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. 

John McCrea's Ragman in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1

As I happen to have read a few Ragman appearances lately and discussed the way the character was drawn by Kelley Jones and Michael Golden, I thought it might be worthwhile to linger on the way he appears in "The Destiny Dilemma", the lead story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The story was written by Scott Beatty and, more relevant to our discussion here, drawn by John McCrea (Andew Chiu shares the "inkers" credit with McCrea, and Tom McGraw handled the colors, although I should probably note here that I'm not sure they were reproduced 100% faithfully by the library scanner I used for this post). 

McCrea hails from Ireland, and his earliest work was in the British comics industry, including work on Judge Dredd and related characters in the early '90s. It was on one such story that he first collaborated with Irish writer Garth Ennis, with whom he would develop a long and fruitful partnership.

By the year this story was published, McCrea had collaborated with Ennis on 18 issues of the writer's 1993-1995 run on The Demon, and the pair were about four years into their five-year run on Hitman, which I still think is both one of the best comics DC has ever published and one of my favorite comics they have ever published. Ennis and McCrea had also published a four-issue mini-series from Caliber Press called Dicks. 

What all of those comics have in common, aside from McCrea and Ennis, was that they were all rather unique genre stories, ones that celebrated their genres while simultaneously taking the piss out of them. The DC work, at least, was delicately balanced, so that those comics were full of serious character work and parodic comedy elements. A single issue of, say, Hitman might have heart-wrenching drama, gut-busting gags and superior action telling, while also managing to riff on superhero comics tropes and one or more of Ennis' favorite oddball films. (Dicks, on the other hand...well, let's just say I wouldn't use the words "delicately balanced" to describe it.)

So, this story was interesting not just because it was an opportunity to get an extra 22 pages of McCrea's art, but also because it gave us American readers a then-rare opportunity to see McCrea drawing a script from someone other than Ennis (he would go on to do plenty of great work without Ennis in the 21st century, of course) and because here McCrea was drawing a DC super-comic that was completely straight, with no real humor elements to it.

He, of course, knocked it out of the park. 

As bad as that scan of two-page spread above is, what with the line down the middle of image, distorting Madame Xanadu's lovely face, you can see how good his art is here. We're going to concentrate on Ragman in this post, of course, but do note his massive, intimidating version of Blue Devil, and the menace and mystery of his Phantom Stranger, a single white dot on his shadowed face for an eye, and even the hint of menace about Zatanna's half-shaded face, a bit of visual foreshadowing for a twist I will soon spoil. (Oh, and while it's not quite apparent here, he also draws Sentinel, who by this time had lost his unnatural youth and vitality to resume something closer to his biological age of a man in his seventies, as an old man. Sure, this Alan is still handsome and stands up quite straight, but he also has a visible paunch and wrinkles, and his muscles weren't straining to break out of his costume.)

That double-page splash accounts for pages two and three of the story. Sentinel Alan Scott has awoken in a field and he soon stumbles upon the so-called Sentinels of Magic: Doctor Occult, Ragman, Madame Xanadu, Zatanna, Blue Devil, The Phantom Stranger, Faust and the new Doctor Fate, Hector Hall. It's a rather weird group, full of vastly different characters designed by different artists from comics throughout DC's history, but I think it's worth noting that even among a group of such unusual figures, McCrea's Ragman still stands out as particularly strange.

He certainly looks the scariest of the bunch, about as tall as Blue Devil, but thin and awkward looking, seemingly all hood and cloak, with only shadow where his face or much of his body might be. One thing I really like about McCrea's take on Ragman is that, in many of the images, it looks as if Ragman might be all suit and no body; that is, in many panels he looks like a living suit of rags, rather than a living person wearing a suit of living rags. You can see it here in his exaggerated thin-ness, the length of his limbs, and the way his gloves look far too big for his hands (Speaking of thin, check out Zatanna's legs; her ankles look like they belong to a bird rather than a woman. Certainly, McCrea's art has a cartooniness to it, even in this, a serious story). 

These heroes have been gathered for a mysterious purpose, but standing in their midst is the Spear of Destiny, the legendary weapon that once pierced the side of the dying, crucified Jesus, was passed down from conqueror to conqueror and, in the DC Universe, was used by Hitler to keep America's superheroes at bay during World War II and is now both cursed and the only weapon capable of hurting The Spectre.

As The Spectre had just gone on a rampage that threatened the world and the afterlife and then received a new, perhaps unreliable host, these heroes have to decide what they should do with the spear. 

During their discussion, Ragman's rags—which, remember, are each evil souls and their job is to seek out more evil souls to add to their number—are pulled towards the spear.

Our heroes decide on a course of action, and they begin to unite their magics to deal with the spear. Note Ragman's huge, melodramatic gesture there. 

There is a complication, though. That's not really Zatanna, but a villain who took her form to infiltrate the group. Alan Scott identifies the villain as The Wizard. There's an interesting bit where The Wizard essentially rips out the Zatanna shape, a rather weird bit of imagery, given that The Wizard is apparently a bit bigger than that super-skinny Zatanna McCrea had drawn. 

The villain uses the spear to battle the heroes for a bit, but ultimately Faust, whose lack of soul makes him immune to the spear's curse, snatches it from him, Blue Devil punches him out and then Ragman's rags go into action:

Here, Ragman's rags suck The Wizard bodily into his suit, as opposed to how this very process is shown playing out in the later Day of Vengeance, wherein Ragman sucks the soul out of a victim's body, leaving a desiccated corpse behind.

Now, how does this square with 2005 JLA arc "Crisis of Conscience", in which The Wizard is very much not a rag in Ragman's suit of souls? (And I think he had some JSA-related appearances between these this story and "Crisis of Conscience" as well?). Don't ask me; I am not a DC Comics editor. 

Anyway, with The Wizard finally dealt with, the heroes continue with their plan, using their magics to bind the spear and throw it into the sun, where it can only be retrieved if all seven of them gather again and agree to do so.

Then they all put their hands together like a high school sports team right before a game as Alan shouts "Sentinels of Magic!" (as seen in the previous post on Day of Judgment), and that's about the last we see of McCrea's Ragman, aside from his very distinct silhouette as he walks toward a glowing portal created by Doctor Fate. 

In the last four panels, we see The Spectre Hal Jordan debrief with The Phantom Stranger, and Hal explains that he had gathered the Sentinels here to give his friend Alan the means to destroy him, if need be, as a fail-safe. 

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.

Meanwhile...

Yesterday at ComicsAlliance I had a short, image-filled post highlighting the saints-as-superheroes sculpture art of Igor Scalisi Palminteri, and today at Robot 6 I have some thoughts about IDW's new Mars Attacks comic, which features work by EDILW favorite John McCrea.

Review: Batman: Monsters

I puzzled over seeing Batman: Monsters (DC Comics) on a recent Diamond shipping list a lot longer than I should have.

It’s a collection of three short story arcs from the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight title, consisting of seven issues all together. They’re by three different writers, two of them at least being “name” ones able to move some paperbacks by their bylines alone.

I wasn’t quite sure why these stories, though, and why these stories now. Even the binding theme of “monsters”—how is it that that’s never been used fort he subtitle of a Batman trade paperback before?—was a little shaky. One story involves a pretend werewolf, another genetically engineered soldiers, the third supervillain Clayface.

It seemed if one wanted to put together a bunch of Batman fights monsters stories—even if one were limited to issues of LDK—one could find ones that fit better into a “monster” theme. And if one wanted to simply put together short Batman stories written by James Robinson or Warren Ellis, well, there’s certainly enough material floating around that a Batman by Warren Ellis or Batman by James Robinson would be do-able.

But, like I said, I was over-puzzling over the matter. Monsters is essentially just another serviceable, evergreen Batman trade, something of a random sampling of short arcs from LDK, almost the entirety of which could be plundered to put together loosely thematic trades like this.

The first story is “Werewolf,” a three-issue arc by James Robinson and John Watkiss. The title is something of a red herring (Sorry if I’m spoiling the story at all; it is 14 years old though), although it pretty directly frames the leading suspect in a group of vicious murders in both Gotham City and London—a werewolf.

The truth is insanely complicated—animatronics and hallucinogenic gas are involved—and the mystery elements are even more convoluted, but for the most part it’s a rather fun read, and Robinson does a decent job with it (And compared to his more recent superhero work, “Werewolf” might as well be Watchmen).

The appealing elements of LDK included the fact that its Batman was more realistic, that he was divorced from the greater DC Universe and much of his own continuity, and that he was younger, weaker, more fallible and more human. All of that is in evidence here, as Batman journeys to London to get to the bottom of the werewolf killings, and finds himself contending with the cops and robbers of that country.

Watkiss’ art is dynamite, featuring big, thick lines that look like brush strokes, and a tall, slim Batman with highly expressive eyes (despite their lack of pupils). Watkiss’ werewolf design in particular is a great one; it’s gigantic, almost twice as tall as Batman, and bearing paws that could wrap around our hero’s waist. The face isn’t even all that lupine—it’s basically just a huge smile full of teeth.

One year and ten issues later came “Infected,” a two-part story written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Hitman artist John McCrea.

The results of a top secret military experiment to breed perfect soldiers have escaped into Gotham City, and since they’re pre-programmed with war games that make them bug-fuck insane, they essentially go on a killing spree. Batman stops them.

It’s a rather Warren Ellis-y story. There’s some neat super-science ideas in it regarding the specifics of the super-soldiers—gross-looking, organs-on-the-outside, H.R.Giger-y guys who can fire bullets made out of their own bones from guns built right into their wrists—and the exploration of those ideas seem to dominate Ellis’ attention.

The climax contains two events that should have been pretty big deals for Batman—he uses a gun on his opponent, and he takes his opponents life—but neither gets much more than a passing acknowledgement in the narration that Batman would rather not have to use a gun, and that the dude he ices was essentially dead already (For a guy who hates guns and only reluctantly picks this one up, Batman sure is a crack shot).

McCrea’s one of my favorite superhero comics artists, although I’m not sure he’s the best fit for Ellis. Even when operating in a more serious vein as he does here—McCrea tends to modulate the cartooniness of his art from story to story and sometimes even character to character—there’s a fun sense of exaggerated reality to his designs that make his Batman, with his Simon Bisley profile and long cape with curling scallops, if not quite out of place in the story, then not perfectly at home either. (Sorry, that’s a really long, shitty sentence. But what are you gonna do? It’s free, right?).

The final story is the one that sticks closest to LDK’s original mandate of telling untold tales of Batman’s past (or re-telling previously told ones for post-Crisis continuity). This is the story of Batman’s first encounter with Clayface II, the shape-shifting Matthew Hagen Clayface rather than the Golden Age Clayface, and it happens awfully early in Batman’s career.

In fact, Batman says it’s only the third week of his mission, but he’s already tangling with his second Clayface? That struck me odd mainly because the story is written by Alan Grant, who wrote the “Mud Pack” storyline (which really oughta be in trade, DC) and pretty much every Clayface appearance up until the end of the nineties (after which point DC and its writers wouldn’t even bother distinguishing between the various Clayfaces, but just assume the only one was the one from the cartoon).

Grant probably wrote more Batman stories than anyone else in the ‘90s, although I was still sort of surprised to see him here, as his name isn’t quite the draw that Ellis’ or even Robinson’s is at the moment. His story is probably the best one in the book however, as it’s the only one that pretends to be concerned about anything other than the Batman + Badguys = Conflict formula that drives the earlier stories.

This 1997 two-parter was called “Clay,” and while Hagen is the villain, Batman’s main conflict is his reaction to his first encounter with this Clayface.

Batman takes a severe beating, and witnesses Clayface smashing a man’s head between his powerful hands. The image shocked the young Batman, and he can’t get it out of his mind. He spends the rest of the story in a mild state of shock over the gruesome image, and struggles with thoughts of his own mortality throughout.

Okay it’s still not Shakespeare, but Grant’s focused on telling a story about Batman’s inner life as well as his running around getting in fights, so there’s something to that. It’s nice to see shocking violence treated as shocking violence—that’s mature, sophisticated storytelling, rather than violence for violence’s sake (Reading the two-panel sequence, in which we see an image of Clayface’s hands squeezing his victims head in one panel, and the next cuts away to Batman reacting as he’s splattered with bits of gore from off-panel, and a big red “SPLORCH!” tells us what happened, I realized that today we almost certainly would have seen the head being popped on-panel).

Grant is working with Quique Alcatena, an artist whose extremely detailed artwork was so often the very best part of the Batman stories he was drawing in and around that time. His Batman is “first appearance” style Batman, with big, thick bat ears pointed at angles away from the cowl, rather than sticking straight up.

Alcatena is a perfect horror artist, and he draws the story like a horror story. We see every drop of clay on the oozing, undulating surface of the villain, who has a thick, stocky build and ponderous way of moving that suggest a man in an elaborate costume from an old black and white horror movies.

Alcatena gives Batman’s face a shell-shocked, worried look, and Hagen’s a slightly crazed one. He draws every brick in the walls of the underground settings, and every hair on the bats that fly through the Batcave. And when Grant gives him a fever dream of Batman’s about death and violence to cut loose on? Well, I wish I had a scanner to show you.

That’s three stories ranging from pretty good to pretty great scripts, with art that ranges from great to Holy shit, look at how awesome this panel is!, so I guess this collection’s existence isn’t really all that puzzling after all.

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.