In response to the raves on the New Comics threads on the various boards I visit, I picked it up Punisher: the Cell and the Punisher MAX: Kitchen Irish and Mother Russia trades earlier today. Kitchen Irish got me thinking.
Ennis’ Punisher: Doing a Lot with Limited Means.
Outside of Frank Castle’s early appearances in Amazing Spiderman and the great Tony Dezuniga’s retelling of the Punisher’s origin in the seventies I never cared too much for the Punisher. I thought of him as a very, very one note character (though I loved Mike Zeck’s art in his Punisher miniseries, the one introducing (?) Jigsaw. (Boy, he’d come a long way from his work on Master of Kung Fu which was often overshadowed by Paul Gulacy’s panel layout and use of celebrity faces, early in his debut run on the book). It didn’t help matters that I’d read a small pile of Don Pendelton’s Executioner novels as a kid. Those made me view the early Marvel version as a pale imitation (“Mens Adventure” genre paperback writers could go a lot further with the sex and violence than comic book writers in those days). All the sucess of the earlier Punisher series underscored to me was the appeal of Jim Lee and John Romita Jr.'s early work for Marvel, and I couldh’t help note how quickly (relatively speaking) people burned out on the character.
When Garth Ennis’s first Punisher stories came out, I was happily surprised with what he did with the character: he made Frank almost mythic (with the return from the dead, which in this case took place off camera - a wise move, I thought). He also made the Punisher enemies, and his signature ways of finishing them off, memorably funny, in the same sick way his Preacher was funny, a clever solution to the potential monotony of the character.
The thing is, the Punisher remained a one note character. Frank Castle’s a killing machine directed at criminals. Essentially and simply: he gets boring quick. He’s also oddly confining: Frank just didn’t have the long, varied mythology that characters like Spiderman, the FF, Batman or Superman have for writers to draw on, as they do these days when they want to honor the characters roots and find ways of reviving and expanding on a character without distorting or heavily retconning the past. Here, Ennis had hit upon a good, if short-term, solution. It wouldn’t work for the long term, it didn’t give the character new “legs”, but I figured it was enough for a couple of years. And I was right. Two years worth of issues later, Ennis seemed to start running in circles, so I bailed.
I returned briefly to read two Ennis Punisher stories: Punisher: Born which pretty much did as much one could do to lend Frank a touch of the supernatural, as an Agent of Death (like Thanos in Starlin’s Capt. Marvel and Warlock stories; the soldier in the Death story in Gaiman’s recent Sandman: Endless Nights Anthology, or Ennis’ own Preacher: Saint of All Killers; and Punisher: the End which served as a great and fitting end for the man (who, like Gaimen’s Death in the first Books of Magic story) whose job it was, “to hang around until everyone else was gone, sweep up the last of the remaining trash (the rich scum in the bunker), and turn out the light”. Good drama all around: but I was left thinking once Ennis is done with the character, there won’t be much left for anyone else to play with.
Reading Punisher: Kitchen Irish* (reprinting Punisher MAX #7-12)* this afternoon raised more questions than I had answers (not that there was anything wrong with the story: Ennis definitely left no loose ends hanging: all the baddies are good, and stone cold dead by the end of issue #12) that I wanted to ask hard core Punisher fans like Mike Powell,…
Assuming you buy into (or at least understand where I’m coming at regarding the character having inherent limitations) is Kitchen Irish indicative of Ennis current solution to the problem of the Punisher’s limitations?
I couldn’t help but notice that, in a six issue story (filled with all sorts of interesting intrigue and ugly brutal violence - which has it’s own entertainment value: we are talking about the Punisher here), Frank Castle actually appears in only a little over a single issues’ worth of pages. Most of the storyarc is focused on Frank’s targets, in this case, no less than four separate groups of enemies: IRA men who reject the peace process, the last of infamous Westies, McGinty - representing a newer, meaner kind of immigrant criminal - and the River Rats) and “guest stars”, like the aging MI6 hard man (seen in Ennis’ earlier stories about Frank in Northern Ireland) and the young soldier out to avenge his father. In fact the most memorable exchanges in the story occur between the older and younger British soldier, as the elder educates the younger in tactics, torture and the ‘killing life’ - and between the older soldier and the idealistic young IRA killer, left behind by the Uncle he admired, in that other “older soldiers’” pursuit of his “pension”.
It’s funny but I half expected the younger black British soldier to let the younger Cooley go, half sickened as he was by the incredible amount of death and destruction he sees in his week stateside. “Welcome to NYC! Glad to have you!”
Then there is the usual mix of background characters, who are beginning to remind me more and more of the supporting cast Ennis once developed for his run on John Constantine: Hellblazer: angry aggrieved minorities, ambitious immigrants, extremely strong women and very weak men. When it came to the women in this story, Polly of the River Rats, and Brenda Toner of the Westies, I couldn’t help thinking these were the darker, more dangerous sisters of Liz, the Irish woman Constantine loves and loses. In more than one way, it’s all beginning to remind me very much of Azzarello’s 100 Bullets. Ennis builds these interesting supporting casts, explores them for three-six issues, then Frank kill’s’em all off.
Of course, there’s no comparison between Frank Castle and Azzarello’s Minuteman. (It’s funny, when Frank thinks he’s met his polar opposite in a firefighter/EMS Tech, I was thinking his true opposite number is someone like Lono or Agent Graves.) A minuteman kills to preserve a status quo. Frank would more than likely remember a line from the bible: “that behind every fortune, there is a crime”, and proceed to dismantle the Trust (assuming he survived a series of run-ins with the Minutemen). It’s very "fanboy’ of me but I’d love to see Agent Graves and Frank talk. Or Lone and Frank fight, but I doubt it’ll ever happen, unless I went so far as to commission a story I couldn’t afford.
Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that PUnisher: Kitchen Irish represented the the best work by Leonardo Fernandez I’ve seen to date….
… Got around to Punisher: the Cell and the Punisher MAX: Mother Russia late last night (it’s getting hot out here in the valley: hard to sleep), which reinforced my thoughts on Ennis narrative strategy. One thing I really enjoyed about this story was seeing the Marvel Max version of Col. Nick Fury again; the version that appeared in Ennis’ earlier Fury miniseries, which was an under-rated satire on the bureaucratization of post Cold War intelligence, and two aging soldiers’ desperate attempts to hold onto the fading conflict that gave their lives meaning. (More than anything else, the presence of this version of Nick Fury convinces me that the Max stories take place in another universe, the presence of the aging MI6 man in the previous story nonwithstanding.)
By abandoning all humor, in stories like The Cell, Ennis brings out a dark dramatic edge to his work that rivals Azzarello’s best 100 Bullets stories (the ones that don’t meander). However, while I agree with others that The Cell is to be one of the best Punisher stories published, with all due respect to Ennis, here the credit really goes to Lewis LaRosa, for his interpretations of the characters, his page layouts and use of shadows and panel compositions to create mood and build suspense.
The story itself is pretty simple. While I assiduously avoided spoilers for this story, I knew what it was going to be about by the third page: Ennis Punisher is an efficient man, who’s always out to maximize the number of people killed in any outing, usually by selecting his killing grounds (few exits, concentrating targets in a limited space, etc.). That and I recognized the name, Drago. I believe it was mentioned in at least one of the earlier recountings of his families untimely deaths.
Thoughts folks?
