The Punisher #37

Written by Garth Ennis

Pencils by Leandro Fernandez

Cover by Tim Bradstreet

 

The return of Leandro Fernandez on pencils also heralds the return of Rawlins, yet again. If you haven’t been reading the Punisher since its MAX re-launch then you might not know of the rat son of a bitch Rawlins who’s been one of the only recurring characters throughout the series. The other, O’Brien, is the closest thing to a love interest Frank (the Punisher) Castle’s ever had. His dead wife doesn’t count because she was never in the story as a character, just a prop to motivate Frank to kill.

 

By nature of the concept, the Punisher doesn’t have a large recurring cast, so the few who do, need to be developed well, given some time to grow and panel space to do it in. To that effect, we’ve actually not gotten a lot out of O’Brien or Rawlins. Both are still just characters defined by their relationship to Castle. Hopefully this story arc will begin to change all that. Rawlins we don’t really need to know too much about but O’Brien, as a love interest, is desperately in need of some more depth.

 

Reading this comic, one may skip over Ennis’ subtle and brilliant use of standard literary and comic conventions. He writes well enough to have Rawlins give us a quick synopsis about the past events without making it seem either forced or like we’re reading the exposition we are. The story so far begins with the first story arc of this whole MAX series where Punisher was captured by the C.I.A. under the leadership of Rawlins in hopes that he’d go fight ‘wars’ for them overseas. He said no. O’Brien was a part of the C.I.A. team and had an unhealthy attraction to Castle.

 

Rawlins and O’Brien show up several times throughout the series, but the two things you need to know is that Rawlins did some illegal things for the C.I.A. and Castle used this information to blackmail the C.I.A. into leaving him alone. Two, that O’Brien went rogue from the C.I.A. to help Castle blackmail them, and then she and Castle had the only thing resembling a relationship, built upon their shared need for violence and various other neuroses. One other thing, Castle did do one overseas venture for the military where he infiltrated a Russian missile silo and destroyed a chemical weapon there. This pissed off the Russian General Zakharov, who is the primary manipulator for this current story arc.

 

Now that everyone is caught up, let’s get on with the current story—Rawlins goes to see Zakharov about killing the Punisher, he’s out for revenge after he got fired from the C.I.A. because of the blackmail incident. His plan is to capture the still rogue O’Brien (who’s fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan, and I do mean ‘fighting’ in a literal sense), which is the only person alive Castle might go overseas to help save. Not much more to it at this point.

 

Through a roundabout way, Castle learns that something odd is going on with the Russian Mafia. Then O’Brien gets captured by what appears to be either Australian or British operatives (one of them says ‘mate,’ *shrugs*). I trust Ennis by now to make sure the plot is sufficiently complex and unpredictable—O’Brien is as likely to die by the end as she is to be incarcerated or maimed or raped or all of the above.

 

A lot of people are asking how long Ennis can keep this all up. My only response is a simple one—as long as he can keep writing genuinely interesting situations, small in scale but key to creating the rich texture of the comic’s story, then the comic will still be worth reading. No one doubts Ennis’ ability to keep telling large tales, but how many of these little criminal based asides does he have in him.

 

Take this issue’s scene where the Punisher makes a deal with a low level gang member so he can meet and kill the hard to reach gang leader. The mechanics of it aren’t new, we’ve seen the Punisher let himself get caught a million times before, but the characters themselves are unique, instantly intriguing, that drive the mechanics along. The gang leader, bleeding out on the cement, realizing his fatal error in not killing the Punisher right away as he crawls and curses is incredibly entertaining. Write on Ennis, write on.

 

Rating - 9