Written by Greg Rucka
Illustrated by Marco ChecchettoHunting for the villains behind the Wedding Day massacre, The Punisher will leave no body unturned! With Detectives Bolt and Clemons on his tail, the massacre’s only survivor will seek the Punisher’s aid…which might be the worst of all possible choices.
I’m kind of sad there was no Punisher ’90s cartoon. Sure, he showed up in Spider-Man, but I imagine that it would be pretty amusing if he had a cartoon about him being a hero with a catchy theme song. “Punisherrrr – he’s going to punish some bad guys! You won’t believe your eyes! Here comes the Puh-Nish-Errrr!”
None of that has anything to do with anything, though.
Check after the cut for some thoughts on pertinent Punisher-related stuff.
The Punisher is one of the more odd characters in the Marvel Universe. All things considered, he’s really not that interesting; he’s just a guy with a gun and a backstory that doesn’t really matter. He’s the kind of character you just throw into a story that has been told before: “Bad guy needs shooting! Let’s get Frank!” There have been only a few writers and artists who have actively tried to do something else with the character, and even then it is all to varying results and reviews.
The hope here is that Greg Rucka will be able to take a character who is otherwise fairly stale in his inception and do something with him to make him succeed in the execution. That’s all that really matters here; you can do anything with the Punisher (like turn him into Frankenstein), as long as you do it in an interesting way. I must say, after two issues that assumedly set up how Greg Rucka wants to write the Punisher, I am definitely in for the long haul for my third volume of the eponymous character.
What makes Greg Rucka’s Punisher interesting here over other Punishers is that, for all intents and purposes, the book is not about the Punisher. While you can buy and read the wonderful PunisherMAX to buy a book about Frank, this book so far is really just about the aftermath. Rucka’s Punisher is a violent force of nature, moving through the book in action sequences and in shadows and taking up very little of the spotlight. This book is really The World Of The Punisher (“The Punished”? Too corny?), focusing on the mob who fear him, the cops who wants to catch him, and the few people in the public who admire him. It’s certainly different from Fraction’s run (let’s integrate the Punisher in the Marvel Universe!) and Remender’s run (let’s fuck everything up and see what fun we can have!), but the fact that Greg Rucka is writing the Punisher without effectively changing his character yet still writing a brand new book is certainly something to be applauded.
So it works. We don’t really need to read that much about the Punisher. I can assume we’ll see more of him (and soon, probably, considering he’s now in a fight with a supervillain), but this sideline view of the Punisher’s universe does what it needs to do. The Punisher shouldn’t really be integrated to the Marvel Universe, because that’s like asking an ant to defeat a human being. No matter how creative the ant takes down that human being, it’s still going to be ridiculous. By keeping the Punisher on the street and keeping our focus on that same street, Rucka is isolating one of the core elements of why the Punisher should exist, and he’s clearly having a ball with it. The book is similar in tone to Rucka’s other crime-based work (like Gotham Central, which focused on the police dealing with Batman’s aftermath and villains), and it generally feels comfortable here.
It also happens that Marco Checchetto is drawing the heck out of the book. Since the Punisher is a character that lives and breathes in the shadows of the otherwise bright-ish Marvel Universe (despite all that devastation, the good guys do always win, you know?), Checchetto and colorist Matt Hollingsworth (the fantastic colorist from Diggle’s run on Daredevil) have found a wonderful way to put Castle in a dark that’s right on the border between being a noir film and an episode of The Wire. Castle’s vicious storm front of violence is illustrated to great detail, and I for one love the redesign of his famous t-shirt logo.
Greg Rucka isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here or anything like that, but rather is just spinning the wheel as fast as it can go to make sure it still turns, and turn it does! What we have here is a rather entertaining comic with a new take for the Punisher. Nothing about the comic is effectively new; stories starring side-characters instead of the “main” character is a story-telling technique Rucka has used before, and the Punisher is still out there punishing people (like a boss). What works here is the entire execution. With fantastic art by Checchetto and Hollingsworth, Rucka has given us a tale starring an endearing new cop duo who are in a world that’s not unrealistic enough to lose the audience, yet still fictional enough to fit into this particular niche within the Marvel Universe. It’s a risky experiment for an audience assumedly expecting more (More explosions! More violence! Shoot everything!), but it is definitely a nice way to reinvigorate the Punisher in the main Marvel Universe without overdoing it.
Final Verdict: 8.5 – Buy
