Written by JASON AARON Penciled by STEVE DILLON Cover by DAVE JOHNSON
JASON AARON'S and STEVE DILLON'S seminal run on PUNISHERMAX comes to an end! DO NOT MISS the Punisher story you'd never thought you'd read! 32 PGS.
Date Available: 02/08/2012
BONUS REVIEW by Matt Streets
When Garth Ennis wrote his seminal Punisher series “Welcome Back Frank”, he changed the character forever. Gone were the silly vans, the mystic nonsense, the extreme reactionary violence (all those poor, dead jaywalkers). It was back to basics Punisher: methodically wiping out street crime from the ground up, laced with the Ennis’ wicked black humor. As the series meandered into a lengthy Marvel Knights ongoing (including a hilarious run-in with Wolverine and an army of angry amputees), the character seemed once again to lose focus, and Ennis knew it.
So he once again rebooted the character under Marvel’s MAX imprint with a new series simply called The Punisher. No humor, no silly villains (until Barracuda at least), just brutal, unforgiving violence against the most despicable people in our society. Gun runners, human traffickers, war profiteers, the ever-present Mafia, and even white-collar criminals all came between Frank’s crosshairs, and for 60 straight issues, the comic racks ran crimson with red ink. And to tie it all together, Ennis created the brilliant 4 issue mini-series “Punisher: Born”, which showed us Frank Castle’s time in Vietnam, and showed the psychological damage the war did to him, paving the way for what was to come.
To me, this Garth Ennis run was the ultimate take on the Punisher, and it seemed that there nothing more that could be intelligently said about the character. When Marvel announced they were AGAIN rebooting the character, I was skeptical, yet hopeful that my guys Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon (a Punisher vet himself), could get the job done.
And that brings us to Punishermax #22, the final issue of this unbelievable run, and the end of Frank Castle’s Marvel Max existence. Though broken up into 4 and 5 issue arcs, this was really just one epic story of an aging Punisher taking on new crime boss Wilson Fisk and his increasingly lethal list of psychotic henchmen. Here, Aaron manages to do the impossible: build off Ennis’ near-perfect Punisher run, make it even MORE violent and disturbing, AND dig even deeper into the main nightmare of Frank’s life, the massacre of his family in Central Park. The brilliance of Aaron’s run is that besides showing the brutal physical toll that this endless war on crime has taken on Frank, he also delves deep into Frank’s psyche, and shows that the mental cost of all this violence is perhaps the most painful wound of all.
Capping both Punisher Max series are appearances by a grizzled Nick Fury, the only man who ever fully understood Frank Castle, and the private torments that drove him. These are men born of war and blood, and as they share a beer at the end of this issue, the feeling is not one of closure, but resignation over the years of violence and loss.
