Go Frank Go

Since I was a little kid, I've loved comic books. There's pictures of me from Christmas 1983 in a Spiderman outfit with a huge smile on my face. I think I even believed it would allow me to stick to walls like the man himself, an illusion that didn't last too long when put to the test.

Though Superman never did much for me - even as a young 'un, I could see how boring he was - issues of X-Men and Batman would be eagerly read alongside more English fare such as Beezer, the Beano (just for the Bash Street Kids) and Roy of the Rovers. These days, thanks to people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, comics are acceptable even to people pushing 30, like me. Ahem.

My own particular favourites these days would be the Question (as written by Dennis O'Neil) and the Punisher (as written by Garth Ennis). In the case of the latter, the 60 issue series under the 'Marvel Max' banner is amongst the best things I've ever read by in any medium.

But I ask myself why it is I enjoyed so. After all, Frank Castle (aka the Punisher) is essentially a ruthless killing machine who has no purpose in life but to execute criminals in all manner of brutal fashions. Through the run, more extreme moments include: removing limbs with a fire axe, gouging an eye out of a spook to get information and shooting a senile mafia Don on his 100th birthday. One particular storyline saw our Frank punish a group trafficking sex slaves in particularly gruesome fashion, including some amateur stomach surgery.

So why do I read these comics with glee? Do I enjoy seeing such bad (albeit fictional) people suffer their comeuppance in such a way? Perhaps I like to think of the ethics of what the Punisher does. Is he a psychopath? It's made clear throughout that Castle takes extreme care to ensure innocent civilians are never harmed by his actions and the times he is apprehended by police, he merely administers a mild beating to ensure his escape.

Regardless: what Ennis does do, as he did with his also-excellent 'Preacher' series, is give us a real insight into the character of Frank Castle. Unlike with most comics, Frank has aged - he's a Vietnam vet moving closer to 60, who's spent over 30 years on his self-perpetuating war. He sees no end in sight and doesn't look for one, fighting Russian gangs, the Mafia and ex-IRA members with equal deadly force.

Ennis also tied up two ends of Castle's life with the one-shot books 'Born' and 'The End'. The former shows us him in Vietnam, through the eyes of a young soldier who sees Captain Castle as his only way out of the hell of war. The latter shows him in a post-apocalyptic New York, searching for a cabal of figures hidden from the destruction who he believes responsible for what happened. Despite pleas from the group that they remain the only chance for humanity to emerge from the chaos and ashes, Frank dispatches them all with the justification of "The human race. You've seen what that leads to".

So, yes. As much as the Punisher can be seen as an extreme right-wing reaction to problems of crime and social disorder, Ennis never lets him slip into parody. Particularly enjoyable to me was an episode that saw our man go after uber-capitalists looking to profit from shutting electricity down in vital areas of Floria, thereby causing deaths in hospitals and the like. Frank's solution to these sharks is to... well... feed them to the sharks.

Punisher Max #1-60 deserves to be filled alongside the likes of 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' as a great piece of storytelling. Anyone with an interest in (very) dark fiction would do well to check it out.