Punisher MAX Issue 7

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues his issue by issue look at Garth Ennis's Punisher Max series. Read this one. You will learn something. Graham Tedesco-Blair is going to take you to school.]

It's possible to read the next story arc without knowing anything about Irish history, and it's possible to enjoy Garth Ennis without knowing anything about his upbringing (“blah blah the author is dead etc.”), but this arc makes a little more sense if you know a little bit about both.

In 1968, what's known colloquially (and with a great deal of understatement) as “The Troubles” began in earnest. It's difficult to give quick summary of this VERY complicated conflict, but the short version is that the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Irish who want to be part of England hate the ones who want Ireland to be completely free, and of course vice versa. It's a traditional hatred that's been going on since the 1600s or so, and that a civil war was fought over in the 1920s. The Ulster Volunteer Force, the Irish Republican Army, the British security forces, and hundreds of other splinter factions were engaged in an extremely violent campaign of war and terrorism against one another. Bombings and assassinations were common. It was an unequivocally shitty time to live in Northern Ireland. And our Garth Ennis was born in 1970, smackdab in the middle of it all. He grew up in Holywood, just outside Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, the son of atheist parents. He has claimed an interview with the Comics Journal in 1998 that his childhood had very little effect on his writing, but, considering how often he writes about Ireland and its Troubles, about how stupid religion is and the terrible things it can make people do, and about how awesome the British SAS are, he's must be being incredibly facetious.

Punisher Max issue 6 -- one more thing

[Graham Tedesco-Blair has been looking at Ennis's Punisher Max series. Last week he sent me a revision to one of the paragraphs in his last review, but I forgot to make the change for him. My bad. Here it is. The paragraph that begins "Pittsy and Frank keep smashing the tar out of one another" should look like this:]

Pittsy and Frank keep smashing the tar out of one another, when we get an odd call back to Morrison's Arkham Asylum, of all things. Morrison is about as un-Miller as you can get these days, though he had yet to start his attempted subversion of Millar's Batman, bear in mind. Pittsy stabs Castle through the hand with a shard of broken glass, recalling that famous scene in the aforementioned book, the one than snaps Batman out of his scared and tired trance, and the same thing happens here with Frank, who uses it as an opportunity to chuck Pittsy out of the window, where he's impaled onto the sharp spikes of the fence below. Even then, though, this isn't enough to kill him, so Frank jumps off after him, landing feet first on Pittsy's chest, and driving him further onto the spikes. That old school mafia archetype is hard to put down, after all, but perhaps it can be temporarily distracted by a crazy Scottish magician?

Punisher MAX Issue 5 and 6

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues his issue by issue look at the Punisher Max series. There is some very well observed stuff in here about various crime story influences working themselves out in the pages of the book. Smart stuff.]

Opening Remarks

Before I start the analysis, I wanted to address a question left in the comments for the preamble. Steven asked: “In that Boys storyline, I didn't catch where he disses Winick. How did you pick up on that? I didn't see it, but I'd be interested to see how you caught that.”

The story in question, “Get Some,” (The Boys, #7-10) is a murder mystery in which a young gay man is found murdered, tossed off the roof of his apartment, and examines in generous depth the reactions of a somewhat average straight guy to the homosexual community, as well as the sheer folly that comes in trying to label someone as gay or straight without bothering to try and get to know them. Issue 8 starts with Hughie reading a “Swingwing” comic, the titular character being a pastiche of DC's Nightwing. The comic's plot is almost exactly the same as Winick's famous “gay roommate” story arc in Green Lantern, and Hughie's dialog describing it seems directly pointed at the original author:

“An' then later on the kid gets queerbashed, right? An' Swingwing goes after the guys and knocks the fuck outta them... I mean, in what weird fuckin' parallel universe has anything like this ever happened to anyone, would you tell me? ... I just think this is really stupid. I mean gay fellas do get beaten up, there are these fuckers going around doing it – an' here's this shite sayin' not to worry, there's a superhero on the way...”

Punisher MAX Issue 4

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues to look at every issue of Garth Ennis's Punisher Max run.]

“No one ever before dared defy THE MAFIA. . . but THE EXECUTIONER not only defies them, he kills, maims, and tries to destroy them piece by piece, with his Vietnam-trained tactics. . . using his knowledge of jungle warfare in his one-man crusade to wipe out the evil web of organized crime in America.” --Jacket copy for Don Pendleton's “The Executioner: War Against the Mafia!”

That sound like anyone we know?

One of the clearest predecessors to The Punisher is Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan, “The Executioner.” The parallels are abundant: a well trained Vietnam soldier who's family is killed takes his war to the mob. There are superficial differences, for example, Bolan lost his parents and sister to mafia loan sharks, and was a Green Beret, while Castle lost his wife and kids, and was part of a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, but the basic idea is clearly the same.

After spending 11 years worth of novels killing his way across the states (and coinciding with Pendleton's sale of the character franchise to Gold Eagle books), Bolan fakes his own death, and emerges as the leader of the top secret government strike force Stony Man, who fight Communists and such all over the world.

Punisher MAX Issue 3

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues to look issue by issue at Ennis's Punisher Max.]

One of the things that struck me while rereading this issue was how often these plots move along with little to no direct involvement from the Punisher. Frank has one line in the entire issue, and spends the duration tied to a chair while Micro lays out exactly what's wrong with him, while laying on the table three snapshots, one of his wife, and one each of his two children. And Mirco's analysis isn't bad at all: no rational person could have carried on a campaign like this for all those years, and while Frank doesn't seem to derive any pleasure from killing, he certainly seems to like it, as if there were some sort of darkness inside him looking for an excuse to get out. He is using his family's deaths to justify something horrible.

(We'll get the quasi-mystical/maybe-it's-all-in-his-head explanation for this in the Born miniseries, featuring just what happened to Frank during that 2nd tour of duty in Vietnam, but it's not important here. That story hadn't even been written yet.)

Punisher MAX Issue 2

[Graham Tedesco-Blair continues his issue by issue look at Ennis's Punisher MAX run.I read the first four issues. They were reasonably good.]

There's a very frustrating trope in Batman comics where some talking head on a news show starts babbling about how horrible Batman is because now that he's here, he attracts all the crazy fringe elements to himself, gives the villains permission to dress up, makes the Joker want to kill people, etc etc. It's overused simply because it's a cliché excuse to pin the blame on Batman, and because it's not very well thought out. And yet, when Ennis manages to tell that exact same story with good reasons and without some smarmy newscaster losing her head, it's quite effective.

In this issue, we meet the arc's bad guys, Nicky Cavella, Pittsy, and Ink. Cavella looks like a combination of Patrick Bateman and Jerry Seinfeld, and has been brought in because all the other mob bosses are dead. Pittsy is an ancient looking, short buff dude in a yellow tracksuit, one of Tony Soprano's thugs, and Ink is straight out of a Sin City comic. We don't see them in action this issue, but even their conversation over dinner is tense. Ennis even lets a joke through, when Ink asks how they could tell if Don Massimo was dead or alive, but it's cruel, with a flat delivery you can read from Ink's expression, designed to hurt Larry, the mobster who called them back to NYC.

Punisher MAX Issue 1: In the Beginning...

[Graham Tedesco-Blair starts his issue by issue look at Ennis's Punisher MAX run. I wanted to comment but have not yet read the issue, though it is in my house. Soon. I make a brief comment below.]

We open with a single page splash panel depicting the gravestone of Frank Castle's family. There are very few other places one could start the series, as Castle is as tied to his origin story as heroes like Batman or Spider-Man are. And it is just that origin story we are treated to in the opening pages, depicted ably by penciler Lewis Larosa. Some panels look like they were inked by running them through a photocopier that was low on toner, but this adds a grittiness and atmosphere that help set the mood. “Gritty” and “Moody” are overused adjectives, but they describe these pages perfectly.

“They hated that old man so much that they shot him through my family,” Castle's narration begins. Like the aforementioned heroes, the Punisher had his origin in the death of his family by criminals, but unlike them, he was already a well trained soldier, a veteran the Vietnam war, rather than an impressionable young boy or teenager. While Bruce Wayne's parents being shot down in front of his young eyes gave him a life long aversion to guns and killing, and fueled his transformation into a child's idea of the perfect man, and teenage Peter Parker's uncle dying thanks to his inaction led him to have crippling guilt about ever not interfering if he thinks he could help, Frank Castle was already a trained killer with a wife and two children he loved dearly. Without them, he reverts to being a soldier, the only thing he knows how to do, the only thing which makes sense. His description of the incident is peppered with phrases like “Thompsons, like the kind our fathers carried” (presumably in World War II) and “the old man's soldiers” because this is the kind of mindset he now lives in. Rather than a traditional, reactionary vigilante book, we are being set up for a war comic that happens to take place in New York City between one well trained man against any and all criminals who cross his path. As his narration continues, Castle mentions almost as an aside that he's already killed the old man, all the shooters responsible, the ones who had ordered the hit, and “probably thousands more.” It hasn't given him any sense of closure, nor has it stopped his mission.

The Punisher MAX: Preamble [New Guest Blogger]

[Oh! What? Did someone say an issue by issue analysis of Garth Ennis's Punisher MAX run? Graham Tedesco-Blair is going to be covering that for us here on Thursdays. BAM. This is a good one for me. Jason's has taught me the virtues of Claremont, who I never disliked exactly (though I did foolishly and ignorantly consider bog standard at one point). But I kind of almost HATE Ennis, even on Punisher and Preacher, which I read at least more than 10 issues of. EXCEPT: Punisher: The End, which is on my list of favorite comics of all time because a friend put the comic in my hand and MADE me read it. I don't think I have ever seen a writer do a better job of taking a character, and thinking him all the way through to the end. So I am intrigued by this. Let's all welcome GTB.]

“[The Punisher] kills criminals because he hates them. It's not exactly brain surgery. It's his methods were interested in here.”
--Detective Soap, Marvel Knight's Punisher #3

When I was younger, I rented the film The Big Lebowski from the local video store. While watching it with my father that evening, my mother happened to walk in, and commented that she disliked how much swearing was in the film. I recall saying something about how the swearing isn't important, because it's a really great story and a very well made movie, but she just couldn't get over the word “fuck” being uttered about once a minute. And it seems that this is precisely the problem most people have with Garth Ennis.

Ennis is an often misunderstood author. Ever since his career in comics really took off with Hitman and Preacher in the mid-90s, his works have been regarded by most as a combination of Adam Sandler and Eli Roth, a coupling of scatological humor and extreme violence. While this is not at all an unfair or unfounded assessment, there's also a lot more going on in his comics than people saying the word “fuck” back and forth for 90 minutes.

With all the crazy things going on in his work, it's easy to miss that he's pretty clearly laying out a system of what's right and what's wrong. Ennis is a very moral writer, but one in the vein of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. Often, the judgment is implied by the consequences of the character's actions and our own reactions to the horrible things that they do to one another. If you need someone standing over your shoulder, reminding you that American Psycho's Patrick Bateman is an unequivocally horrible human being, then you miss the point entirely. As a result of this stylistic choice, Ennis is one of the few writers out there with the capacities to write completely reprehensible and unlikable villains who are none the less gripping and enthralling. You're not going to get any scenes of the villain playing the piano in an empty room, crying.