Random Reviews- The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe

Random Reviews

The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe

I hate this comic. I hate it so much I can't think of a witty little opening paragraph.

If I could, I'd gather every existing copy and the entire creative team in a building and bring it down on top of them.

Introduction

Todays' subject is the inaugural Marvel work by one of the more controversial names in comics, Garth Ennis. Simply put, Garth Ennis hates superheroes. That's not a personal judgement made by me, it's a known fact that he readily admits to- the man wrote a comic about a superhero prostitute for crying out loud. I've not read a lot of his work, but from what I've heard, superheroes are depicted as well-meaning bumbling idiots at best and depraved rapists with no respect for human life at worst. Some people enjoy this irreverent take on the material, others utterly hate it. I personally don't have an opinion- like I said I've barely read anything he's written, and anyway, I prefer to judge each work on it's own merits without any preconceptions about the author- everyone has one bad story in them after all. Of course, judged on it's own merits, this comic is pure crap.

As you can probably tell from the title, this is a non-canon story set in an alternate universe. It's technically a "What If?", the Marvel equivalent of an Elseworlds. I should mention that this was created in 1995, before Garth Ennis became famous and before he had anywhere near the amount of star power he has today. 

It's important you bear that in mind because I have no idea how this got through the door without a big-name creator behind it. According to Wikipedia, Marvel released it quietly and nobody noticed until Garth had some name recognition years later, but if they were that ashamed then why even bother?

If you're wondering why I've only mentioned the creator and not the creation itself, it's because there's really no introduction I can give to the comic except that it's exactly what it sounds like, and it's absolute shite.

Plot

Our story begins in Hell's Kitchen, where a group of bullies beat up a young Matt Murdock, before being chased off by Frank Castle. I'm not a fan of either character but I'm pretty sure they didn't know each other as kids. However, this one-page flashback is important, because it's the only thing that makes Daredevil's behavior later in the book even remotely understandable.

The story really begins in the present day (well, 1995 anyway), where the Avengers and the X-Men are fighting off an alien invasion in Central Park. Frank Castle, in this world a SWAT officer, races towards the park because his family are there. Frank arrives just after the battle, where Daredevil is berating Cyclops and Captain America for the fact that a woman and two children (Frank's family) were killed in the crossfire. This is extremely stupid and Daredevil will continue to be stupid throughout the comic. 

Captain America points out that the invasion happened much too fast for them to evacuate the park, and Cyclops makes the point that casualties are unavoidable in a crossfire- they are right, Daredevil is wrong. I enjoy a good superhero battle as much as anyone, but I am not naïve enough to think that nobody gets hurt by a stray blast or falling rubble- several comics and spin-off media have made it very clear that people do die in these conflicts, and I refuse to believe that this is the first time it has happened or the first time that Daredevil has witnessed it. It's called collateral damage, it's tragic yes, but it's unavoidable and better than the alternative- what would Daredevil have had them do exactly? Take the time to evacuate the park? All that would have done is allowed more innocents to get hurt as the aliens rampaged unopposed, and without prompt response the fight could have spilled out into the city where even more people would have died. It's a testament to the heroes' competence that the fight was contained within Central Park and only three people died, especially when you consider that the aliens involved were the Brood, which are basically Xenomorphs only much worse.

Anyway, Frank snaps and guns down most of the heroes- this is the only time that Frank kills someone and it's even slightly believable, since it's mostly the non-powered heroes that actually die, whereas the guys who should be able to survive or avoid getting hit by a bullet survive. Garth Ennis will not pay us that courtesy later. Frank is naturally arrested and Matt Murdock acts as his attorney. Yes, you read that correctly- Matt Murdock, the guy who only defends people he knows to be innocent, is defending the man who shot several people right in front of him. This will be a recurring theme; Daredevil being so blinded by a single act of childhood kindness by a man he hasn't seen in decades, that he's willing to totally abandon his entire code of ethics and aid a mass murderer. Obviously everyone is entitled to legal representation, but probably not by a man who A- witnessed it, and B- knew the victims, and C- never defends the guilty as a point of principle; Murdock isn't just ignoring his own morality, but legal ethics for the sake of a man who once stopped people picking on him.

Naturally Frank is sentenced to life imprisonment at Ryker's Island. However, in transit he's dropped off by bribed guards at the home of a wealthy disfigured man named Kesselring, who leads a group of other people injured in super-battles. He offers to equip and fund Frank on a deranged crusade against every single superhero and villain in the Marvel Universe; presumably including the ones immune to bullets, the immortals, and the ones with godlike abilities. Frank agrees.

At some undetermined point in the future, Spiderman and Venom are fighting in the sewers, when Frank hits them both with barbed tasers and shoots them both in the head. Why Spiderman, Marvel's flagship character?

That's why I chose a  beloved pop-culture icon for my dumbass revenge comic

This marks a trend in the comic as the deaths become increasingly sudden, pointless and with total disregard for the established rules of the Marvel Universe, as we see with Frank's next kill- the Hulk. Oh yes. How does he manage that you ask? He shoots Bruce Banner in the head. Just shoots him. For those of you who didn't see The Avengers or has never read a Hulk comic, if Bruce Banner is hurt, he will immediately and automatically transform into the Hulk to heal- especially if the wound would normally be fatal. They just don't care, do they? They don't give a damn about making this seem believable or plausible in any way, they don't even have the courtesy to give us some bullshit excuse as to how that should work- an adrenal inhibitor, anti-gamma rays, literally anything would have been better than this.

Frank then attacks Kingpins' base, killing his way up a skyscraper, before eventually murdering the Kingpin, who I should mention, survives a hail of bullets before being taken out by a headshot at point-blank range, whereas the freaking Hulk was taken out with a single shot. Frank is recaptured and again his rich friend has him released. Okay, if a man was imprisoned for murdering several superheroes, was broken out in extremely suspicious circumstances, and went on to kill several more, I don't think I'd send him to the same prison as before, and I think I'd launch a very thorough investigation into said prison and it's staff, because clearly someone is on the take from somebody else. Kesselring should have been caught by now, is everyone in this comic a moron?

Frank parachutes into Latveria, planning to assassinate Doctor Doom. Naturally he gets his arse handed to him (offscreen). Until he pulls out a "magnetic mine" he stole from the Kingpin, which I'm pretty sure the police would have confiscated and handed over to SHIELD when he was re-arrested, and detonates it on Doom's head. This borderline-magical device sends out a feedback wave the totally annihilates every single Doombot, and fries Doom's armour, and then Punsiher beats him to death with a hammer. Garth Ennis expects us to believe that Doctor Doom, one of the most dangerous villains and greatest geniuses alive, did not include EMP shielding in any of his technology. Also, I'm pretty sure there are a few human soldiers and servants in Latveria, not just  robots, so how come none of them are shooting the Punisher right now? 

Punisher and his genius sidekick steal a bunch of high-tech sci-fi weaponry from Doom's lab that will never be seen again, since Frank will be using machine guns for the rest of the story. They also steal a nuke, and, get this- fire it at the moon, where every single mutant hero and villain has gathered for a single battle. Yes, all the mutant villains: including the ones that hate and have tried to kill each other. I would question the logic of this situation, and the fact that several of the people should probably have survived or had some means of escape, but why bother at this point. Also, Frank and his sidekick react to this horrific act of mass murder with mild amusement.

Genocide! Yayyy!

He then goes to fight and kill Wolverine, who he'd sent in a wild goose chase to Japan. Needless to say the death is stupid and contrived- he stabs Wolverine in the throat, then sticks him in the chest- with his own claws no less, and throws him at an electrical transformer which completely burns away all soft tissues on his body, leaving only his skeleton. The English language does not contain a word that can describe just how idiotic this is: first of all, Wolverine has survived things much worse than electrocution- the guy had the metal ripped out of his body, was cut in half and was set on fire; second, I'm not a doctor or an electrical engineer, but I'm almost certain that the current flowing through a transformer- while definitely enough to kill you- is not enough to reduce every scrap of flesh on a man's body to ash, even if his skeleton is coated in metal; and finally- that's how you kill Wolverine? One of the biggest badasses and most popular comic book characters of all time? Really? Was anyone even trying, or did they just write "Punisher kills some guy" on a bar napkin?

The last time something like this happened it was because he was blasted by a giant, mutant-killing robot .
I cannot stress enough how dumb this is.

Frank goes on a killing spree, demonstrated by him firing his guns in front of a wall of faces of Marvel characters such as Black Panther and Nick Fury, while his bosses sing his praises in panels off to the side. I should mention that Kesselring says that Frank "has a knack for choosing just the right weapon for any given situation", when we have only seen him use anything except a knife or a gun a grand total of once. As well as this, the faces of Frank's presumed victims include the Thing (bulletproof), Vision (who can become either completely indestructible or intangible at will), and Ghost Rider (who is empowered by Mephisto himself). Obviously Garth couldn't think of any remotely believable way Frank could kill people like that and decided to not even try.

We abruptly cut back to Frank in jail. In fact, all the cuts have been abrupt- there are no narration captions or any other kind of dialogue to suggest how much time is taking place between scenes. The whole thing could be taking place over the course of years or a week, I genuinely cannot tell. There is dialogue that implies Frank has been repeatedly re-arrested and broken out again, but that's all it is- implied, this is incredibly lazy and getting a little annoying. Anyway, he's talking to Murdock, who for some inexplicable reason is still his lawyer- he's not court appointed, he's not being paid by Kesslering, he's doing this voluntarily to help a man who did one nice thing for him years ago. Murdock demonstrates just how absolutely idiotic he is by encouraging the murderous sociopath to give up before it's too late. Frank replies it's already too late because he's kill five hundred people, and... WHAT?

FIVE! HUNDRED! PEOPLE! Including two foreign heads of state (Doom and Black Panther), and the director of SHIELD. At that point I think the Federal government would step in to bring the hammer down on this bastard- he should be in Pelican Bay spending 23 hours a day in a concrete box, he should be on death row, he should be extradited to the countries whose monarchs he murdered. Kesselring has officially become a Deus Ex Machina, no-one has enough money to keep getting this monster out. The Punisher is by now a full-on supervillain, and for a story about a villain to work; you need to sympathise with him, or at the very least like him, you need to want to see him win. I want to see Punisher be eaten alive from the inside by lizards, I hate him that much!

Three months later (a narration caption, my God!), Frank ignominiously kills Captain America with, what else, a bullet to the head and I don't even care anymore. This apparently leaves Daredevil the only superhuman on Earth (yes really). Frank goes back to base and kills Kesselring when he tells Frank that he wants him to kill any more superbeings that are born or develop powers in the future which, for some inexplicable reason, Frank doesn't want to do. You could argue it's because none of them would have been involved in his family's death, but neither did most of the people he's killed anyway.

Frank goes to Hell's Kitchen and meets Daredevil. They have a fight lasting twice as long as any other fight in the book. Frank stabs Daredevil in the chest and Daredevil takes of his mask. Horrified by the revelation that the people he's been killing are actual people, Frank blows his own brains out about forty pages too late.

Conclusion

Like I said, I've not read a lot of Garth Ennis' work, but what I have read had a certain level of humor to it, you got the impression that it wasn't supposed to be taken too seriously. But this has no humour, no irony, no hint that this was intended as anything other than one man's lazily written tirade against an entire genre. This isn't satire, this isn't deconstruction; it's just pure, spiteful, bile-filled hatred. 

The main character is a deranged killer and borderline Mary Sue with the ease he takes down vastly smarter and more powerful opponents, Daredevil is an absolute moron, nothing makes any kind of sense, and the writing is some of the laziest I've seen outside of fanfiction.

The concept of the Punisher going on a murderous rampage against the entire Marvel roster is stupid and stillborn from the start, but the story itself  had some halfway decent ideas- showing the human cost of superhero battles, and showing how a man who loses his family to one of these battles could come to blame superheroes. That could have made for the origin of a sympathetic villain, or a oneshot story focussing on a support group of people injured in super-battles could have been genuinely interesting.

Instead they decided to have their homicidal maniac of a protagonist slaughter their iconic characters in the most disrespectful and anti-climactic ways possible, that displays absolute contempt not only for the Marvel Universe, it's history and it's characters- but it's fans. Garth Ennis hates superheroes, and he clearly doesn't give a damn about anyone who enjoys them, the obvious lack of effort he put in is evidence enough. 

I can only assume the editor took one look at the script and decided to let it through anyway because Garth really needed a paycheck, and hey, who cares if it's crap, nobody will read it, it's not like this Ennis kid will ever be worth anything.

0.5/5, avoid at all costs, destroy if given the opportunity.