Sunday Trade: The Punisher

The Punisher: The Slavers Written by Garth Ennis, Pencils by Leandro Fernandez, Inks by Scott Koblish, Colors by Dan Brown, Letters by Virtual Calligraphy's Randy Gentile

I give Ennis' current projects a lot of shit. Because they deserve it. Lately he's just coasting, mildly revamping old ideas and seemingly trying to out "shock" previous efforts. But his MAX run on The Punisher captured the character of Frank Castle so perfectly, Marvel honestly should have just retired it. Ennis and his various artists give a 50+ year old Punisher. One who has been killing criminals for decades, with a tally of the dead in the thousands. And you can see it in every line and scar on Frank's body. In the effecient and cold way he carries out his mission. But for this volume, these people, they spark something in Castle. Real hate...

"It was in that moment that I realized something. A dull, blurred feeling that I'd had since this whole mess began, all of a sudden crystal clear. It had been a long, long time since I hated anyone the way I hated them."

It starts with the Punisher preparing to kill yet another low-end drug dealer. But a crazed woman begging in the rain involves him in something much, much darker. A group of ex-military Baltic War vets. Ones that are traffic in women, stealing them off the streets in Eastern Europe and selling them into lives of enslaved prostitution. Before it all ends Frank will have drugged a man, cut him open and dragged out his intestines. All as a prelude to torturing him for information. He'll have beaten an unarmed woman to a pulp and thrown her out a high-story window. And he'll have covered a tied-up old man in gasoline and lit him on fire while videotaping it. And everyone one of those will be a good and righteous thing...

Mean Guns

So Ice-T gets together a whole mess of killers and crooks and tosses them into an unused prison, promises 10 million to the last 3 standing and then drops a bunch of weapons on them. There is some kind of plot involving a crime syndicate and a couple of the ostensible lead characters have some kind of vague back-story. But it isn't really important to the movie. The dialogue is mostly terrible with a few amusing moments. Generally not the ones MEANT to be amusing of course...

The cannon fodder seems to respawn so the named characters have more people to kill, bearing no real relationship to how many people seemed to be at the start. And when Christopher Lambert is your best actor (and he seems to be high half the time) you can tell where the bar is set for that...

And yet I was still mostly entertained. If it had more swearing and claims of hax I'd say it was liking watching a First Person Shooter movie...