comics
The rumor mill is spinning that writer Garth Ennis will give up the reins on Marvel‘s Punisher book some time in 2008, ending a nearly 10-year run with the iconic, skull-emblazoned urban vigilante. Ennis’ contributions to the Punisher mythos cannot be overstated. He literally brought the character back from the dead in his 1999 Marvel Knights mini-series; prior to that, Frank Castle had a short, ignominious run as a supernatural assassin hunting down rogue angels and demons after committing suicide at the end of the once-popular ’90s ongoing series. Ennis jettisoned all that garbage, bringing Frank back to basics—dealing out cold steel justice to pimps, drug dealers, mobsters and murderers, the worst criminals humanity has to offer.
 The hunter becomes the hunted: The latest Punisher book sets the widows of a few bad men after the skull-chested judge, jury and executioner. Mountain men! |
While Ennis’ Marvel Knights Punisher series blended brutal violence with outrageous, inappropriate comedy—a tactic he put to much better use in his legendary, soon-to-be-adapted-by-HBO Vertigo series, Preacher—when he relaunched the book under Marvel’s mature-readers MAX line in 2004 he went straight for the grim, gritty antihero at The Punisher’s core. Now with more than 50 issues in the can, this volume of The Punisher will likely be remembered as the character’s best. Nearly every arc has been a home run, each one putting Frank into a new, clever scenario that underscores both how single-minded yet complex the character can be. Over the past three-plus years he’s dismantled a white slavery sex ring, taken on white-collar crime, been inadvertently roped into the "War on Terrorism" and killed countless would-be Mafia dons.
The most recent collection, Widowmaker, is arguably the weakest of the MAX storylines, but its premise exemplifies Ennis’ brilliance. It’s so simple, it’s astounding that nobody tried it in the character’s near three-decade career: the widows of a handful of The Punisher’s mob victims team up to take out the man who killed their husbands. Frank ultimately becomes a supporting character in his own book as the storyline focuses more on the women, and things are further muddied by the addition of a conflicted cop and a second female party with a murderous agenda of her own. But the haunting ending mostly makes up for the arc’s unevenness and proves that, after 20 years in the comic industry, and nearly 10 with the same character, Ennis is still producing stories as memorable as the character he saved from banality.
