Review: The Punisher #4

I’ve been a huge fan of Matthew Rosenberg’s since his Black Mask days. The first time I read We Can Never Go Home I was converted to the cause. I loved the Punk Rock ethic employed not only by Rosenberg, but by the entire Black Mask crew. Then 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank hit the racks and I became a Rosenberg fan for life. So when his name started popping up on more and more Marvel covers needless to say life was good. Now he has become something of a go-to guy at the House of Ideas and one of the books he is absolutely killing is The Punisher.

The series is in its debut arc and Rosenberg has already placed his stamp indelibly upon Frank Castle and the world of The Punisher. This issue begins with Frank hauled up on charges and thrown into a holding cell. Now anyone knows you never corner a deadly animal and that is exactly what Frank is at this point. Longtime Punisher adversary Jigsaw returns to make Frank’s life just a bit more miserable than usual and this time he is aided by one of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, Chameleon. The forecast calls for a hail of gunfire and that’s what we get in this issue as the spent shell casings fly and the bodies stack high. Rosenberg has mastered the art of Frank’s rather economical vocabulary, never wasting a syllable when scripting the skull clad vigilante. The narrative unfolds at a white-knuckled pace, very deliberately building tension with each panel. The rivalry between Jigsaw and Castle feels more explosive than it has since Garth Ennis was handling writing duty on The Punisher books. Rosenberg writes the character much like Ennis or Jason Aaron did back in the days of Punisher Max. There is also a Tarantino-like feel to this issue, a particularly bloody shootout calls to mind Reservoir Dogs when a dying cop hands his gun off to arm Frank against his captors. It’s not the events that call the Pulp Fiction creator’s work to mind but, the intensity of the close quartered bullet buffet. There is an almost claustrophobic feel to this issue as the entire story takes place in the holding area before it is completely obliterated when a grenade is pierced by an extremely well placed shot.

The artwork has been expertly handled by former Spawn artist extraordinaire, Szymon Kudranski since the series began and for my money I hope he stays put for a long time. Kudranski did some fantastic work on Spawn but, he has tapped into something special on this Punisher book, especially this issue. He uses stitches to tie the panels together giving his pages the look of Frankenstein’s Monster in what has to be my absolute favorite page layout, maybe of the entire year. There is no doubt that Kudranski has reached the next level of his creative career as is evidenced by the mind-melting visuals on display in this issue. His photo-realistic take on the character designs as well as on the anatomy of every human form on these pages makes the violence that much more gruesome. There is a beauty to the carnage in the way that Kudranski stages the gunfight and designs every page in a catastrophic ballet, a snowglobe full of bullets, shaken to destroy the delicate bodies of their unfortunate recipients. This is top-tier work by a truly brilliant artist. The Punisher can be a divisive character, he is not a spandex clad super hero, neither is he a gun-toting psychopath, he is something in between and that can be not only hard to label, but in the wrong hands The Punisher can be used to push an agenda that has nothing to do with the character. This creative team has hit the mark with precision and intelligence. This Punisher is a man driven, a man on a mission and yes a man willing to employ extreme measures to ensure his intended outcome.

Overall, this issue is full of all the things we love about The Punisher. It’s dark as heck, even despairingly so at times, but not to the point of being misery porn. There is a hopefulness to Frank Castle that can be hard to see through the swirling gun smoke and mounting body count, but Rosenberg and Kudranski are able to show us that hope. The kind of hope that surely must exist in foxholes and trenches, in burning buildings and in the jail cell of a wrongly convicted man. There is a hope borne of desperation, in fact in thrives in the face of adversity, in spite of it and that’s the kind of hope Frank Castle will always represent to me and that’s the Frank Castle we get here. If you haven’t been reading this book I suggest grabbing all four issues and let the bodies hit the floor. 4.5/5

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(W) Matthew Rosenberg (A) Szymon Kudranski (CA) Greg Smallwood