[This one isn’t so bad. I genuinely loved Ennis’s work on
The Punisher. I loved it even more when they had the MAX series. And I’m super
grateful that Ennis is at it again currently. The man was born to write
Punisher. This appeared in the Elmhurst College Leader on February 22, 2000.]
Not long ago, Marvel killed their greatest superhero off,
which wasn’t wise, considering their lack of good heroes. In the tradition of
killing superheroes, though, they brought him back from the dead. That is usually
a bad move, but in this case, it was ten times worse. Why? Because that hero
was the Punisher, and in resurrecting him, they brought a great deal of the
supernatural into a story where the supernatural has absolutely no right to
exist. All of a sudden, the Punisher had glowing eyes and worked for angels
killing the scum of the earth.
Luckily, this didn’t last long. Now, with all that silly
bullshit out of the way, writer Garth Ennis (Preacher, Hitman) takes up the
reins with the new number one issue of Marvel Knights’s The Punisher. As the ad
says, “No capes, no masks, no mercy.” Finally, the Punisher, aka Frank Castle,
has returned to the basics.
Steve Dillon, who worked on Preacher and Hellblazer with
Ennis, has also joined the team, allowing his work to be inked, which almost
never happens. Dillon’s work, which has been going a bit downhill in Preacher,
looks excellent with Jimmy Palmiotti’s complimentary inking. The only bit of
bad artwork is the cover by Tim Bradstreet, who can definitely do better. His
covers for Unknown Soldier and Hellblazer were much better.
Anyone who knows Ennis and Dillon’s work will certainly know
that they are the perfect people for the job. First of all, Dillon’s work is
stark reality. Unlike other artists who tend to make their characters look
inhumanly muscular, Dillon shows real people. This is the world of Frank
Castle—dark, gritty reality.
Ennis, an avid fan of Clint “Blow ‘Em Away” Eastwood and
John Woo movies, has shown his flair for writing action sequences time and time
again. Think back on all the times he’s shown the Saint of Killers killing
platoons of people in the pages of Preacher, whether they be cops or people in
tanks. Think back to the ghastly Stein and his fighting methods in Pride and
Joy. Think back on all those shoot-up scenes in Unknown Soldier.
Ennis does not disappoint Punisher fans. There’s Big Frank
on the very first page holding a gun to some guy’s head with the bodies of
scumbags at his feet. When the guy gets the idea to push the drugs that the
dead scumbags won’t be able to push, Frank walks up behind him and makes his
head do a complete 180 turn. He then torches the drugs, the money, and the
bodies in the typical Punisher style.
Or how about the morgue shoot-out scene? Guns, explosives, and
lots of corpses to hide behind. There may have been bodies there when Frank
walked in, but there certainly were more of them by the time he left.
To cap the first issue off, Frank throws a man off the top
of the Empire State Building while he just stands there reflecting about how he
came back, waiting for the grisly SPLAT! Apparently, when he died, the angels
thought they could use him as Marvel’s version of the Saint of Killers,
punishing the sinners, but, as Frank says, “Tried it. Didn’t like it. Told them
where to stick it.” Cast back down into his grimy, murderous world, Frank’s
having fun blowin’ away punks. The first issue has an approximate body county of
18, and that’s a minimum.
Some could say that this is a bit excessive. Ennis takes
this issue up in a note at the end of the issue, “In Defence of the Punisher.”
He said, “I can see why Frank’s little hobby might be viewed as requiring some
kind of justification. But only by morons.” He brings up the humor of “Itchy
and Scratchy,” then moves on to the body count of scumbags in The Killer, and
finally backing everything up with Dirty Harry and his crime fighting methods.
Truth be told, the people Frank kills are true scum—they aren’t generally good
people slipping into a world of crime out of necessity or accident. These are
the people who would kill children if the little tykes were in their way. They
would murder, rape, steal, etc. their way to their desires. These are beyond a
shadow of a doubt bad people. Did anyone feel bad when Dirty Harry blew away
the killer in the end of the first movie?
Finally, there’s someone who will make these punks crawl
back into whatever wretched womb that spawned them. Whether he shoots, stabs,
strangulates, or simply throws people off the Empire State
Building, the Punisher is
back in action. Welcome back, Frank, says the world.
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