Retro Comics Corner: Welcome Back, Frank!

Hello there! Welcome to the first in my hopefully extensive series, Retro Comics Corner, wherein I discuss graphic novels and story arcs which have become, in my opinion, classics. A quick disclaimer: I do not claim to be some sort of comic book historian, and I am writing these purely for fun and entertainment value. My goal is to provide a humorous perspective on classic stories, and if you don’t like what I have to say, I invite you to grab the nearest broom handle, break it in half (making sure of course to leave the ends nice and jagged), and enthusiastically fuck yourself with it.

That being said, let’s talk about Welcome Back, Frank!, Garth Ennis’s first run at the Punisher, and the character’s first appearance since he died and became some sort of avenging angel killing demons or something (I really didn’t pay much attention; reading that story was like watching a comic book having sex with the Bible, and then being violently raped by their offspring right in the common sense).

The Punisher as a character is deceptively complex, at least from a writer’s stand point. What I mean by that is that the concept behind him is fairly simple: his family is killed senselessly by bad people, so he decides to kill the holy bejeezus out of any bad person he can find. Murderers, rapists, mobsters, jaywalkers; you name it, he’ll eviscerate it. …That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. He’s like Charles Bronson in Death Wish, but with way less moustache.

Yeah. Sorta like that.

However, it is this simplicity that makes it so difficult to write a captivating Punisher story. After all, how many times can you write a story about a man murdering the shit out of a whole bunch of people before it gets a bit stale? That’s when you start to see story arcs like the aforementioned ‘avenging angel’ run or whatever the fuck it was called, which suck legendary amounts of penis. Thankfully, a man named Garth Ennis

exists. Ennis knows how to make shocking levels of violence and depravity fun, and is famous for injecting very subtle, very dark humorous tones into his ostensibly unfunny stories and somehow making it work. To say he revitalized interest in the Punisher is a woefully incompetent understatement. Welcome Back, Frank! was to the Punisher what Jesus is to Christians, or for you non-believers, what bacon was to the cheeseburger. Suddenly the Punisher was not only once again a credible character, he was fucking kickass.

Let’s look at a few moments from the series that epitomize why it became a classic, shall we?

“It’s bears!” WHAMFF!

I was going to do these in chronological order, but I couldn’t resist putting this one first. This moment, to me, tells you everything you need to know about this series.

While scouting Ma Gnucci for a hit, the Punisher is spotted by one of her body guards and takes one bullet in the ribs and another in the shoulder. Unarmed and losing blood, he hides out in the zoo, and proceeds to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting henchmen that are hunting him down. He feeds one to piranhas, another to a snake, but the best is when he punches a fucking polar bear in the face, causing it to attack Ma and her remaining bodyguards.

The Punisher tells PETA to fuck themselves.

And there you go. The Punisher. Punches a bear. In the face. Admit it, if you weren’t interested in this story arc before, you can’t wait to read it now.

Don’t hide behind the thin guy.

The first time we see the Punisher in a full on gun battle in this series is when he attacks Bobbie Gnucci as he’s viewing his brother’s body in the morgue. The Punisher uses the dead body of some fat guy as a human shield, and the guy he’s shooting at decides to do the same. Only he hides behind some skinny dude, and the Punisher shoots right through the body and kills the guy.

Garth Ennis has a tradition of making movie references in his stories, which as a

huge movie nerd, never ceases to fill me with glee. This sequence is a nod to the ‘human shield’ scene in Total Recall. If you’ve ever seen that movie, you know that it’s just stupid, over the top, extraordinarily violent fun. The fact that it occurs in the first issue of the series lets you know what to expect: reading this book will be a lot like watching a Schwarzenegger movie, and that is awesome.

Oh, and the best part: immediately after he does this, the Punisher walks over to Bobbie Gnucci and delivers a classic action movie one-liner. “Got a message for your people, Bobbie. Listen:” and then he blows his head off. Oh, fuck yes, the Punisher is back.

Punisher vs. Daredevil

Let’s get serious here for a second. Around the fourth issue of the series, the Punisher attempts to assassinate Dino Gnucci in Hell’s Kitchen, and of course, Daredevil shows up to try and stop him. After giving the Punisher a speech about how he has a choice and he doesn’t actually have to kill anyone, the Punisher tells him to fuck off and a fight ensues. Punisher manages to get the best of Daredevil, and ties him up with a gun taped to his hand. He tells Daredevil it’s time for him to make that choice he was talking about. Either shoot the Punisher in the head to stop him from killing Dino, or do nothing and let Dino die:

PUNISHER: If you don’t shoot you’ve got a death on your conscience. A death you could have prevented. If you do shoot, you’re a killer.

DAREDEVIL: What kind of a choice is that…?

PUNISHER: The one I make every time I pull the trigger.

After bitching and whining for a bit (I’m pretty sure ‘bitching and whining’ is one of Daredevil’s superpowers), Daredevil aims the gun at Punisher’s head, pulls the trigger and… click. No firing pin. Punisher paints a mural on the sidewalk with Dino’s thoughts and memories, and Daredevil is utterly crushed by the realization that he just attempted to commit murder.

This issue is interesting, because it shows that at the end of the day, Punisher and Daredevil are the same. They both fight crime, but they do so from a continuum. On one end you have the Punisher, killing everything bad that moves; on the other, you have Daredevil, who just likes to hit bad guys a few times and hope they learn their lesson. However, when Daredevil pulled that trigger, it proved that the points on the continuum on which the two characters reside are not fixed. The Punisher is Daredevil; he is Spiderman, he is whoever else you care to name. The only difference is that he doesn’t hide behind a wall or pretense; he doesn’t feel the need to incessantly apologize for what he is and what he does. Spiderman and Daredevil and all the rest may seem more “heroic”, but strip away all their speeches about justice and the value of human life and they’re really no different than any anti-hero you care to name. After all, these are people that are so driven by what they think is true and right that they dress up in costumes and get in fights with bad guys every day. To make a distinction between the hero and the anti-hero is therefore futile; the only difference is where they draw the line and, as this sequence shows, all it takes to push that line over to the “dark side” is the right set of circumstances.

“I hate them.”

About halfway through the series, Ma Gnucci finds out where the Punisher lives and sends everything she’s got to take him out. The Punisher of course kills everyone, but not before taking six bullets to the chest. As he’s lying in bed dying in his mousy neighbor Joan’s apartment, this exchange occurs:

JOAN: Why do you kill them? Bad people, I mean.

PUNISHER: I hate them.

JOAN: Oh. I thought it might be because you wanted to make the world safe for

good people.

And there you go. The reason the Punisher imprint is so great under the direction of Garth Ennis. The Punisher isn’t a goddamn superhero; he’s not even really an anti-hero. He just hates bad guys because of what they did to his family, and he simply likes to kill them. Even in story lines where the Punisher is helping someone, you still get the feeling that he’s only doing it because of the opportunities it affords him to kill a shit ton of bad guys. He’s basically a psychopath; luckily for us, he only murders people who deserve it. Ennis understands this, and can therefore write compelling Punisher stories.

The Russian.

The Russian is Ma Gnucci’s last-ditch effort to put the Punisher out of commission. He’s about the size of the Incredible Hulk, twice as stupid, and ambushes the Punisher out of nowhere. This is another instance of Punisher being caught off guard and unarmed, and having to improvise. After two entire issues consisting of nothing but the Punisher getting his ass handed to him, he’s finally able to kill the Russian. How?

By throwing a hot pizza at his face, and then suffocating him to death with his morbidly obese neighbor’s body.

You know, I think we can all agree that there isn’t much that’s funnier than fat jokes. Dick jokes, maybe, and punching a bear in the face, definitely, but only barely. And using a fat guy to take out an undisputed badass like the Russian? That’s just entertainment gold.

The Russian: giving "pizza face" a whole new meaning.

Detective Soap.

Finally, we have Detective Soap. Another thing about Garth Ennis is that he often will include a character in his stories that is an epic loser in every way imaginable, and they often even have some sort of physical deformity, as was mentioned in one of Mr. Burke’s earlier articles. Well, Detective Soap is definitely that. He’s a joke to the police force, and since none of the police officers actually want the Punisher caught, they put Soap on the case. He drives his first partner to suicide, falls in love with his lesbian second partner, and generally just gets shit on constantly, both literally and figuratively (at one point during Ennis’s run on the Punisher, he even unknowingly fucks his own mom. But that’s neither here nor there.)

However, Soap doesn’t have any physical deformities to speak of, and that’s the real reason I put him on here. I can just imagine Ennis, in a drunken rage, yelling at chief editor Joe Quesada: “Dammit Joe! Just let me make his nose into a dick! Or fine, I’ll put a vagina on his forehead! That way everyone will know he’s a pussy! It just wouldn’t feel right otherwise! QUIT STIFLING MEEE!!!”

And there you have it. Hopefully you enjoyed my first entry for YNTCFC. I’ll update some more in the future; hopefully fairly regularly, but realistically, whenever I damn well please.