Comic Book Review | PunisherMAX Vol. III: Castle and Vol. IV: Homeless

This is the end, my friends.

In the first half of PunisherMAX - collected in the trade paperbacks Kingpin and Bullseye, which I reviewed together here - Scalped's Jason Aaron impressed the hell out of me with his willingness to develop, on a fundamental level, a classic Marvel character that had been treading water for decades. All of a sudden there were stakes again. Heroes and villains alike, re-envisioned as if they existed in the real world rather than some impenetrable, comic-book bubble. And in the real world, narrative logic often fails to prevail. Good people suffer for nothing. Bad people get away with it, whatever it is, all the goddamned time. Shit happens, we say.

Well, shit happens on almost every page of PunisherMAX, and let me tell you this thing: very little of it is good. But bloody as it is, and unremittingly grim, it's also, equally, absolutely fucking fantastic. If I had thought - for a single, solitary second - that this lamentably limited series couldn't get any better, I'd be eating my words as we speak. Because it can. Because it does. But after Kingpin and Bullseye, I had good reason to expect the best.

Castle, for its part, picks up some time after Bullseye's shocking conclusion, with our bloody, broken and seemingly beaten anti-hero behind bars at last. After "punishing" a corrupt cop and being caught assaulting the Kingpin's impenetrable skyscraper, Frank finds himself locked up in a maximum security prison, surrounded by criminals on all sides... but with no way to make them pay! Instead, he turns inwards, remembering his family, and the sadistic circumstances by which he came to lose them.

Oddly, then, this third volume - of a total of four - is essentially a retelling of The Punisher's origin story, yet ye need not fear: it is not, not by any stretch, the tragic but by now over-familiar origin story fans of the franchise know to the last letter. Superficially, I suppose, the exact same things happen: after a career of killing remarkable even amidst the terrible violence in Vietnam, Frank returns home to New York City, only to find his family caught in the crossfire of a mob shoot-out in Central Park. As they bleed out in his arms one after the other after the other, to add insult to injury, The Punisher takes shape in Frank's fast-hardening heart.

However, where before Frank Castle was a victim of all this, fundamentally a family man driven to a dark place by the wickedness visited upon his nearest and dearest, PunisherMAX isn't so sure of his innocence. The continuity of Aaron's retcon is infinitely more perverse than the clear-cut conflict between the forces of good and the legions of evil that birthed The Punisher in the first. I won't give the game away, but let's say that in a very real sense, Castle implicates Frank in the deaths that have made him the murderer he is.

And Castle is just the calm before the storm, because of course Aaron isn't content to simply lock up The Punisher to rot, and throw away the keys. In Homeless, the fourth and final trade paperback collecting this stunning story arc - indeed the complete series - he breaks out of jail (with some surprising assistance, as it transpires) to wage one last on his arch-enemy: the so-called Kingpin of crime. But this time, they'll fight to the death. By the end, only one man will be left standing... and even then, no-one's truly safe in this series.

And I really do mean no-one.

If Kingpin and Bullseye were surgical strikes of a sort, these two concluding trades represent shock and awe on an epic yet still intimate scale. One senses Aaron is holding nothing back, and the rewards wrought by this no-holds-barred attitude are truly awesome, meanwhile Steve Dillion has never in recent memory been better, or ballsier. With amazing layouts and marvelous clarity, he captures the ugliness of Aaron's bastard cast of characters and the city they lay waste to like no other artist could. 

This, thus, is definitive. Never mind Garth Ennis' hallowed run on The Punisher under the Marvel Knights umbrella: PunisherMAX by Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon takes the cake, the pastry... the very dough, damn it. It's so incredibly good that I'm actually sort of bowled over that it exists to being with. After all, it ends; a real rarity in comic books — as discussed in my review of the first two trades. And though The Punisher will live on in other forms - there's already a separate ongoing series, penned by Queen and Country's Greg Rucka... which I'll probably check out eventually - it's hella hard to imagine how anything else bearing the brand at hand could live up to PunisherMAX's unforgettable finale.

I don't care if you've never given a crap about this character. PunisherMAX will make you care. Like so many of Frank Castle's unwitting targets, in fact, you'll have no choice in the matter. Unlikely as it sounds, PunisherMAX is as groundbreaking in its way as any of the medium's other high watermarks. And let's face it: Watchmen isn't half as much fun.

Comic Book Review | PunisherMAX Vol. I: Kingpin and Vol. II: Bullseye

The Punisher is Frank Castle, a Vietnam vet who witnessed the brutal slaying of his wife and children in Central Park... collateral damage in the mob's war on law. Haunted by his horrific history, and reeling from this latest, greatest loss, Frank Castle grieved as only a born killer could: he got himself a long leather trenchcoat, a shirt with a sweet skull on, some guns, and murdered his family's murderers.

Since then, I suppose he's mostly been keeping up appearances. Killing, kidnapping, torturing and extorting his way to the top of the food chain, such as it is in the hive of scum and villainy that is New York City... as per The Punisher, at least.

Now it's not a bad origin story, that - there are certainly many, many worse ones - but it's hardly tailor-made for a medium in which codes of conduct and content have historically restricted creativity. No surprise, then, that The Punisher has been badly mishandled in the years since its inception in the 70s. 

Which isn't to say I've steered clear of it, as perhaps I should have. Oh no. In my younger years, during my first fling with comic books, I read rather a lot of The Punisher. What can I say? In those halcyon days, bargain bins everywhere overflowed with coffee-stained copies of War Journal -- perfectly price to match my dinner money, it seemed to me. And I didn't want dinner. I wanted comics! And by god, I got comics.

Obviously not the ones I should have, because I lost my a lot of my love for the medium thereafter, and perhaps that was in part because of The Punisher. Now that I've been pulled back in, it made a certain amount of sense to see whether it had changed, or simply stayed the same. And I can hardly say how glad I am to have given this character another chance.

Not coincidentally, PunisherMAX concluded just last month, after a 22-issue run -- a fact that makes my heart abstractly glad. I like to be sure the things I begin will end eventually, and in comics that's rarely the case. To know that this story has been told on its own terms from one end to the other, to great critical acclaim to boot, thus without any obvious intrusions either... I'll admit it: starting in on the first collected volume of the series, I had - of all things - hope.

Well I've no hope now, but not because PunisherMAX disappointed me in any sense. I've no hope because this is a truly hopeless story: bleak as the inner city and black as long knives at night. But for all that... brilliant. PunisherMAX is a whiplash-fast, smartly characterised comic book, finely toned and heroically honed: Jason Aaron's scripts are tight but not terse, explicit without seeming attention-seeking, and paced perfectly.

Each of PunisherMAX's four story arcs runs for five or six issues, and chronicles, in effect, an origin. In the first, collected in Kingpin, we learn of the rise and rise of the fabled boss of mob bosses. Wilson Fisk means to make the mantle his own, and as he goes from convict to henchman to criminal mastermind, he leaves a bloody trail in his whale's wake that The Punisher cannot bring himself to believe. Fisk's rapid ascension is not without its own cost, of course, and initially Aaron is as interested in this - in the tragedy of the Kingpin - as he is in his creaky old anti-hero, which gives the narrative an excellent sense of balance.

This impression persists in PunisherMAX Vol. II: Bullseye, which brings the master assassin into the fold, under the Kingpin's wing. But Bullseye, being a bit of a lunatic - and that's putting it politely - doesn't just want to kill Frank Castle: first, he has to understand him. Before putting finger to trigger, Bullseye intends to get inside his head, the better to see what makes this vigilante tick. Meantime, The Punisher has a whole lot of catching up to do. His skepticism about the existence of a kingpin of crime has meant he's late late late to a very important date, and now that there's no doubting it, it's practically impossible to get near Fisk.

Among the most admirable aspects of this eminently accessible series is its structure. Kingpin is a tale unto itself - as is Bullseye - but one lays the foundations for the other, and the other builds atop the last chapter's narrative in readiness for the next. The only sensible place to jump on board is with the first  collected volume, but from there on out PunisherMAX doesn't stop, and to my point: you won't want it to.

All these letters later, it occurs to me that I haven't even mentioned the art of PunisherMAX. That's my bad entirely, because it's anything but. Assisting Jason Aaron through these two trades - and indeed the two concluding volumes to come - is Garth Ennis co-conspirator Steve Dillon, whose clear and present pencils took me back to the good old days. Of Preacher, I mean. More meaningfully, Dillon has a preexisting history with The Punisher, and it's evidenced in every panel he and the other iconic characters that figure into this series appear in. Dillon's layouts are plain yet perfectly poised, whilst his Frank Castle is grizzled and relentlessly grim. Exactly what you'd want, in short.

The shocking conclusion of Bullseye falls exactly halfway through the whole run of Jason Aaron's PunisherMAX, and much as I can get behind a good ending at the right time rather than a sudden conclusion well after the fact, at the moment I don't want this series to be over ever. But there's no going back now, and that's probably for the best, because without the worry that this series will have to sustain itself indefinitely, the creators can truly let loose. Thus, the first half of PunisherMAX is incredible - powerful, exhilarating and ambitious from the offing - and I can't imagine it going out with anything less than an almighty bang.