killed more quickly. For as many as he kills, he's knows there will always be more criminals, long after he's dead. Even while he's alive, there are numerous ones he'll never catch up to, and the most he can hope for is what he does might give them a moment's pause. He knows he's gone too far down this path - willingly, it's worth noting - to turn back, which is why he can't be part of the life of the daughter he learned he had with O'Brien. It's not so much that Frank couldn't believe in an afterlife, but more I didn't think he would bother to. He's focused on his mission, and doing it efficiently as possible.

Today, it occurred to me that War Zone was under the Marvel Knights imprint, the same as the "Welcome Back, Frank" mini-series Ennis and Dillon did several years earlier (which lead to a Punisher ongoing under the Marvel Knights heading, and eventually the ongoing Ennis wrote in the MAX imprint). At the very start of "Welcome Back, Frank", Ennis addresses Castle's previous status quo: acting as a killer of paranormal stuff under Heaven's direction. Ennis deals with it quickly, basically stating "Yeah, it happened, but Frank's alive again, back to killing mobsters and such. Moving on!" The idea that Frank Castle believes in the afterlife wouldn't come as any surprise, considering he'd seen it, acted in service of it, even.

I'm not clear on what connection there might be between Ennis' Marvel Knights and MAX Punisher work. Costumed superheroes are never mentioned in the MAX stuff. Neither is the Russian, or Frank once making a French military officer drop a nuke on an island. However, Frank's SAS buddy Yorkie Mitchell showed up in both titles, though more often in the MAX book. Still, MAX imprint Frank believes in something, too. In Punisher: The Tyger one-shot, at the end, as Frank begins his war on crime, he thinks to himself that he'll show them something not made by God. it's a reference to a scene earlier in the book, when Frank attends a poetry class as a kid. After hearing Blake's "The Tyger", he asks who made the Tyger, because he doesn't believe it could have been made by the same being that made lambs, meaning God*. It could be a product of his upbringing he hasn't shaken, the same way there are certain things he learned as a kid he honed as he's grown older.

There's always the possibility that Frank believes because he likes the idea that after he's done with the crooks, they wind up someplace worse, where they suffer more than he could ever inflict. By and large, Ennis' Punisher doesn't torture. When he does, he doesn't hold back, but it's rare enough that it even worries him how easy it was. Normally, he's trying to do things as quickly and cleanly as possible, so there wouldn't be time to drag it out. So those he kills could fall under the category of "At least it was quick", if that's a consolation. But he can tell himself there's more waiting for them on the other side.

I don't think that's it, though. He's killing them, and that should be satisfaction enough, in its own way. It's another scene in the MAX run I was thinking of as evidence of his beliefs I think is the reason. At the end of the "Up is Down, Black is White" arc, Frank's captured Nicky Cavella, the mobster who dug up the remains of Frank's family, urinated on them, then sent a recording of it to major news stations. Frank went wild for a bit, not killing civilians wild, but being much more showy and careless (with himself) in how he did things. Now though, he's leading Cavella into the woods, and he thinks to himself (I don't have it in front of me, so paraphrasing) that the clouds had gone and he could think clearly again. He remembers Maria and the kids are someplace people like Cavella can never touch them.

That's the key to it, because Castle isn't just the Punisher, unstoppable, remorseless, emotionless killer. Frank Castle, husband and father, is still in there, but buried as deeply as possible. Because when that part of him comes to the surface, takes control, he gets careless. He does things less intelligently, puts himself and others at risk. It isn't a strict revenge thing, because that would end with the ones responsible for his pain**. It's a mission that doesn't end with the death of one criminal, but hypothetically ends with the death of all criminals (though it really ends with Frank's death), and so emotion can't enter into it. In that way, the belief that his loved ones are somewhere else, in peace and happiness, safe from the sort of violence that killed them, is a soothing measure for that emotional part of Frank. They aren't simply dead and gone, they're dead, but in a better place, so he doesn't need to be angry over them. It keeps that part of Frank Castle quiet, so the soldier can do what he has to, how he has to do it.

* The teacher, a priest, responds that God made everything, and that's all there is to it, as far as he's concerned.

** As it did for Jenny in the Widowmakers arc. She'd trained herself to be very good at killing, but once she killed the specific people she hated, there was nothing left for her, and she killed herself.

I Know There Are People Who Would Pay Money For This

And here I was, worried I'd have nothing to post about tonight. Sally has this post, which talks a bit about Batman, his current adventures in time, and includes that panel of Batman tied up with cavemen all around.

Looking at it, I think Bats looks rather like Frank Castle. I think it's the stubble, or maybe the lines around his mouth. They make him look older, and I'd figure Castle should be older than Bruce Wayne*. This, of course, lead me to wonder what happens if the Punisher becomes lost in time. If he meets cavemen, and one of those cavemen tries to kill another because, you know, they're trying to survive, or they want the other one's stuff, or whatever, does Castle do what he does?

Initially, I was thinking of it in terms of whether he'd risk the timeline, but considering his timeline leads to the death of his wife and kids, I don't think he'd care**. There was a story in Marvel Knights Punisher about Castle getting Nick Fury to convince Reed Richards to send Frank back to Capone's time to kill him, under some premise that killing Capone would keep the sort of organized crime that took his family from existing. Yeah, I know, it was all a dream story, don't sweat it. At any rate, it would suggest Castle doesn't particularly worry about stuff like that.

Then I started wondering whether law exists at that time. If there are no laws stating it's illegal to take another person's stuff, or cave their head in with a rock, is it still criminal to do so?It could be considered immoral (that would depend on who is making the judgment, though), but without laws prohibiting it, it could be argued the person isn't actually a criminal***. Then I remembered Castle isn't much for technicalities, a crook is a crook, so if he saw a caveman doing something he considered criminal, he'd kill them.

* Though I'm not sure how old Bruce needs to be to incorporate his years of training, then Grayson's years of being Robin, then Nightwing, and Drake's time as Robin, and everything else. Wayne has to be in his early forties at least, right? I figure Castle's pushing 60, though.

** Plus there's Marvel's bit about how you actions in the past only create new timelines where those actions have an effect, but the original persists unchanged. When writers actually use that, anyway.

*** It reminds me of a piece from The Forgotten War, that I read back in March. Hierry talked about how the Germans would let a native of the islands off with a warning if they committed a crime, but were from a section of the island the Germans hadn't reached with their administrative and judicial offices. The reasoning being, they didn't know the law, so it would be wrong to exile them, or sentence them to hard labor. In that case the laws exist, but since the person in question wasn't aware of them, the laws in a way don't exist until the moment the Germans let them know about them.

Probably A Preferable Situation Than His Usual Fare

That is probably my favorite panel from Deadpool: Suicide Kings (it's from #4). Apologies for the glare in the center. I tried taking the picture 7 times, and that was the best result.

Carlos Barberi is definitely trying to ape (homage? copy?) Skottie Young's style, since Young was drawing that Marvelous Land of Oz mini-series at the time. That's fine with me, as I prefer Barberi trying his hand at being Skottie Young to Barberi's work in the rest of the mini-series. Which doesn't bode well for my satisfaction with the upcoming Deadpool #20. Then again, that issue is going to feature Deadpool and Spider-Man trying to stop Hit-Monkey. Considering my disinterest (or distaste) for most non-human primates in comics, that's possibly a bigger strike.

At the end of the previous issue, the Punisher performed and explosive headshot on Deadpool, and this is what he's dreaming about as his entire head regenerated. No, I'm not sure how, minus a brain, his body remained alive long enough to pull that off. What's a little creepy is he was trying to explain to Spider-Man he wasn't guilty of the particular crime he was being hunted for, and so Spidey and Daredevil (who showed up shortly after the unsafe cranial expansion) brought him in an empty apartment to pull himself together. Which suggests they watched his head grow back (well, Daredevil radar sensed it, but close enough*). even for two heroes who have been around the block as much as those two, you'd think that would freak them out more. They were pretty blase about it.

In the panel, we have Wade as Dorothy, Spidey as the Scarecrow, Frank as the Tin Man**, and Daredevil as the Cowardly Lion. Spidey as having no brain I get. He wouldn't believe 'Pool. Frank as having no heart, yeah, makes perfect sense. Daredevil lacking courage is a little dodgy, but this is Deadpool's regenerating brain we're talking about. It's close enough.

* Then again, he also heard and probably smelled it. That might be even worse than seeing it.

** Two panels from now he's going to kill the freak Deadpool mentions. Which is actually a munchkin, as the munchkin points out. Then Tin-Frank kills it.

Hopefully We'll Avoid Arguments About Crime-Fighting Methods

One thing I've developed as a side-effect to reading (and enjoying) Garth Ennis' Punisher MAX work is I don't feel much interest in seeing the Punisher in the Marvel Universe proper. I guess that stems partially* from my disinterest in his run-ins with Spider-Man and Daredevil. As you might know, those two don't really approve of Frank's "Let's kill the criminals" attitude. That leads to tension between them, if not outright attempts to apprehend Frank by the other costumed type**. At that point, most stories seem to boil down to two conclusions: Frank is captured, or Frank escapes. Well, the first leads to "Punisher in jail", which has been used to some effect in the past, but it limits your options with him, until you get him back out of jail. My problem with the second is it requires the hero to play the fool for Frank to escape. Not all the time; sometimes Castle takes advantage of the confusion of a big fight, or the arrival of emergency services, or random innocents being in danger, and slips away while the hero is occupied. Still, there are times where it's as though Frank has some gas pellet that saps the I.Q. of people around him, and they wind up looking like chumps.

So I imagine it's the lack of a philosophical difference that keeps me from minding Frank's showing up in Moon Knight. I doubt there's going to be a lot tedious arguing between the two about whether they should kill the criminals they're inevitably going to confront. We know Frank won't kill any cops, and Jake has already made it clear he's not OK with that either, so that just leaves the criminals to kill, and any innocents around to not kill. Should keep things simple.

* The other reason is I've grown pretty comfortable with the idea of Frank focusing on more "normal" crime, and perhaps deciding that going after costumed villains is just too much trouble. You have to fight the heroes, it requires specialized ordinance, and the villains never stay dead. Sure his struggle with more everyday crime is just as endless, but there he can usually point at someone he shot and feel confident they aren't coming back in a couple months.

** I was going to say hero, but that would imply Frank is a hero, and that tag doesn't really fit him.

Well, It Was A Dream

I just noticed this today, so I figured it was worth discussing.

In Punisher #50, Frank has a dream where the kids were sick so they didn't go to the park, and thus tragedy did not strike the Castle family. The dream takes place in what I assume would have been the present, where Frank is a grandfather, having a dinner with the whole family, and good times, and it's very pleasant. Eventually Frank wakes up, and he's bothered by the dream, and he's tries to do some target shooting to clear his head, and it doesn't work, and then he runs into Barracuda again, learns he has a daughter, and away we go.

The thing that caught my eye this time around was during the dream, Frank is talking with his son and son-in-law, and the in-law is asking about Frank serving in Vietnam. Frank says he served most of a tour, but caught some shrapnel near the end. What's interesting to me is that Ennis had established in various other works that Frank had three tours in Vietnam, not just one. The first, as far as I can tell, was fairly basic. The only thing I know about it was that he heard Sal Buvoli* had gotten killed on that tour. The second tour was the one that apparently invovled darker work, including a mission to go silence a captured American general**. The third tour was the one that put at Firebase Valley Forge, where the events of Punisher: Born took place.

Seeing as Ennis wrote all those works, I don't think that was an error. The way I see it, there are two possible explanations. One, in the dream, Frank is not being totally honest, because the things he experienced on those later tours are things best left buried. I recall from Born that Maria was pregnant with Frank Jr. during the third tour, and since he told the son-in-law, it's possible Frank just never told him about all of it, and Maria and Lisa agreed not to discuss it either. I don't really buy that though.

What I think is, Dream Frank never had those latter tours, he never went on, is wetworks a proper term, never had to do whatever was necessary to survive at Firebase Valley Forge, and that strikes me as an interesting thing for Ennis to put in there. The one thing Ennis kept working at throughout his time on Punisher was that it isn't as simple as "family dies = Punisher". Frank Castle is more than that, and more than the training he received in the military. He's those things, plus a hundred other little things through his life before that*** that helped make him as effective as he is. Still, it's interesting that Frank's subconscious removes those tours for the dream. It suggests that Frank realizes that whatever he experienced over there, whatever darkness he reached for to survive, would have wrecked this happy life, even if his family survived.

It raises the question in my mind of what Ennis believes Frank Castle would have been, if he had done all three tours, but not lost his family to crime (or random superheroic activities****)? Would he have kept going back to military service, or become a cop? I have a hard time seeing Castle as a serial killer*****, just killing people randomly. Would that darkness drive him to kill his own family, or would he turn to more self-destructive pursuits to release it? I don't have any answers, and unless Ennis has said something about it somewhere, I don't imagine I will. I like that Ennis gives Frank that level of self-awareness. It's not new, Frank has been pretty open about why he does what he does, how effective he is, and what it's done to him as a person. Still, I appreciate that even if his dreams, he isn't trying to delude himself, even if the result is a bit disturbing.

* Sal being the older brother of the girl that Frank was sweet on in The Punisher: The Tyger. Sal was also the one who burned alive the mafia son who assaulted her, which lead to her slitting her wrists.

** Also described in The Tyger.

*** For example, in The Tyger, we see young Frank is very good at sneaking around, and listening in when nobody knows he's there. He probably honed that as he aged, but that tendency towards moving silently, not announcing his presence when he doesn't want to, was already in place.

**** So let's leave Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe out of consideration.

***** Actually, is the Punisher a serial killer? Carnage is considered one, and Frank has a higher body count than he does, I'm sure.

Trying To Describe My Dissatisfaction With The Punisher

I feel reasonably certain that when I go to the comic store tomorrow* I'm going to request the Punisher be removed from my pull list. But I figured it might be worth trying to examine what about Hurwitz' Frank Castle that rings so false for me. Chris Sims has been doing a pretty solid job of summing it up as he's been reviewing the issues, but I figured I might spend a little time examining my personal feelings on it. I think it's because Hurwitz writes him as Frank Castle, not the Punisher.

The feeling I got from Ennis' work was that the Frank Castle calling himself the Punisher has actively attempted to bury the Frank Castle that had a wife and two children, and that other Frank leaks through mostly in dreams, provided nothing upsets the balance. It's a conscious decision, done to help him maintain a certain distance from what he does. Without that distance, what he does goes from a mission to kill those who harm the innocent, to a revenge based killing spree. The end result is possibly the same, but with emotion in the picture, the means will be different, his thinking will be less clear, innocents are more likely to get caught in the crossfire, and he is more likely to die himself. While Ennis' Punisher is realistic about his mission, that he will never kill all the criminals, and that he will die someday, that doesn't mean he's in any hurry for his time to end. He plans to keep doing what he does for absolutely as long as he can.

Going for revenge jepardizes that**, so he tries very hard to push any emotion down, and it's a constant struggle. Nearly every arc Ennis wrote seemed to involve Frank being faced with some situation that dragged his human emotions to the surface. It was Micro reentering his life, his family's remains being desecrated, girls being used by the slavers, the generals sending American soldiers to stop him, or his having another daughter. Those produce reactions in him that hampoer his effectiveness. He holds back, or loses control entirely and makes poor decisions. For the continuation of his mission, it's a bad thing.

With Hurwitz, the memory of Frank Castle's family is much closer to the surface. There was the monologue about all the things that are still happening while 'they are dead'. Seeing them in TV screens, mirrors, or in drinks. I'm fairly certain the scene at the end of #62, where he grasps the wrist of the girl he believes he's just killed to be a callback to him holding his daughter after she'd been shot in that park. The one that truly stuck in my craw was when he's reached the town, and the townspeople offer him the services of a girl. He turns them down initially, but she follows him to his room, and he doesn't send her away. But as she starts in, he looks over and sees his family bleeding out on the ground reflected in the mirror. That was a bit much. Really, if it bothers him that much, why didn't he send her away again? He typically trusts his instincts, and if they're telling him this is wrong, then why would he continue?

I think that's what goes wrong with it. Hurwitz wants us to feel a deeper connection with Castle, so he wants to make sure we know he still misses his family. But having him not refuse the girl kind of udnercuts that. Ennis certainly wasn't adverse to having Frank get some action (O'Brien in two separate arcs, Jenny in The Widowmakers), but there was never any indication that Frank felt he was being unfaithful to Maria. I think that's because he did his best to deny any emotional connection to these women***. He questions in Long, Dark Night arc whether he merely pretended to like O'Brien because that's what he felt the situation demanded, or if he genuinely cared about her, despite his best efforts to avoid connections. It wasn't love, but affection? Possibly. Still, I think it works because the specter of his deceased wife doesn't loom over it. It doesn't feel he's being unfaithful to her memory, because he doesn't seem to dwell on how it might be. The man that married Maria, loved her, is hardly there. he's been buried out of necessity, to undertake this mission. Hurwitz has brought that man out to be a more consistent part of the picture, but he's trying too hard, and it's overwhelming some of the professionalism, for lack of a better word, that I think defines the Punisher's approach.

* That's right, I've returned to the place I was before the previous two months. So I'll actually be able to provide my crappy reviews in a timely fashion! For the next 2 months or so, anyway.

** See the arc Up is Down, Black is White.

*** Beyond perhaps sympathy for them.

Garth Ennis' Punisher: What Survives?

Jog's already put up an interesting read about Ennis' Punisher run, which I encourage you to go read. It pointed out a few things to me, such as the fact that the author of the book we kept getting excerpts from in this last arc is the brother of a character from Ennis' Punisher: Born mini-series. It's not vital to this arc, but it was something I wasn't aware of.

Of more importance was Jog pointing out that this last arc contained none of Frank's usual inner monologue. It's entirely from the view of the characters around him, mirroring the book where everyone describes what they remember or think of the event so many believe to be the origin of the Punisher (Vietnam, specifically the battle at firebase Valley Forge). It's kind of amusing in light of Ennis' Punisher: The Tyger one-shot, where we get to see that the genesis of what Frank becomes started long before he went to Southeast Asia, and he even muses on how people will ascribe his motives to his family's death, and his time in the service.

There's other things in that essay that I'd been thinking about periodically, like the impermanence of Frank's supporting cast (I think O'Brien appeared in more issues than any character besides Castle, and nobody, including her, showed up in more than three stories, because you can only be around the Punisher, or in his sights, for so long before you die), and how he just keeps on keeping on in the face of all of it, and his understanding the reality of what he does. The thing I wanted to get at is this: Are there things Garth Ennis added to the character of the Punisher that you think will be kept by future writers, and if so, what are they?

I'm hampered here, because Ennis' Punisher pretty much is the Punisher to me. Prior to "Welcome Back, Frank", I owned two, maybe three comics where the Punisher was the star, and maybe a dozen comics where he guest-starred (probably less than that). So I can't really separate what was Garth Ennis, and what was already there. I imagine the idea that Frank still dreams of his family isn't new, but maybe the idea that he actively works to bury those dreams (as seen in #50) is. The idea that it's not supposed to be a personal thing with him, that he tries to regard it as a mission, not much different from the stuff he did in Special Forces, sounds new. Especially the idea that when he lets things get to him (ala the Black is White, Up is Down, or The Slavers arcs) it either gets him in trouble, or worries him after the fact. The idea that the Punisher is actually capable of doing things to criminals that even disturb him after the fact (which he reflects on at the start of The Widowmakers), certainly seemed new.

Again though, I'm not familiar enough with what he was before to really say, which is where you come in.

Unrelated note: I'm leaving town tomorrow, to go help move things. I'll probably be back Friday. Maybe Saturday. So expect reviews one of those two days, and hopefully at least a little posting in between now and then.