by Garth Ennis and Leandro Fernandez
*warning this whole thing is one long spoiler
The story starts with Frank doing a routine gang bust/slaughter afterwards he goes to a diner to have some food and he finds someone has dug up his family and pissed on their skeletons via CNN, who seem to have the thing on 24 hour repeat. while this happening O'Brien (last seen in the beginning being shot and horny) is enjoying her jail time when 3 prison lesbians try to frame her for a prison guards death because she won’t go down on them so she has to escape. meanwhile we find out that it was Nicky Cavella (also from in the beginning) who has set the whole thing up so he can be the Godfather of the mob, as you can imagine Frank isn’t too happy and goes on a killing spree of the underworld so massive it makes the Rwandan genocide look like a picnic for the elderly. so he goes from gang to gang only leaving one survivor with the message to the police if they don’t rebury his family then he will just keep killing and they cave faster than a priest at an all boys school because they are getting so much shit from the press and criminals who are shitting themselves that they will be next. When the his family are reburied Castle goes after Cavella who is waiting with a hit squad including Rawlins from Mother Russia who has been told to kill Castle on the orders of that general who Fury kicked the shit out of other. Just as Rawlins is about to shoot the Punisher,O’Brien ambushes him and shoots Cavella in the chest, causing the Punisher to snap out the funk he's in and letting him make a getaway, so she rescues frank and kidnaps Rawlins (what a woman) taking him back to Roth’s so she can torture him for every bit of black market info they can get out of him. They take care of Cavella after being ambushed by Pittsy's little brother I mean sister and warn him not to go near Rawlins because even in his half dead state he's still dangerous. It all ends nicely with Rawlins killing Roth and escaping, O’Brien going on the run and Cavella dying a slow painful death in a forest allowing Frank to get closure on the whole thing and go back to killing at his normal speed.
Just a dream
I hadn’t really gotten into The Punisher at this point in my life so I had no idea what I was picking up when I was browsing through the random issues at the comic book store, but I got to the end of issue two and that speech kicked in, the one where he's killed all the gangsters and he turns his guns on the innocence with the line "if my world ends so does yours" that one line changed how I viewed not just comic book heroes but heroes in general. Heroes can kill, not only can they kill they can torture you, and it’s weird this concept isn’t a new one we've just been conditioned to think that heroes have that line they should never cross, all our saints and historical figures all their victories and notoriety is bathed in the blood of the people they murdered and killed all in the name of our country, we just gave them some disturbed notion of honour because well do you really want to see the men that enslaved nations as bad people. History remembers them as good that all that matters. We view these characters like angels holier than holy they can do no wrong, and this guy just turns the whole thing on its head, it breaks convention at its very heart. It was just a complete shock to me, like that first time you watch the ending of Fight Club with the sky scrapers crumbling to the ground, it was like time slowed down panel by panel in these two pages and your just sitting there in shock at what you've witnessed. Wolverine might be damaged but these was always a line he never dreamed of crossing because at his heart no matter how much he wanted to be an animal he would never give into it, Frank Castle on the other hand is that monster, that darkness, it’s so much a part of him he can barely even see the light he just knows it these guiding him.
The way Fernandez and Ennis have dragged you into someones darkest personal hell and still have you connecting to Frank is just something to behold, watching a character that far gone, the way he is compulsed to do and carry out the kill even though he knows it will end badly for him. He know there will be serious consequences but he needs to do it, there’s something in that you can relate to, how many times have you did something that you know will fuck you over but you do it anyway? It’s like its saying something brutally honest about human nature, some dark impulse where you have to make to prove your point even at the expense of something you love or your health, like walking away from a relationship, it hurts like fuck but it’s just something you have to do. In this case what happens to Castle was like opening a meat grinder on to the world, and it wasn’t going to stop till it was fed, writhing on the floor choking on its own bile and vomit.
what the hell did I drink last night?
What happens to Cavella also brings up some great issues of whether someone
is born a psychopath or can be groomed to be like it, all the horrifying crap
in his childhood is brutally realised in this, there’s the old argument that
child abuse creates mental health issues but before any of that has even
happened he's already murdered his whole family guided by his monster of an
aunt who pretty much kills any chance of a childhood he had, does it excuse all
the forcing a man to eat his sons or digging up a family and pissing on them?
probably not no matter how much sympathy you want to give them but it was
interesting having at least some reasoning behind his behaviour rather than
just making him a flat out two dimensional psycho. This book is full of strong women Pittsy’s sister makes less of an impact than her brother but he was going to be a hard act to follow, she's very well drawn and you can tell they had a specific person in mind when Fernandez drew her if I didn’t know any better I swear he drew one of the girls I went to school with (hence the reason I didn’t get laid a lot in my teenage years Crufts wouldn’t take them for being too dog like) she has a dominating presence and a face that says 'I will rip off your balls because you don’t have any' it’s a good analogy because she is just a dog on a leash waiting Cavella’s command to attack anything he clicks his fingers at, you get the feeling she could have had more of a story but dies before she gets beyond the love sick puppy routine, which is a shame I wouldn’t have minded an issue where her and barracuda team up.
Another strong woman Obrien is just a powerhouse in this, the way she’s the only one in the whole book she seems to have her head straight apart from the fact she acts like a love sick school girl with a wet on for the punisher, she does do the whole sensitive thing but it’s a good reflection of how fucked up the punishers world is, there’s a sadness in her, a wish fulfilment that things could have been different for them but at the same time resigns herself to the fact there is no other way of life for people like her or Castle.
worst threesome ever
As with most of the MAX series the art is a highlight but Fernandez truly out does himself in this book, the whole thing is almost played out in black and white, giving the effect that your reading the whole thing from a darkened room and the few shades of light you do get normally come from a gun shot. There are lots of detailed close ups of characters grimacing the only time you ever see anyone smile in this is when they have done something evil, you can see clearly what each person is thinking that you could get by without dialogue.
I could talk about this book all day if you give me the chance, every page, panel and word is as near perfect as you’re ever going to get in any comic you will ever read, if that isn’t enough for you to pick it up you've obviously been fucking your aunty.
