A couple more things about Punisher: Confederacy of Dunces (Plus a little bit about "Welcome Back, Frank)

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, about Marvel's new trade collection of Punisher: Confederacy of Dunces, there were a few other aspects I thought were of some interest that I just couldn't quite fit comfortably there. So, I wanted to mention them here. 

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Three jokes I don't think Marvel would have published if these issues had come out today:

1.) Transgressive of transphobic? Ennis has a reputation for pushing the envelope (an understatement if ever there was one), and this means his jokes are often crass, tasteless and seem calculated to offend...jokes of the "I can't believe they actually did that!" variety. 

Of the works of Ennis' that I've read, this often includes him "punching down", making jokes about out groups or particular social minorities, jokes on subjects that aren't generally considered fair game...especially today (Think jokes about overweight people, alcoholism, the homeless, gay panic, etc.)

I obviously can't say if Ennis makes these jokes because he's trying to be intentionally transgressive and attemping to shock or offend his audience—certainly a book like The Punisher is full of over-the-top material—or if he sincerely thinks this stuff is funny, and it therefore reflects his own personal beliefs.

Regardless, a lot of his jokes from the '90s and '00s seem particularly cringe-inducing today. I noticed three in "Confederacy of Dunces" which I have a hard time imagining Marvel keeping in were they publishing the series anew today, rather than collecting a modern classic. 

The first is above. It comes on a page that introduces the perpetual loser Soap into this particular arc, a character whom Ennis is constantly heaping various misfortunes and indignities on, as well as the sarcastic bartender Kevin, who always belittles and bullies Soap, and their relationship to one another. The page also reminds readers of Soap's current relationship with The Punisher, who enters two panels after the one above ("Here's your pal to cheer ya up; maybe he's heard some jokes or somethin'," Kevin says when he notices The Punisher enter the bar to talk to Soap. "Though I seriously feckin' doubt it...").

Now the panel before the one I posted above has Soap seated at the bar, holding his face in his hands, and saying to Kevin, "I've made another of my terrible mistakes..."

Kevin's dialogue above alludes to that mistake and implies that Soap hooked up with a woman that was actually "a fella." 

Now, it's been so long since I read this Punisher run, in full, I can't recall if this refers to something that happened on-panel in the previous issue, or something off-panel, brought up only to characterize Soap and Kevin and remind readers of their relationship.

Therefore, I don't know if the implication is that Soap had an encounter with a transwoman, or a transvestite or, this being an Ennis comic, simply a man dressed like a woman for no particular reason. But regardless, the scene certainly evokes the harmful "trap" stereotype so often applied to transwomen. 

And it certainly further implies that a straight man being intimate with a transwoman is, well, the dialogue has Soap talking of "the horror, the humiliation, the endless misery" of his life. 

2.) "Homo!" Another Soap gag. While waiting for the bar to open so he can spend his day drinking and being insulted by Kevin, Soap is approached by some off-brand Girl Scouts (Who seem to be on the older side, as they are nearly as tall as Soap himself).

He offers to buy a box of the cookies they are selling, and when one responds sarcastically ("Just the one?...Oh, boy. Last of the big friggin' spenders"), Soap changes his mind and starts to lecture her on her attitude. She kicks him in the balls and, when he's on the ground, the three Girl Scouts all start kicking him and yelling at him: "Keep your stinkin' money, fat boy!" and "Friggin' pervert tried to touch us!" and, well, what you see in the close-up above. 

I was frankly pretty surprised to see the word "Homo!" in there. It's a word I heard bandied about quite a bit when I was in school—that is, in the '80s and '90s—along with the R-slur, the F-slur and "gay"-to-mean-"lame", but I haven't really heard since. (In fact, I only seem to see it used online now in the context of the phrase "no homo", always used sarcastically to make fun of gay panic.)

Would teenagers in 2004 been shouting it...? I don't know. But I'm pretty damn certain teenagers in a Marvel comic published in 2026 would not. ("Bastard" also sounds more like a thing an Ennis character would say than a 21st century teenage girl would say, doesn't it...?)

3.) "Bitch?" Finally, in the penultimate issue of the arc, The Punisher is trying to goad the captive and amnesiac Bruce Banner into transforming into The Hulk, in the hopes of using him as a weapon against the superheroes who have teamed up to take him down. 

He initially does so by slapping Banner around for a few panels and, once Frank has insulted Banner and smashed his face against a wall, Banner seems to remember exactly who he is and realize what's about to happen. 

As you can see above, he urges The Punisher to run but, instead of doing so, The Punisher kicks him in the balls and calls him a "bitch." This finally turns Banner's face green and seems to be what pushes him over the edge.

Again, this is a word I heard used as an insult a lot growing up, but less and less as I joined the adult world. Is this because adults generally don't use it like that, or because the word itself is no longer used as much, given that it seems more popularly understood to have misogynistic connotations in addition to the negative ones it's always had...?

Again, I don't know. Obviously, Ennis has Frank using it to try to piss of Banner as much as possible, so, in this context, I don't think it's meant to imply that Frank Castle is the sort of guy who might use the word, but it's telling that it works on Banner, isn't it?

Anyway, another line of dialogue I have a hard time imagining Marvel printing today.

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Can we talk about Spider-Man's spider-sense for a moment...? I confess that I've never quite understood exactly how it was meant to work. 

Wikipedia calls it a "precognitive" ability and says he can use it to sense danger. In the newspaper comic strips and the Spider-Man comics I've read, I generally see it used as a sort of vague, early sense that something's not quite right, usually draws with wiggly lines emanating from Peter Parker's face, which will sometimes be drawn with the mask symbolically over half his face.

As to how exactly it works, it seems to vary from writer to writer and story to story, depending on what the writer wants to happen in a particular scene. One would think it would make it impossible for an enemy to strike Spider-Man—or at least very, very hard to do so—but he seems to get punched, kicked, zapped, whacked by mechanical tentacles and blown up with pumpkin bombs on the regular.

Anyway, I find myself wondering specifically how it works because of a scene in "Confederacy of Dunces," wherein The Punisher lures Spider-Man into a trap.

During "Round Two" of his battle against Spidey, Daredevil and Wolverine, The Punisher has prepared ways to temporarily neutralize each of them. 

When it comes to tackling Spider-Man, who out-powers him in every conceivable way, Frank waits for Spider-Man to come after him in a room which he had previously wired with mines and pressure plates. As soon as Spidey enters the darkened room, his right foot breaks through one of the boards and lands on a pressure plate. Frank flicks the light on and makes sure that Spider-Man knows the parameters of the trap before leaving him, taking Spider-Man out of the fight until he can somehow extract himself from the trap.

So, my question: Would this work?  

Or would Spider-Man's spidey-sense have warned him of the presence of the mines and pressure plates in the floor, and he could have thus used it to navigate the room without stepping on any of them?

Now, to complicate the question. While The Punisher is willing to fight the superheroes in order to preserve his own freedom, he doesn't actually want to kill any of them, and, in fact, goes to great lengths not to kill them (This because while they may act as his adversaries here, they're not actually evil people in the way that his victims are; in this particular arc, Ennis has The Punisher detail the horrific crimes of the men in a room he has just gunned down, demonstrating to readers just how bad these bad guys actually are and, one assumes, help ensure that readers don't feel too badly for Frank's victims).

That means that the pressure plates and mines aren't really meant to go off at all and are a just a feint to trick Spider-Man into staying put and not joining the fight. Spider-Man is doubtful of this, even when Daredevil explains it to him:

Remember what I told you: Castle wont' take an innocent life. He'll beat us and cripple us and terrorize us, but he won't go all out to kill us.

All he wanted to do here was take you out of the fight. Those mines have no explosive in them, or they're not wired to the detonator pad, or something.

But they will not go off when you lift up your foot.

And, of course, he's right.

So, did Spider-Man's spider-sense not warn him of the presence of the pressure plate and the mines because they didn't pose a real danger, and thus they didn't trigger his spidey-sense?

And, if that were the case, wouldn't Spidey know that the mines didn't pose a real threat, or nah?

One more complication: Note that last panel above. Artist John McCrea draws wiggly lines emanating from half of Spider-Man's face, which is how his spidey-sense going off is always depicted. So, is his spidey-sense going off there? And in reaction to what, exactly? (Can it be tricked, for example? Can The Punisher telling Spider-Man of the threat trigger the spider-sense, even if he's lying...?)

Yes, I know. I have now officially thought way too much about this scene.

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Remember a few weeks back, when I was talking about my difficulty in finding good graphic novels to start my comics-curious, 14-year-old nephew on? In that post, I talked about how hard it was coming up with a high-quality, evergreen, easily accessible trade featuring the X-Men or Spider-Man to hand him, and wrote that "Unlike, say, Batman, Spider-Man doesn't seem to have a Dark Knight Returns or a Batman: Year One (Or an Arkham Asylum or a Gothic or a Long Halloween or a Hush or a Court of Owls or...)"

I had been thinking about that off and on for the last few weeks now. Specifically, the fact that I could easily recommend a graphic novel or three or twelve for most relatively popular DC characters, but not so much with any Marvel character.

Now, I've always had a DC bias in my reading habits, so I'm not the best person to weigh in here, but it seems to me that Marvel Comics has always focused on producing comic book series, and had barely ever even dabbled in producing either original graphic novels or limited series or story arcs that could be collected into trades and then sold as graphic novels to the emerging market for them; not in the wake of Dark Knight Returns/Watchmen/Maus in the late 1980s, not when a market for trades emerged in the late 1990s, not when the Big Two started collecting everything they published to cater to the newer "wait-for-the-trade" audience, not when manga became a bookstore phenomenon, and not today, when bookstores and libraries are common places readers find comics. 

Marvel, stubbornly, seems to still be a comic book publisher whose only real "graphic novels" are trade collections of their regular comics, while DC has spent decades catering to readers who get comics in places that aren't specialty comic shops. 

Like, whenever I think of the more famous Marvel storylines I know of, they almost always tend to be runs on titles rather than stories that can be collected into a single pair of covers. It seems rare for Marvel to actually publish something that 1.) features a popular character, 2.) is by a noteworthy creator, 3.) is distinct enough to offer a particular take on a character or concept, 4.) is easily accessible to a general audience, 5.) is somewhere between 100-400 pages and —and this part is important—6.) is actually in print and available for purchase.

As you've been reading, these last few paragraphs, you've probably been thinking of counter-examples. I'd like to hear them in the comments as, again, I am not a Marvel guy. I've been thinking of counter-examples too, and haven't come up with many that quite seem to fit the six criteria in the previous paragraph (Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz's Elektra: Assassin would seem to fit the bill, for example, but I just looked it up on Amazon, and it looks like it was last published in 2019...and is not currently in print. I don't think I've ever seen it outside of the rack of a comic shop, either). 

Much of the Marvel Premier Collection line, which is where I would expect to find what Marvel considers its graphic novels, features books that are parts of runs: Greg Pak and company's Planet Hulk, Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four and Avengers, Grant Morrison's New X-Men, etc. They feature stories, sure, but they are each only parts of bigger, longer storylines. For a while I considered Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's Civil War, which was a limited series...but (in addition to not being very good, and reading worse and worse each time I revisit it) it was such a big "event" that Civil War proper is just part of a massive story too, comprised of hundreds of pages, some of them quite relevant, that aren't collected between the covers...and would be too numberous to do so (What about Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta's The Visions...? I've never read that, but it seems to be quite limited in scope...)

In the end, I came up with two Marvel comics that I think fit my criteria: Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' 1994 Marvels and Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon and Jimmy Palmiotti's 2000 The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank. Two very different books, but also two books that you can hand pretty much any reader, and they could easily make sense of and, I imagine, find things to appreciate about (Although the former is obviously a bit more geared to a popular, general audience than the latter; I wouldn't be in a rush to hand my nephew any of Ennis' Punisher works and say "Here, you like Marvel superheroes, right?").

Actually, I'm not 100% on whether or not Marvels is currently in print or not. Amazon shows a 2018 "Remastered" edition, and there doesn't seem to be a Marvel Premier Edition version of it for some reason.

Thinking some more, I thought of a couple others that standalone as actual graphic novels and that Marvel seems to agree are significant enough to keep around. 

There's Millar and McNiven's Wolverine: Old Man Logan, which I never read (I had read enough Mark Millar by the time it came out) but that seems to be a discrete story of its own (Marvel's efforts to turn it into a "world" of its own, and to import the title character into their mainline universe for a while aside). There's a Marvel Premier Edition of that. 

And there's Roger Stern and Mike Mignola's Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph & Torment. That seems to have been out-of-print for some time now (Marvel seems to have stuck it in a Doctor Strange Epic Collection in 2023...I could have sworn I heard Marvel was re-releasing it, though). (Then again, is either Doctor a Spider-Man or X-Men level character...? Probably not). 

Do any of you have any other suggestions of something akin to Marvels or Welcome Back, Frank or Old Man Logan...? Something that reads like a standalone graphic novel, rather than part of a run or series  or series of series...? 

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I suppose I should mention that there are a decent amount of recent standalone works starring Marvel characters that are meant for general audiences who find their books in bookstores and libraries. They just aren't published by Marvel but licensed to other publishers. 

These include Jeffrey Brown's Hulk Teach books (Scholastic/Graphix), Mike Maihack's Spider-Man "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" books and Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate's Iron Man "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" books (Harry N. Abrams), Patrick McDonnell's The Super Hero's Journey, Alex Ross' Fantastic Four: Full Circle and Marvel Dimensions and Chip Kidd and Michael Cho's The Avengers in The Veracity Trap (Harry N. Abrams again) and the standalone Spider-Man manga Fake Red (Viz Media; they also publish Kizuna, Octo-Girl and Shadow Warrior, but those are all manga series).

On Punisher: Confederacy of Dunces

I didn't realize that Marvel was going to be publishing a new collection of "Confederacy of Dunces", the story arc that ran through the last five issues of Garth Ennis' 2001-2004 The Punisher ongoing series, until I saw it waiting to be shelved at the library.  

It was the cover that caught my eye (as covers should). I noticed the big "PUNISHER" and skull logo in the middle of the cover, the odd assortment of characters and the very distinct art of John McCrea, who has long been one of my favorite comics artists. The previous collection of the arc, 2004's Punisher Vol. 6, used series cover artist Tim Bradstreet's cover for The Punisher #37. It was a nice enough cover, a highly realistic, portrait-style image of The Punisher, but it looked like all of Bradstreet's coves for the series, featuring as it did a weathered-looking Frank Castle among recurring elements like skulls, guns and bullets.

 Like so many Marvel covers of that period, Bradstreet's cover eventually became a sort of visual white noise, offering no indication of what might be occurring within that particular comic, or how it might differ from the issue before or the issue after it (Here, scan this gallery of Bradstreet's covers, for example; how would you choose one over another? Some indicate that Spider-Man or Wolverine guest-star within, sure, but there's nothing in the covers for the five issues that make up this arc to indicate that Spider-Man, Wolverine and Daredevil all guest-star in them, as the three team up with one another to take on Castle).

This new collection, released in 2026, has a far better cover then, I think, as it features all of the characters involved and is also drawn by the same guy who drew the interiors. But I think it goes a little too far. For example, The Hulk is on the cover (and the copy on the back cover also mentions "things go from bad to worse when the Incredible Hulk shows up!"). 

This is a pretty major spoiler for the story, after all, revealing a plot point which Ennis quite carefully keeps from the reader until a double-page splash at the end of the penultimate issue. The arc involves The Punisher busting up an unusual auction taking place among the various factions of the New York criminal underworld, the prize being a little naked guy lying unconscious in the back of a van...and a videotape revealing who the guy is. 

As said guy has amnesia (and McCrea draws him sans glasses), no one except The Punisher knows that this guy is actually Bruce Banner until Castle forces him to transform into The Hulk and points him in the direction of the trio of heroes who have decided enough is enough and it is time to bring down The Punisher once and for all.

Well, there's that, and the fact that the new cover is a composite of figures from three different panels; someone apparently chopped up McCrea's interior art and rearranged it rather awkwardly on the cover. They probably should have just commissioned McCrea to draw a new, original cover. 

As I said before, this was the last arc of Ennis' first Punisher ongoing, which followed he and pencil artist Steve Dillon's 12-issue, 2000-2001 maxiseries, which has since been collected as Welcome Back, Frank (Most recently in a "Marvel Premier Collection" for just $14.99). Dillon and inker Jimmy Palmiotti followed Ennis onto the ongoing as well, and that was the team for much of the 37-issue run, with some fill-ins. 

McCrea, who of course worked with Ennis on DC's The Demon and Hitman, took over as series pencil artist at the very end, drawing the last five issues, the "Confederacy of Dunces" arc. (Previous to this, Ennis and McCrea had also collaborated on a pair of Marvel projects in 2001: The Tangled Web arc "The Thousand" and that the miniseries Hulk Smash). 

Obviously, McCrea knew how to draw an Ennis script as well as anyone at that point, and he was a perfect artist for Ennis' particular take on The Punisher character, a sort of black comedy that juxtaposed the absurdity of superhero comics with the single-minded, sociopathic killer of a protagonist and reveled in the friction that doing so produced. (That, and Ennis, Dillon, McCrea and others seemed to delight in the relatively slack chain that the Marvel Knights imprint and mature readers rating gave them to present Castle as an ultra-violent mass-murderer; the stories were often quite silly, sure, but, in their way, also took the idea of a vigilante with The Punisher's astronomical body count more seriously than the previous decades' worth of Punisher comics ever had.)

Also, Ennis and company's Punisher comics were all set firmly in the Marvel Universe, which meant Daredevil and Spider-Man and others might pop by now and then. Ennis' next Punisher ongoing would be a "Max" series, and thus non-canonical (And, outside of the Marvel Universe, they tended to be a lot more realistic and a lot more violent...and, if you ask me, a lot less fun. Is a guy who has colorfully, creatively killed hundreds of people, even if they were all bad guys, someone who should be cheered for? Or recoilded from?).

Anyway, "Confederacy of Dunces" was basically the grand conclusion of Ennis, Dillon and company's take on The Punisher, that which was staked out in "Welcome Back, Frank." The "dunces" of the title, which was borrowed from John Kennedy Toole's 1980 novel, are, of course, the Marvel heroes seen on the cover and already mentioned: Daredevil, Spider-Man and Wolverine.

Despite that title, Ennis and McCrea treat Daredevil and Spider-Man more or less seriously, whereas it is Wolvie who is presented as a clown: Rather silly-looking and always talking in goofy tough-guy cliches (McCrea draws Wolverine sans costume, as he wasn't really wearing one at the time, and his hair looks like an exaggerated version of how Hugh Jackman's Wolverine hair looked in the live-action movies; that is, like a more-or-less normal head of hair, with two "ears" rising out of it for some reason. The "ears" here, however, are long and pointy, more Batman-like than wolfman-esque).

Now, Marvel's heroes deciding that they really should do something about the fact that there's a killer vigilante in New York City, where most of them live and operate, makes sense; especially since, as this story tells us, Castle has killed "thousands" and has been doing so for "thirty years." (I'm not sure what to make of that timespan; debuting in 1974, The Punisher had been around for 30 years at that point, but that's assuming Marvel characters aged in real time. Like, I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to believe that Spider-Man is in his late fifties and Daredevil in his early sixties in this story, even if the young, fit-looking Castle is supposed to be a veteran of the Vietnam War.)

As for why it is these three heroes in particular and not, like, The Fantastic Four and The Avengers, well, obviously Spider-Man and Daredevil run in the same circles as Frank, but, in the context of this series, all three had previously guest-starred and, as Daredevil says when he summons the other two to propose the mission to them, they all got "put through the ringer." 

In Daredevil's case, the "ringer" was mostly a moral and emotional one, whereas Frank used Spider-Man as a human shield during a rematch with The Russian, and Wolverine...well, Ennis had Frank exploiting Wolverine's by-then amped-up healing factor by subjecting him to cartoonishly over-the-top acts of violence. Like running him over with a steamroller ("An' then--th' final iggomininny!" as Wolvie tells it here, "The dirty frikker drives a steamroller over my head!")

Had there been a story previous to this one where various Marvel heroes decided to treat The Punisher as the supervillain he essentially is...? If so, I had never read or heard of it.

Anyway, because these three had such recent history with Frank, with The Punisher getting the better of them each (And of course he did; it was his book they were appearing in), their appearances in this arc make for various callbacks, and give Ennis' final arc on the series a real sense of climax. 

Surely, no reader would have much concern if Frank found himself facing off against any number of armed criminals, but facing off against a group of superheroes determined to finally take him down? Well, that's suspenseful ("Any one of these three could dismantle me in about a second," Frank tells himself during the first of three rounds he fights against the trio).

The arc isn't just one big fight scene, of course. The Punisher is going about his regular punishing while Daredevil proposes the alliance to the other two, and, once he gets wind of the big underworld auction, he of course wants to be there. Not because he cares about what is being auctioned, but because he wants to gun down everyone present for the bidding (This he starts to do in a big double-page splash; on the previous page, bad guys notice him arriving and shout from off-panel "NO!" and "God! No!!", while Frank's thoughts are an almost sexual response of "Yes. Oh yes."

Having killed all of the attendees, he ends up in possession of the amnesiac Banner, who he keeps locked away and feeds stew with suspicious insistence...another aspect that will only be explained at the climax.

And then there are subplots involving characters Dave, a kid and neighbor of Frank's from "Welcome Back, Frank", and Soap, an unlucky, pathetic, sad-sack police officer who was assigned to The Punisher Task Force and has been acting as Frank's kinda sorta Commissioner Gordon throughout the series. Both of them get send-offs in this arc as well. 

As for the Punisher vs. the superheroes conflict, as I stated above, it basically consists of three rounds. 

In the first, Frank manages to outsmart them and make his escape by distracting them (which he does by doing the opposite of what one might think he might do when challenged to a fight), sparking a berserker rage in Wolverine that forces the other two to focus on stopping their teammate rather than him.

In the second, he plans ahead and has come up with ways to neutralize Spider-Man and Daredevil, while poor Wolverine takes a rocket from a rocket-launcher to the gut, skeletonizing much of his body until he can grow his "meat" back. (Frank still gets the shit kicked out of him by Daredevil here, though, ultimately only defeating him through some lucky circumstances. Wolverine aside maybe, Ennis does play "fair" in the conflict, coming up with plausible reasons for how Frank might actually triumph over guys who are more skilled and/or more powerful than him.)

And, in the final, he wields the rampaging Hulk like a weapon against them, not entirely unlike the way he famously weaponized some polar bears against foes in "Welcome Back, Frank" (Here, Wolverine gets punched all the way to Boston, where he lands claws first on a poor duck in a pond).

As the conflict winds down, Ennis has The Punisher try to explain to a pinned and helpless Daredevil why it's useless for them to try to bring him to justice anyway: 

Look at the lengths I've had to go to not to kill you.

This fight you've picked wastes everybody's time. Let this be an end to it. 

Once and for all. 

...

I understand.

You want to stop me murdering criminals by taking me off the streets. That's stupid. Send me to prison and I'll just kill everyone I meet.

There's only one way to stop me. You know that.

If you haven't got it in you to do it, don't waste my time.

Will that argument convince Daredevil? One would assume not, and that the pair would thus be locked in an eternal struggle of sorts. But because Frank makes this little speech in the last issue of the series, well, it's not Ennis who will have to deal with the question of why Marvel's heroes don't stop The Punisher. 

The last four pages feature a sort of coda, one that intentionally echoes the events of "Welcome Back, Frank." In that story, Ennis and Dillon had Frank rather famously throw a criminal to his death of the Empire State Building. 

Here he hauls another criminal to the top of a building and throws him off, staring intensely at the falling figure until we get a big, red sound effect of "SPLAAAT" to let us know the poor bastard has hit the bottom. 

Interestingly, the section features The Punisher thinking about the events of 9/11, Marvel's in-comics reaction to which were...varied, to say the least (Twenty-five years later, it is John Romita Jr's drawing of Doctor Doom shedding a tear at Ground Zero that I remember most strongly).

"Four years ago," Frank says to himself in a narration box, referring to 2001, when "Welcome Back, Frank" was completed...and Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center (Again, Ennis suggests that time passes in the Marvel Universe at the same rate it does in ours). "The view was different then," he says, and continues:

I remember the day the Towers came down, not for all the sound and fury, not for the streets awash with smoke, but for the looks on the faces of the people.

The stricken horror of innocence killed stone dead. 

See? I thought.

See now? 

See what the world is really like?

The City, now, it knew. 

It had known all along.

For a moment I seem to hear it talking.

Frank, it says: Don't ever go away again.

But I'm not going anywhere. 

I need you, Frank. Says New York City.

Here Ennis seems to suggest that, as The Punisher sees it at least, 9/11 was to New York City what Frank's family being gunned down to criminals was to him, and now the city (perhaps the country?) was ready to embrace the remorseless killing of killers, to excuse the suspensions of such niceties as trials and human rights in the pursuit of a just vengeance.

Was he right? I'm not happy to report that Ennis' Punisher maybe got America's number there. 

Despite Frank's promise not to go anywhere, he would eventually go away again...although that seemed to have more to do with Marvel struggling to find a way to keep the character relevant while simultaneously distancing The Punisher and they themselves from all the bad people who had co-opted his iconic skull symbol in the real world. Many of whom tended to be...well, not people that a comic book publisher/business of any kind would want to associate with.

There were some attempts to replace the skull symbol on his chest with other logos and, as I understood it, he was even given a weird "ending" to his story at one point.

At the moment, I have no idea where The Punisher is in the Marvel Universe. If he's alive or dead, active or temporarily retired. But Marvel did publish this trade, so it's not like they've abandoned him. And he did play a prominent role in this summer's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, one of the most successful movies of the year and, if I understand it correctly, ever. 

So perhaps Frank is right. He's not going anywhere...and, even if he does seem to disappear for a while now and then, he'll be back sooner or later.

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While rereading this story arc, there were a few things that caught my eye as worth talking more about—some dialogue that I don't think Marvel would have published in 2026 even if they allowed it in 2004, some questions about how Spider-Man's spider-sense actually works—that didn't quite fit into this post, so we'll return to this story arc (and maybe Ennis' earlier Punisher stories in general) again next post. 

Meanwhile...

You guys probably aren't going to believe it, but this week? I wrote about comics. On the Internet. I know, right?

You can read a piece I wrote about All Star Section Eight's continuation of Garth Ennis and McCrea's making-fun-of-DC-comics-in-DC-comics here at Comics Alliance. You can read a short review of Jeremy Baum's very, very weird (and all-around beautiful) Dorfler here at Las Vegas Weekly. And, finally, you can read my review of IDW's Ghostbusters: Get Real #1 here at Robot 6. The above image of Batman blowing off a parking ticket is, of course, from Section Eight.

I like this John McCrea cover.

That's John McCrea's cover to Section Eight #1, a six-issue miniseries that constitutes he and Garth Ennis' return to the DC Universe and stars a couple of relatively minor characters from their 1996-2001 Hitman series. Below that is the cover of Hitman #1, which the former is clearly meant to echo.

I really like McCrea's art, and it's fun seeing the deliberate reference to a previous cover. Note the differences in the Batmans, in terms of their costuming, as well as the similarities, in terms of Batman's expression and the way McCrea draws his cape, as a sort of explosion of ink.

Ennis and McCrea first introduced the characcter Tommy Monaghan, the hitman of the title, in a 1993  annual attached to their run on The Demon (Psst! Ennis and McCrea's Demon run would make a fine collection, People At DC Who Decide What Gets Collected). They used Batman to help ease the character into the audience's eyes, which made sense not only in terms of Batman helps sell things, but because Tommy was a Gothamite (The Demon was set in Gotham City, after all).

Between the end of The Demon and the launch of Hitman, Tommy appeared in a short story in The Batman Chronicles #4, sort of tied to the then-ongoing Batman crossover storyline, "Contagion." Batman then played a fairly prominent role in the first Hitman story arc, punching Tommy so hard in the stomach at one point that he throws Thai food up on Batman's boots. Despite both Batman and The Joker swearing vengeance upon Tommy Monaghan by the end of that story arc, neither reappeared for a rematch throughout the rest of the Hitman run, which made for maybe the only loose story thread Ennis didn't tie-up.

As for Batman's presence on the cover of Section Eight this week, Section Eight's leader Sixpack is trying to revive his team, no easy feat since most of them are dead. He gets up to seven, but still needs an eighth, and Batman is his first potential new recruit.

If you're looking for this book tomorrow–and you should be!–do note that the McCrea cover above is a "variant;" for reasons that perplex me, the "regular" cover is by Amanda Conner, a fine artist whose only fault in this instance is that she's not John McCrea.

Garth Ennis did not write this scene

(despite the fact that he has written multiple scenes of people being killed by falling into airplane propellers.)





This fight to the death between Hans Von Hammer and The Bull was written instead by Robert Kanigher, and constitutes but one of the Enemy Ace's many acts of black-and-white bad-assery available in Showcase Presents: Enemy Ace Vol. 1.

No Sale: War Is Hell

Dear Marvel Comics,

Hey guys, how’s it going? I just wanted to drop you a line to say WHAT THE HELL?! When I went to my local comic shop this week to pick up the new releases that looked good, I couldn’t help but notice that you were charging $3.99 for War Is Hell: The First Flight of The Phantom Eagle #1.

Now, as an English major in college and a “creative type,” math has never really been my strong point, but I know enough of it to know that $3.99 is a whole entire dollar more than $2.99, which is what you guys normally charge for 22-page comic books. If I understand fractions right, that’s a one-third increase over the normal price of your normal 22-page comic books.

I picked up War Is Hell, felt its weight in my hand, and flipped through it, and while I suppose it’s possible that it was printed on an ultra-light paper that deceived me, it sure seemed to be your average 22-page page count. It didn’t even have a cardstock cover like Logan #1, that other comic book you jacked the price up to $3.99 for no reason for. At least in that case, I could assume you were spending more on cover-stock, and felt justified in asking readers to shell out a little bit more.

But why did War Is Hell cost so much? Is red ink more expensive than all the other inks, and thus a scene of a dude falling into a biplane propeller is more expensive to create?

Or is it simply because it is a Max imprint book, meaning there’s probably some swear words that appear in English instead of, like, “@#$%” you Iron Man, you @#$%ing @#$%!” and you want to discourage kids from reading it by making it more expensive?

Because if that’s your rationale, don’t worry. Kids don’t read Marvel Comics. And even if they did, I’m fairly certain their first choice isn’t going to be the one about the obscure World War I flying ace that their dad’s never even heard of drawn by that Chaykin guy who makes all the characters look fat and flat. I would assume they might gravitate towards something with Wolverine on the cover. Or Venom. Or Wolverine possessed by Venom.

Me, on the other the other hand, I’m the goddam target audience for this stuff. Garth Ennis? I love that guy. And everyone knows that other than stories featuring Irish vampire drinking buddies, sarcastic hitmen with x-ray eyes and hearts of gold and insane vigilantes killing mobsters with zoo animals, his very best work is that which involves war.

And I love Howard Chaykin’s art. And cover artist John Cassaday’s. Hell, this book even has my favorite letterer on it.

And having recently made my way through Showcase Presents: Enemy Ace and Ennis’ Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, I’m totally pumped about a WWI pilot story.

But why should I pay an extra dollar for it? Anyway, I guess I’ll just wait for the trade. Again.

Make mine $2.99,
Caleb

One post, six topics

1.) Meanwhile in Las Vegas...: Everyone’s talking about Garth Ennis’ new series for Virgin Comics, Dan Dare. And so am I. That’s the book featured in this week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics column. Go read it, if you like. I’ll wait here.

Back already? That was fast. Did you get the headline? It was supposed to be a play on “derring do,” but I have a feeling it could just as easily be read as “having sex with Dare” or “making another Dan Dare comic.”




2.) Rare first appearance of Bow-wow: In the corrections department, in discussing children’s book Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug on Monday, I mistakenly claimed that one of its creators, Mark Newgarden, is the author of a graphic novel entitled We All Die Alone.

That’s not exactly true. While Newgarden does have a book entitled We All Die Alone, it’s a collection of biographical information and old gag strips and cartoons by Newgarden, some sequential, but mostly one-panel. It's not a graphic novel. A lot of these strips are hilarious, some of them are tedious, and most of them are pretty avant-garde, making for an interesting book to think about, but not a terribly entertaining one to read.

Newgarden is a huge Nancy fan, he worked with Art Spiegelman and he is the inventor of Garbage Pail Kids. Yes, Garbage Pail Kids. For real.

One reoccurring strip idea Newgarden used was something called “Meet the Cast,” in which he’d fill a panel or series of panels with weird-ass cartoon characters, like Dampy the Effeminate Pancake, Sid The Sea Bishop, Noah the Unhappy Apple, Way Groovy Tom Peacenik of the Moon, and so on. In one installment, I couldn’t help but notice a dog named Bow-Wow…



Let’s take a closer look there…



Bow-Wow sure has mellowed out a bit since 1990, and I think he may even have had some work done to his snout.



Now I wonder if we’ll bee seeing a charming children’s book series starring Shithead O’Leprechaun or Joey Donutfoot the Misanthropic Dead Bakery Assistant in the near future…




3.) Ed Benes Isn't Very Good: Some people apparently like the work of Ed Benes on Justice League of America. I know this to be true, because I’ve read through plenty of message board posts at Newsarama, where you’ll always have a lot of guys saying how awesome it all looks or what a great talent Benes is. Seriously, check it out if you don’t believe me.

Now, everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion, however I feel compelled to point out that if you’re of the opinion that Ed Benes is a good comic book artist, you are wrong.

I’m not familiar enough with Benes’ entire body of work to say how bad he actually is. I kinda liked a lot of his work on Birds of Prey for example, particularly at the beginning (after his run lasted for a while, his weakness in drawing more than two different body types—male and female—became clearer and clearer). I don’t think Sandra Hope’s inks necessarily do his pencils the best justice, however the pair of them can acquit themselves fairly well when doing big, posed shots, like that cheesy team photo in JLoA #7 (A badly scanned version of which is above). Benes may be a fine pin-up artist or cover artist.

But as a sequential comics artist, illustrating a script? The guy sucks. Now, JLoA is certainly harder than other titles in the number of characters that need dealing with. The team has, what 14 characters on it, now? (I’m not sure if Flash or Geo-Force are actually on the team or not). And in this storyline, they’re fighting about as many super-villains. That’s a lot of costumes to keep straight. So maybe Benes is just on a book too big for him (Well no maybe about it; the number of fill-ins we’ve seen in the first 15 issues shows that he’s definitely on a book too big for him).

But aside from the lack of backgrounds, the lack of variety in characters’ body types and faces, the poor “acting” he does, and the Liefeldian layouts full of characters breaking the borders for no reason, Benes has that one unfortunate tendency of putting a female characters’ butt or breasts or both in the focus of every panel he can get away with it in.

This week’s issue is chockfull of that, but here’s what may be the most egregious example. Ready? Here’s what I think may be the worst panel in a book full of bad panels:



Note Batman’s head sticking out of the top of the panel. Why? No reason. It just is. At least it’s not as hard to read as other border-breaks, like the Vixen/Rocky Guy Thing fight.

Also note the fact that Batman gets off a whole sentence in the time it takes The Joker to fall a few inches. Reading old comics today, we all like to laugh at how Captain America could say paragraphs of dialogue while executing a flip or two, but a) that was a generation or two ago, b) those comics were made for kids and c) Jack Kirby can get away with that shit because it would have been one of the ten thousand panels he drew that month.

This is 2007, and Benes is drawing a comic book read almost exclusively by adults (at least, I hope kids aren’t reading this thing) who read a lot of comics. Why not draw The Joker already on the ground? Or still in Batman’s hand? Why choose to draw the fall in mid-air, if the script tells you there are two sentence of dialogue that will pass the time in which the image is supposed to capture?

But I already know the answer to that. If he drew The Joker on the floor, or being dragged along it by Batman, he might have had to lower the "camera" angle a bit, and then wouldn’t have been able to draw Black Canary’s ass in the panel, or perhaps not as much of it.

And, let the record show, Benes’ guiding principle when composing an image is whether or not he can draw a woman’s ass in it. I mean, look at this image; it’s almost 50% Black Canary’s ass. No one’s talking about her ass, her ass has nothing to do with the story. The subject is Batman disobeying Black Canary’s orders and having gone off into the swamp to retrieve the escaping Joker.

Anyway, it wasn't my intention to turn this into Benes bashin week at the EDILW or anything; I actually drew the previous post a while back, and was saving it for the second Batman's Christmas List post because Wonder Woman's his second best teammate or whatever. It's honestly just a coincidence that I've talked shit on Benes for, like, four posts in a row.




4.) Although Benes is still better than Liefeld: Have you read this article headlined “The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings” yet? If not, make sure you check it out when you’ve got some free time and are in a place where it’s okay to laugh out loud. I’m not sure if the headline is meant to be taken literally, as there are some very, very bad drawings in here, but I kept expecting to see the Cap With Boobs image, and it never came, and I’m pretty sure that’s worse than some of these. Maybe not.

I’ve always felt a little sorry for Liefeld, on account of making fun of him is just so easy, it feels a little like making fun of the foreign exchange student for talking funny during lunch period or whatever. (And I have very little personal experience with his work; there are exactly two comic books containing Liefeld art work in my long boxes—Darker Image #1 featuring the most shameless rip-off of another character I’ve ever read by Liefeld [Plus, a Sam Kieth Maxx story, the reason teenaged Caleb bought it], and that one Superman Christmas issue by eight different artists, one of which was Liefeld.)

But man, writers “Hanstock and B” (what kind of names are those?) show no mercy, and it gets pretty hilarious. After a while, I began just giggling myself silly at the images themselves, before the commentary would even begin. I mean, look at that panel up there. I was alive and reading comics in the ‘90s—did people really think stuff like that looked cool back then?




5.) I will now comment on that one thing everyone else will also comment on: So J. Michael Straczynski’s not crazy about the latest J. Michael Straczynski Spider-Man story either, huh? Does that make it official? Does everyone hate the idea of rebooting Spider-Man continuity to magically undo his marriage to Mary Jane? Everyone except Marvel Editor-in-Chief and the story’s penciller Joe Quesada, anyway?

If they don’t undo the marriage magically now, I’ll be pretty surprised, because whatever the decision was—to do it or not do it—it must have been made months and months ago, since the new, tri-weekly schedule for Amazing Spider-Man is dependent on the outcome, and, if Marvel’s as on-schedule with ASM as they claim, then the first story arc of that book at least was finished before “One More Day.”

They can still de-re-boot Spider-continuity, as I’m fairly certain they will, given fan reaction, but it may not be for a while yet.

What I find perplexing is that Quesada even took it this far. He’s been talking about his problems with the Spider-marriage for years on Newsarama. No other issue gets talked about as much as the Spider-marriage in this formerly weekly interview columns, Joe Fridays, not even his ban on smoking in Marvel Comics. And his opinion has always been universally disagreed with.

Of course, he is right, a married Peter Parker ages the character and makes him easier for adults to relate to then children—having him marry Mary Jane in the first place may have been a mistake, and should have been undone. But it would have had to be done in, when was it, 1987?

Now, there’s just too much momentum to the marriage, and it’s played too big a role in too many Marvel Comics.

But to stop thinking like a fan and reader for a second, un-marrying Spider-Man no longer makes a lick of sense.

Ultimate Spider-Man (indeed, the whole Ultimate line) was launched specifically to appeal to new and young readers, to bring the spirit of the original Spider-Man comics into the 21st century, and it succeeded wildly. It remains one of the better Big Two comic books being published. It also features a young, unmarried Spider-Man.

Marvel Adventures Spider-Man overlaps with USM quite a bit, in terms of being focused on younger readers and telling stories with much easier jumpingonability, and it also features a young, unmarried Spider-Man.

As does Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. And large swathes of the stories appearing in anthology Spider-Man Family.

The only version of Spider-Man who is a little older and married is the Marvel Universe one, the one whose primary audience is the dwindling, graying Direct Market crowd, all of whom overwhelmingly prefer a married Spider-Man to a single one.

Making Marvel Universe Spider-Man more like the USM and MA ones just undercuts what makes those books special. So Marvel is risking alienating it’s shrinking Direct Market fan base to make their line of Spider-Man books less diverse, is that it?

But back to JMS, it is pretty weird to see a Big Two Marvel writer, even one as influential as him (he is safe and secure with an exclusive contract at the moment, right?) saying he doesn’t like the direction the story’s going in.

It also strikes me as incredibly insincere. As I mentioned last night, JMS could personally be in some trouble over the poor quality of this story—what’s going on in it aside, those first two issues constituted some of the worst comics writing I’d ever encountered—so it’s understandable that he’d want it on record that this wasn’t all his bright idea.

But at the same time, there’s no gun to his head here. If he thought it was a stupid idea, he didn’t have to write it in the first place. Likewise, if he pitched an idea for a story in which Gwen Stacy’s and Peter Parker’s grown children are the villains, but gets it shot down, he could have just scrapped the story and told another one, he didn’t have to change the father of Stacy’s children to Norman Osborne. If there was any form of compulsion to write the dumb-ass story his boss wanted him to write, it would have been financial and fairly minor (I’m assuming; he was leaving ASM anyway, which means the only “at risk” book would be Thor, right?). Isn’t turning down one story’s arc worth of paychecks worth not looking like a chump?




6.) Countdown to Checkmate getting cancelled :And speaking of popular comics writers speaking out against the grind of editorial fiat, long-time DC writer Greg Rucka isn’t renewing his exclusive contract with the company. In a second post responding to the original post which set off Internet response, Rucka essentially says that if there’s any dirty laundry regarding his relationship with DC, he’s not going to air it.

Fair enough.

Rucka got his comics start after a few prose crime novels, then had a very successful Oni mini Whiteout and, next thing you know, he’s writing Batman for DC, including part of “No Man’s Land” (the last really good Batman crossover?) and a long, successful stint on Detective Comics. After working on DC’s biggest star, he then got to work on their other two biggest stars, Superman (which he actually wasn’t very good at) and Wonder Woman (a title he was kind of mediocre on, but being mediocre on the Wonder Woman monthly is the same as being brilliant on other titles).

He was heavily involved in the Infinite Crisis build-up, including the really shitty OMAC Project, and was part of the 52 team, giving DC one of it’s biggest hits in, what, ever? (Seriously guys, that thing sold 90 to 100,000 or more every single week!)

But since then, it’s clear he’s been somewhat, um, underappreciated by the company. His only ongoing monthly is Checkmate, which seems to be a title he’s well-suited for, but also a title that’s on the verge of cancellation, and seems to be getting monkeyed with quite a bit (I can’t imagine Rucka thinking, “Oh sweet, I love Judd Winick and his goddam stupid book Outsiders! Let’s do a crossover!” Or “Sure, by all means, use these characters I’m supposed to be writing to set up your stupid fucking Salvation Run series; sounds faboo!”*)

He’s publicly mentioned that he wasn’t thrilled to see Renee Montoya, a character DC owns but he’s adopted as her primary writer since his TEC run years ago, appearing in the pages of Countdown (drawn badly off-model to boot), and I see she had at least a one panel appearance in the recent Gotham Underground miniseries, which also ties into Salvation Run.

And then there’s Batwoman, the monthly starring the lesbian vigilante who made such a huge splash in the mediascape a few years back. Originally, her monthly adventures were going to be written by Devin Grayson, and a title logo was even designed, but the book never materialized. Later, Rucka was supposed to be working on her series, and he mentioned frustrations with DC’s reluctance to release the book in interviews on different subjects. There’s still no Batwoman comic book on the schedule, and I wonder if that ended up being the last straw?

Anyway, with Rucka leaving DC, what’s that mean for the company? I’m going to assume John Ostrander is going to be named the new Checkmate writer sometime in the near future, if the book’s not cancelled before then, at which point he’ll get to write it for six months and then it will get cancelled.

I’m also going to assume Batwoman will continue to not come out, and, if anything, is now a lot less likely to ever come out.



*Actually, I can’t imagine anyone saying the word “faboo.”

Dream Trades: The Complete Hitman

Garth Ennis and John McCrea's two-issue JLA/Hitman miniseries wrapped up last Wednesday, having served as both a welcome visitation to the characters from the old Hitman series, and a sort of belated epilogue to it.

The miniseries was, by just about any standards, a pretty good comic, but I do wonder why exactly DC published it. I mean, publishing pretty good comics doesn't exactly seem like their regular MO these days, does it?

It could be that it was a sort of test balloon for embarking on a trade program of the series, something Comic Book Resources’ rumormonger Rich Johnston has been pushing for.

I don't know how Hitman sold back in the late ‘90s, when it was still being published monthly, but from interviews at the time, I got the impression that it was a borderline title, not selling all that great, yet not selling poorly enough to be canceled. Rather, DC kinda suggested that maybe it could be canceled at some point in the near future, and afforded Ennis and McCrea time to wrap it up to their liking.*

When they did collect it into trade, they stopped at Who Dares Wins, about halfway through the series (the point where Tommy essentially has a mid-series crisis, and things start looking increasingly bad for our heroes). According to dccomics.com, only the last two of the five trades they did are still in print.

Considering that it's the work of Garth Ennis, whose name alone is enough to sell comics these days, I've always found it odd that the series wasn't a bigger hit, and a perennial seller in the backlist—a "from the creator of Preacher" likely should help sell some books, no?

Now that Ennis' name has been built into brand of its own, thanks in part to his adding a long run on the Punisher to his Vertigo credits, perhaps that’s changed.

And if you can get an Ennis fan, any Ennis fan, to crack open just one cover, I would think that a collection of Hitman collections would do quite well in trade, as it has the best of all of the attributes Ennis is known for: Superhero parody, action, crime, western and war movie tributes, homages, parodies and riffs, plus great character work, almost monthly celebrations of male friendships, and lots of guns, cigarettes and beer.

Of course, if DC were to give trade collections of Hitman another try after their first, aborted attempt, I would hope the would do it right this time around.

And to help ensure that they do, this installment of extremely infrequent EDILW feature Dream Trades is dedicated to laying out a blueprint for a practically obsessive-compulsive collection of all Tommy Monaghan stories.

Here's how I think it should go down...




Hitman Vol. 1 The first Hitman trade was a tad inadequate, featuring only the first three-issues of the series, a short Batman Chronicles story, and the Demon "Bloodlines" tie-in annual which introduced Tommy Monaghan.

Well, The Demon Annual #2 is a given, as it’s the first appearance and origin of Tommy Monaghan, a Gotham City hitman who gains superpowers after an attack by the “Bloodlines” aliens (Unimaginatively known in the DCU as “The Parasites”).

Monaghan had two other Demon story arcs, which should definitely be included. “Hell’s Hitman” ran through The Demon #42-#45, and it guest-starred Tommy Monaghan and Bat-villains Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The story revolved around a battle between Etrigan and Asteroth, and climaxed with the raising of the Gothodaemon, Gotham City’s own patron demon. I think this storyline is also the first appearance of GCPD officer Tiegel, who would become Tommy’s love interest in Hitman.

Monaghan also appeared in “Suffer the Children,” which ran from #52-#54, but I’ve never been able to track those singles down.

Both storylines would be good candidates for collection in a new version of Hitman Vol. 1, unless DC is planning on collecting Ennis and McCrea’s Demon run at some point (which they really should—it’s only 19 issues, and features a couple of Hitman stories and a three-part Haunted Tank story, introducing us to a legacy version of the tank’s commander, whom I don’t think anyone, even Ennis, has used since).

Following all the Demon appearances, but just prior to Hitman #1, Monaghan would appear in a short story in the “Contagion” crossover issue of The Batman Chronicles. Thanks to his mind-reading abilities and X-Ray vision, Monaghan’s able to get the jump on Batman, diss his Darth Vader vibe and, with some Bugs Bunny logic, trick the other one-third of their Mexican stand off into training his gun on Batman.

Monaghan escapes, and Batman follows him into the first three issues of Hitman. It’s a pretty good arc, about someone hiring Monaghan to take out the Joker, and Batman doing his level best to save his mortal enemy, an unrepentant mass-murderer. A lot of great moments, and sly observations about the DCU, although I was always a little disappointed that neither the Joker nor Batman ever fulfilled their promises of vengeance on Tommy. But I guess Ennis was just doing what he had to to launch a new DC series—start with a Batman appearance.

This first story amounts to the bait portion of a bait and switch, as the set-up for the series Monagahan gives us—that he’s a super-powered Hitman who only takes cases involving evil metahumans that normal hitmen couldn’t take—recedes to the background almost immediately (The fact that he even has superpowers is often unclear, based on how infrequently he uses them as the series progressing, occasionally vaguely complaining of them causing him headaches).




Hitman Vol. 2: Ten Thousand Bullets The next story arc is the four-part “Ten Thousand Bullets,” which I personally found to be the weakest of the lot, and I actually considered dropping the title with #4. Some big things happen to the supporting cast here, though, setting the tone for the rest of the series—in the world of Hitman, anyone could die at any moment.

It was followed by a one-issue tie-in to 1996’s big DC crossover, Final Night. I actually liked that one quite a bit. The idea was simply that the sun was going out, it was really the end of the world this time, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone saving the day. Obviously someone did, but a lot of the tie-ins just dealt with the heroes spending their last day with loved ones and so forth. In Hitman, Tommy and the boys at Noonan’s sealed themselves in the bar and told one another stories until the super-guys fixed the sun. This was the issue in which his social circle of killers—retiree-turne-barkeep Sean, best friend and unofficial sidekick Nat the Hat, Chow Yun Fat analogue Ringo, and big dumb guy Hacken—really started becoming sharply defined.





Hitman Vol. 3: Local Hero Next up was a four-issue arc called “Local Hero,” in which Tommy was forced to deal with some left-over Bloodlines crap courtesy of some shady CIA types, and has a very memorable team-up with poor Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who takes a lot of shit from not only Tommy, but also Tiegel. I love that cover of GL reacting to the bill. I could seriously look at that thing all day.

That was followed by perhaps the two greatest issues of the series, “Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium.” It’s just what it sounds like. A mad scientist tests his zombie gas out on the fish and animals at the Gotham Aquariaum, and Tommy and the boys must fight their way through zombie seals, penguins, octopuses, dolphins and at least one great white shark.

It’s pretty much the greatest thing ever.






Hitman Vol. 4: The Ace of Killers Next up was a somewhat sprawling six-part story arc entitled “The Ace of Killers,” which brough guest-star Catwoman (rocking the Jim Balent suit) and Jason Blood and Etrigan into the mix, as The Mawzir, a six-armed monster made out of dead Nazis, seeks to procure the titular rifle, the only gun capable of killing demons. Featuring the debut of the Cat-Signal, and local drunk Sixpack’s very own super-team, Section Eight, which included such sensational character finds as The Defenestrator (who carries a window with him to throw people through) and Dogwelder (who, um, welds dogs to people).

“Ace” is followed by two done-in ones, which would round out a trade quite nicely. There’s the “Big Head” issue of Hitman (from a theme month at DC where every cover featured a close-up of the protagonists face, and a good-jumping-on-point story). It was one of the more charming issues, in which Tommy and Tiegel make it official (and Ennis still finds time for a Mexican stand-off gag that ends in wholesale slaughter). Steve Pugh handles the art, giving McCrea one of the few breaks he takes on the series.

Then there’s a one-issue Christmas story in which Tommy and Nat hunt down a radioactive guy in a Santa suit. I actually hate that issue; probably the weakest of the series.





Hitman Vol. 5: Who Dares Wins This five-issue arc sends SAS agents after Tommy and Nat, to wreak British vengeance on them for a friendly fire incident during the gulf war. I think this is the first Ennis story about Britain’s super-soldiers, which he’d follow with plenty more (see all of the WildStorm Kev stories, for example). Given that the first story established anybody can die at any time, this is a pretty dramatic story, in which our badly out-classed heroes flail against a superior force. (There’s also a scene in a restaurant where a morbidly obese man is pushed over and used as a bullet shield). This is where the last round of trades quit.

Hitman #28 is a nice one-issue epilogue to “Who Dares Wins,” in which Monaghan regrets his life of violence, and begins casting about for something good to do. And he finds it in the very next story arc…





Hitman Vol. 6: Tommy’s Heroes This five-issue storyline, interrupted by the #1,000,000 issue, finds Tommy leading Nat, Ringo and Hacken into Africa as mercenaries in a crappy little war there, one which involves evil superheroes. Ennis gets to indulge in his love of war comics and movies without having to leave the comfort of his regular monthly, and McCrea gets to draw our heroes in different outfits, and the color palette changes quite dramatically. One of the few times the boys get out of Gotham City.





Hitman Vol. 7: For Tomorrow From there, things get weird, and it becomes clear Ennis is starting to wrap things up. “Tommy’s Heroes” is followed by one-issue “Of Thee I Sing,” the Eisner-winning Superman issue And the best Superman story I’ve ever read. Believe it!), a dark, dark, dark two-issue story in which Tommy learns of his real father and mother and returns to Ireland to face a past he never knew he had, and another two-issue arc about vampires seeking to invade “No Man’s Land”-Era Gotham, with the Cauldron as their beachhead.

And that brings us to the first Hitman story I cried (Manly, manly tears) during, four-part For Tomorrow, in which the long-foreshadowed conflict between Tommy and Ringo finally arises.





Hitman Vol. 8: The Old Dog A one-issue epilogue is followed by another of my favorites, a three-issue storyline in which Tommy and Nat go back in time, and a pack of Tyrannosaurs led by “Scarback” come to the Cauldron and quickly develop a taste for human flesh. Tackling the dinosaurs, McCrea proves he really can draw anything he’s asked to, and Ennis riffs on the old Judge Dredd strips about the Tyrannosaurus whose name I forget, narrating the stories from the dinosaur’s perspective.

And then Sean gets his spotlight arc, “The Old Dog” and we get flash backs to his youth, allowing Ennis to work a war comic into the middle of this story about two old, retired killers facing each other one last time.





Hitman Vol. 9: Closing Time After the two-issue Sixpack spotlight arc “Super Guy,” we plunge into the eight-issue finale, “Closing Time.” Ennis does an incredible job of bringing things to a close here, dusting off surviving characters from throughout the run, some of which we haven’t seen for years, in a tale that deals with the Bloodline crap that spawned Tommy, and gives him the chance to do that something good, and, if he’s lucky, die in exactly the way he’s always wanted.

I admit it: I bawled.





Hitman Vol. 10: That Stupid Bastard and Other Stories Well, since most of the cast is dead as of the last volume, you would think that would be a good place to stop the trade collections. But it wouldn’t be. After all, JLA/Hitman was really an epilogue for the series—set years after, and flashing back to when Tommy was still alive, before revealing Superman’s personal memorial to and feelings toward the dead Tommy. Surely that needs traded, and it should be somewhere after Closing Time. Hence, a post-Closing Time trade.

To fill out the rest of the trade, DC could stick in the various Hitman crossovers and specials that have nowhere else to go.

For example, this would be where you’d want to put Hitman/Lobo: That Stupid Bastich! #1. This 2000 one-shot was reportedly something Ennis wrote under duress, having no real affection for or interest in the character of Lobo. And oh boy, does it show. Essentially 38 pages of making fun of Lobo, the story has the unstoppable bounty hunter from outer space stopping in Noonan’s to drink a few pitchers of beer after completing a contract on Earth.

“I hated him on sight an’ I wasn’t eve lookin’at him,” Monaghan narrates the first panel. “He dressed like an idiot, talked like a moron, an’ smelled like he wore his bowels outside his body.” Artist Doug Mahnke helpfully draws some cartoon flies orbiting Lobo’s head, just in case it’s not clear that the character stinks.

So Lobo’s spouting catchphrases, all “Main Man” this and “Frag” that, until he notices there’s a cape in the joint:


(I love this panel, and that sentence gets funnier the longer I think about it, with each Leaguer having their own dubious sphere of influence. I can just see Oracle staring at a bank of monitors, and calling things in along the lines Sixpack established: "Batman, we have a rabid raccoon in Chicago that needs your attention! Wonder Woman, there's a bank robbery in process in Chicago—and the culprit's a she! Green Lantern, hostile aliens have just touched down in L.A., and they have green skin, so they’re all yours!")

When he starts picking on ‘Pack, Tommy pours a bottle of cheap whiskey all over himself, shoots out Lobo’s eyes, and takes off running. That’s page 7. The next 31 consist of Lobo, tracking Tommy by scent while waiting for his eyes to grow back, chasing him spouting increasingly ridiculous phrases based around the syllable “frag.” (“Gonna give ya a taste o’ Lobo’s frag a l’orange—served with a side dish o’ frag!” or “Ground control ta Major Frag!”).

Drawing inspiration from Luney Tunes once again, it’s essentially one big, long chase scene, with lots of mafia gangsters getting in the way. Now, given that Lobo is in Superman’s weight class, how does Tommy take the Main Man down? With a little help from Section Eight, a wedding dress, a video camera, and a promise not to tell if he just goes away. Mahnke handles the art, and his experience as a great superhero artist and a great comedy artist made this a perfect project for him. His Lobo is a mountain of a man, towering over everybody and everything, and Mahnke is quite creative as well as detailed in his gore.

This issue is actually a lot like JLA/Hitman in the way it blends the world of Hitman with a DCU regular, and flashes back to do it (The first panel contains an editorial box saying, “Clearly, this story takes place before most of the cast was slaughtered.”)


This hypothetical volume would also be a good place for Hitman Annual #1, which featured Ennis riffing on westerns in a story entitled “A Coffin Full of Dollars.” This was part of DC’s “Pulp Heroes” annual event, which is the best kind of DC annual event—one that’s thematic instead of part of an interlocking crossover.

The idea was basically to put the various DC heroes in genre stories of the sort the old pulps might have featured, although the main distinguishing detail was the cover dress and the fact that each of 1997’s annuals had a painted cover.

Hitman got “Weird Western Tales,” and we got an extra-length story about Tommy heading west to kill some guys for money, as drawn by Steve Pugh and Carlos Ezsquerra.

This might also be a good place to put Hitman #1,000, 000, which featured Tommy traveling to the 853rd century, meeting the heir to the Gunfire legacy, and discovering the ways in which the future is better than the present (mostly pertaining to vomiting).

There’s also supposedly a Sixpack/Superman short story from a Superman special somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find it.

As for non-Ennis Hitman appearances, there’s only one that I think would be worth collecting, and a sort of grab-bag trade like this would be the place to do it, if DC wanted to bother with the non-Ennis stuff.


That would be Resurrection Man #9-#10, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Jackson Guice, which featured DC’s two trenchcoat-wearing, costume-less super-heroes of the time crossing paths. In addition to some great art, Abnett and Lanning write Tommy and Nat just right, and have a great scene in which the pair exploit Mitch “Resurrection Man” Shelley’s peculiar power—every time he dies, he comes back to life with a different super power.

There are a handful of other appearances of Tommy outside his own title, but the Resurrection Man ones are really the best of the lot.

Grant Morrison wrote a fun few panels of Tommy trying out for the Justice League in JLA #5, but Martian Manhunter was unimpressed with his sales pitch (“I kill people for money”) and his smoking. Not bad, but certainly not enough to justify reprinting that whole issue in a trade.



The Denny O’Neil written Azrael #35 features a team-up between the one-time Batman stand-in and Tommy, but it’s pretty inessential, and doesn’t actually read like a Hitman story at all. It could have been anyone in the green trench coat trying to slot the merman gang boss (Although, may I say—Merman gang boss? Not bad, O’Neil).



Finally, there was Sovereign Seven #26, part of the short-lived and now mostly forgotten Chris Claremont DC series of the late ‘90s. I actually just reread it, since I had trouble remembering anything about it, and it’s about as painful to read as any Claremont DC book, particularly the parts where Claremont tries to capture the voice of an Ennis character.

Tommy only has a few pages, as he’s spying on the S7, and when he catches a few of their names, Rampart and Crusier**, he thinks, “Love the names.” Which would be funnier if it weren’t the same guy who came up with the dumb ass names in the first place writing the line.

The only things I liked about the issue were that his coat was mistakenly colored black instead of green (which is obviously a much cooler color), and there’s a pretty cool panel in which Tommy shoots a dude in the back of the head, the bullet exits through the dude’s eye, hits Power Girl in the eye, and bounces off.

And just to be super-anal, Hitman also had a panel or two in Bloodbath #2, a book I rather enjoyed at the time but is completely negligible for it's Hitman content, and one of those Secret Files & Origins specials dedicated to the leftovers of the DCU, cramming all of the less-popular characters (Tommy, J'onn J'onnz, Wild Cat, etc.) all into one story featuring Chase.

But I’d hate to close on that note, so let’s take one last look at That Stupid Bastich!:


Yes, who did weld a dog to Lobo's butt?

Garth Ennis, John McCrea, and a handful of great artists, that's who. Just as they've welded Hitman to our hearts.








*This wrapping-up went a long way toward making Hitman one of the best big-company comics of the decade, as few super-comics get the opportunity to tell a complete story. It's just the nature of the beast, to squeeze every available dollar out of every property. When you think about DC's best ongoings, however, it's likely no coincidence that several of them had proper endings, happy or otherwise (Hitman, Starman, The Sandman).



**Cruiser?! Seriously? Man, if you’re not a giant alien robot that turns into a car, or an out and proud gay superhero with a sense of humor, you really have no business using that name. However, it does kind of fit in with the rest of the team, all of whom sound like X-Men rejects: Indigo, Reflex, Finale and Cascade. Does anyone know if the Sovereign Seven every appeared again after their series ended? This is the only issue I read, and it sucked pretty bad, but it did have Claremont and Ron Lim, plus Power Girl. I always liked the logo, anyway.