PUNISHER #4

Review by: rwpos

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Size: pages
Price: 2.99

Campy Frank Castle doesn’t work for me.  I enjoy humorous books, and silly’s okay with me in general, but in specific applications it just doesn’t work.  And this is one of those cases where it didn’t work for me.

 

When this series launched it was over the top action, but the first few issues were pretty serious and had a specific tone that didn’t change.  Suddenly, with the fourth issue, I felt that it all turned from an extreme – but serious – caricature of Frank Castle (which is basically a requirement to make him work in a world where he’s fighting super-powered villains), to an Adam-West-Batman romp.  The final straw was the panel where Castle is shown wearing the cast-off weaponry of numerous heroes, but each one had been lovingly defaced by a Punisher symbol.  Just the thought of a man as single-mindedly focused on his mission as Frank Castle sitting down at his craft table one night with a stack of super weapons to lovingly paint his little skull emblem onto each is too much to accept within the confines of the story.

 

If this was a straight-up spoof I’d find it funny, but that doesn’t appear to be what it is.  The story is delivered in a way that I assume is meant to be taken somewhat seriously, but then it’s riddled by little phrases and visual cues that tell me it’s all a lark.  The total product is simply too fractured to be appealing to me.  The craft of the artwork is still good, but the visual choices didn’t all work for me.  And the dialogue read more like Rick Remender cutting up with friends than it did like Frank Castle.  After the first three issues, this was a terrible disappointment.

Story: 2 - Average
Art: 3 - Good

Comments

  1. I have to totally disagree with this. I have read the Punisher since the 80’s and find this series to be the best one that deals with the Marvel Universe. Punisher War Journal is awful. The Punisher crackered some one liners but other than that this issue was not campy or comical. I don’t know how you compare this to Adam West Batman, Castle was killing people with a knife… The twist where microchip was helping the hood was interesting. Although I thought micro died at some point in a earlier series. The fact that the punsiher has a real adversary in Norman Osborn really makes this series interesting. Jigsaw should just be killed. He’s just not a top notch villain. The dumbest thing the Punisher did recently was kill stiltman, an f list villain who was basically a thief. This series has plenty of action, the art is great and there is an actual interesting story instead of the usual Punisher kills criminals.

  2. @ ConanXXXV: I appreciate your difference of opinion and I think it’s great that you enjoyed this issue as much as the last few.  I’m not inclined to debate opinions since there’s no such thing as a “right” one, but you took the time to ask a few specific questions so I’ll answer them and be off without trying to persuade you one way or another.

     

    For me, the pop-culture campy-ness starts early, on the fourth story page, when Frank Castle describes his status as “Code Weezie” and the response is “Got it, Mr. J.”  What the hell is that (other than a bizarre Jeffersons reference)?  Then we see the sequence where the Hood shoots an accountant in the hand because his business isn’t taking in enough money.  Is that bad-ass?  And he does so while spouting-off third-grade quality “funny” analogies, including references to “slightly retarded grade school kids.”  Neither funny nor compelling, but it establishes the Hood as a ridiculous caricature of a villain that would never inspire respect or loyalty from his followers.  And oh yes, he’s being served by a midget.  Dressed in a devil suit.  Ha ha.  A page later the Hood references the training his black ops team has had – the list includes interpretive jazz tap.  Next page the Hood starts telling the Grizzly that he (the Grizzly) eats people and ignores what the Grizzly has to say – this is an exchange written for a sitcom, and not a very funny one.  Then back to the Punisher, and we get Mickey Mouse jokes from a team of trained black ops soldiers in the heat of intense combat, followed by the Punisher throwing out a duck joke a la Roger-Moore-era-James-Bond.  Then the Punisher starts quoting Lynard Skynyrd songs and asking the soldiers about their musical tastes.  It culminates in the discovery a bomb in the helicopter (somehow strapped to the soldier’s leg without his noticing!) with a cute white skull painted on it.  Boom!  Since when did the Punisher start signing his work, like some whacked out serial killer?  But that’s nothing compared to the splash of Castle wearing the Avengers’ gear; that could have been a pretty cool visual – where it not for the fact that every single frickin’ piece of hardware had a skull painted on it.  It seems as if Remender tries to reign it back in at the end when the Hood gives his “disappointment speech” to microchip, but by this point the Hood’s been shown to be so silly and insane that the speech just reads wrong to me.  The Adam West Batman series took the idea of Batman and injected it with pop-culture references and took pains to show that it wasn’t taking the characters seriously.  That’s the same vibe that I got from reading this issue (thus my comparison), which I did not get from the first three issues.

     

    And I’m not sure if you’re saying that Fractions’ War Journal series that just concluded was awful (a sentiment which I wouldn’t share) or that the 90’s War Journal series was awful (with which I would agree).  However, the bottom line for me is that past series – either awful or brilliant – don’t tend to make me think more or less of current series.  I tend to look at the work before me and although nostalgia definitely colors my reading experiences the quality of the work itself always shines through.

     

    Lastly, Microchip WAS dead, but Remender directly acknowledges this through dialogue on the final page (Microchip says “I was happy dead.”) so I assume that his “resurrection” will be addressed next issue.

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