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. 

On 2017's Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness (again, apparently)

(UPDATE: So funny story, and by "funny" I mean "slightly alarming." I wanted to revisit 1991's Hearts of Darkness due to some of my recent reading of Ghost Rider comics, so I looked for it in my library catalog, found the above 2017 collection, checked it out, read it and then spent a few hours writing, oh, almost 4,000 words about it. Once I was finished and was attaching tags to it, I noticed that I already had seven for "ron garney" which seemed like a lot to me, so I clicked on that to see which of the comics he drew I had already reviewed and—surprise!—I had already reviewed this very trade, back in 2017, when it first came out. What's worse, that review was much shorter, punchier and funnier than the one I had just written. So not only is my memory deteriorating to the point that I can't remember which comics I've already written about—hell, I didn't even remember having read Dark Design before, and thought I was doing so here for the first time—but my comics-writing-about skills are apparently deteriorating, as I've grown increasingly used to writing super-long posts and publishing once or twice a week, rather than writing something daily-ish. So that's...great. Just great. Anyway, since I wasted an afternoon re-reviewing this book, I might as well go ahead and post it. But do keep in mind there's a shorter 2017 review that makes pretty much the exact same points as this one, only in fewer words. Ugh...)

This trade paperback collects a pair of Howard Mackie-written team-ups featuring three of Marvel's most violent, most badass and most popular heroes of the 1990s: Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Punisher. 

The first, sub-titled Hearts of Darkness and featuring art from John Romita JR and Kalus Janson, was released in 1991 as a $4.95 special, with a spine and sturdier cover, essentially what DC Comics used to call "prestige format." 

The second, 1994's The Dark Design, was a fairly direct sequel, gathering the same heroes, the same villains and even a supporting character, but this one was drawn by Ron Garney and Al Milgrom (And, I see, cost a buck extra, which seems like a lot of inflation for just three years). 

As I mentioned in the first of my recent posts about Marvel's Ghost Rider character, I had actually read Hearts of Darkness before, shortly after it came out, when I was around 13 or so. If I recall the circumstances correctly, my grandfather had taken my sister, brother and I to downtown Ashtabula on a Saturday afternoon, and I convinced them to let me stop into the comic shop that was then on Main Street. My grandfather offered to buy my little brother a comic too, even though he wasn't a regular reader like I was. 

I suggested he try a Marvel comic, as I figured it made no sense for both of us to read DC Comics, and if he started reading Marvels that would double my access to comics. This book, which had a neat wraparound cover, the right half of which was reused for that of the collection, is what he chose (Why my grandfather agreed to pay almost $5 for a comic book, given that he grew up buying them for a dime, I can't imagine).

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the title characters beyond what I read in that comic (and had gleaned from the covers of their books I had seen previously in the shop), and less than that about the book's villain Blackheart, and his adversary/father, Mephisto. 

I didn't remember too much about it, other than that I kinda liked the art (At that point, the only name I was familiar with on the cover was "Klaus Janson", which I knew from reading a friend's copy of The Dark Knight Returns). That and, despite the chains, claws and guns, it must not have really spoken to me, as I didn't start following the adventures of any of these characters after that. (My brother went on to read Wolverine #48-50, which I still have in a longbox somewhere....Say, that fiftieth issue with the claw marks through the outer cover didn't ever end up being worth anything, did it...? Oh, and I did pull Ghost Rider #33 off the new rack out of desperation a few years later, but otherwise it wasn't until about 2000, when Marvel started hiring favorite DC creators and launching their new reader friendly Ultimate line that I started reading any Marvel comics regularly.)

I was curious to revisit the comic now, in part because reading Wolverine: Evilution and the first couple hundred pages of the '90s Ghost Rider comic put me in something of a mood to see more of those characters from that time period, and in part because I was curious to see how much the experience of doing so at this point might differ, decades and hundreds of comics later, when I was so much more familiar with the characters, having seen them in various cartoons, movies and TV shows...in addition to the comics.

Oddly, I have to admit my regard for Hearts of Darkness hasn't changed all that much. I still think the art is pretty great (in the years since 1990, I got to know the name John Romita JR, and gained a great esteem for his work, although I think this is maybe the earliest of his comics I've read), and the story so-so, a somewhat strained plot offering little in the way of characterization, beyond a very tell-not-show summation of these darker superheroes as belonging to a newer, more modern breed of Marvel champion.

The 46-page story opens in the town of Christ's Crown, apparently so named because of a nearby hilltop ringed in thorns, like Jesus' own crown of thorns. There some people in hoods and cloaks have gathered by torchlight to sacrifice a pretty blonde woman, her modesty preserved by a blanket, in the name of a devil that sounds more like that of an X-Men character than something from the Bible: Blackheart. 

Apparently created by JRJR himself just about a year or so previous, with writer Ann Nocenti for their Daredevil run, the character is the son of Marvel's devil figure Mephisto, and has an interesting look: He's an all-black humanoid with a tail, giant red eyes, thorny skin and a huge mane of hair that looked more like porcupine quills than dreadlocks to teenage Caleb (Wes Bentley played him in the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, although he looked far more like Wes Bentley than JRJR's weird design in that movie). 

He bubbles up from the blood spilled to summon him, strips the flesh from the bones of all of his worshipers, and then seems to have a nervous breakdown of sorts, complaining to himself about his lot in life, that his father stripped him of his free will and, holding the skull of one of the victims' head aloft like Hamlet, he talks about how "There is a new breed of man...one whose fall towards the corrupt will not be so far", a breed of man that will help him kill his father. 

Cut to Dan Ketch motorcycling into what seems like a pretty typical small town, arriving at a local boarding house with a big sign reading "BOARDING HOUSE" on it, and meeting its proprietor, a woman named Flo, and her daughter, a little girl with a ponytail bouncing a ball in the driveway.

He's only the latest boarder there, and he meets the other two at dinner: A "Mr. Logan", who, thanks to his distinctive hairstyle, any reader would immediately recognize as Wolverine, and a "Mr. Frank," who looks a lot like The Punisher wearing sunglasses indoors...save for his pencil-thin mustache.

"Something about these two," Dan thinks to himself. "I feel like I've met them before."

He has, of course. According to Comics.org, Hearts of Darkness was cover dated December of 1991; Ghost Rider met Punisher in issues #5 and #6 of his own book, September and October of the previous year, and he first met Wolverine in a string of issues of Marvel Comics Presents during the winter of 1990-1991. 

Dan apparently can't see through their disguises and aliases though, and they don't recognize him without his skull on fire, I guess, although Wolvie will later tell The Punisher "something about him tickles my nose," regarding Ketch.

This happens at night, when Wolverine sticks a claw through Punisher's door with a "SNIKT" and a "Guess who?" 

"Mr. Logan?" Punisher says, opening the door. "Thought it was you. Didn't think you'd recognize me."

"The phony mustache ain't that good of a disguise," Wolvie answers. "Besides you've got the stink of death on you, Punisher-- --Just like me!" 

Here Frank peels off his mustache, which, sadly, never reappears throughout the rest of the comic.

They compare notes, and we learn what brings the three anti-heroes to the Christ's Church boarding house: All three received short, hand-written notes signed "B.H.", each promising what might seem like their heart's desire. Knowledge about the Ghost Rider, Wolverine's true origins and how he received his claws, and who really killed Castle's family.

So not really all that sophisticated a plan, for a demon, really, this anonymous mail scam. For some reason, they had to come to Christ's Crown, too? Is that where Blackheart lives? Can he not tempt long-distance?

Anyway, that night Blackheart appears to all three separately in their rooms, apparently simultaneously, tempting them further, and talking about them as a new breed of hero:

All three of you represent humanity's newest breed of hero.

A hero that isn't afraid to approach the edge when need arises.

It's an intangible thing. A gray area which resides within each of you, in a place that my father would call your soul. 

I mean, I guess...? But it seems more of an aesthetic thing, at this point. The Punisher and Wolverine seem to kill enemies without compunction, and not fret over the morality of doing so all that much (I wouldn't exactly say The Punisher works in a "gray area," for example; he just seems to murder bad guys and save good guys). 

And while I'm obviously not sure about what happens later in his career, but at this point, Dan's Ghost Rider has never killed anyone.

Anyway, Blackheart's pitch involves making them more powerful, helping them tap into the gray area of their souls and, in exchange, all he wants from them, he says, is their help in killing "the greatest evil your race has ever known, my father, Mephisto." A little later, Blackheart refers to Mephisto as "your world's devil," which seems pretty appropriate.

Still, all three don't want to work with Blackheart, and all three answers in a curt declarative: "No."

Blackheart then, realizing he will have to try a different approach, disappears from their rooms. Flo and seemingly all of the people in the town start to walk as if in a daze towards the top of the hill. As for Blackheart, he's stolen Danny's bike and abducted Lucy.

Punisher and Wolverine struggle to get through both the mass of innocent people and then, later, the thorns. Dan, meanwhile, shouldn't be able to transform into Ghost Rider without his bike, but then looks at his palms, and sees symbols on each. His hands then burst into flame, the flesh melting off of them, and then off his face, and, transformed, he jumps onto a motorcycle stolen from a sports store and speeds through the thorns.

After a bit more tempting (during which Blackheart refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos! If that is who you are"; it is, we will eventually learn, not who this Ghost Rider is), the heroes all follow Blackheart to hell in an attempt to free Lucy, and there they fight hordes of little green, frog-like creatures (those seen on the wraparound cover), and, eventually, take on Blackheart. 

One would think such a thing would be impossible, but Ghost Rider takes off his gloves to reveal boney, burning fists, and shouting "Feel the pain!" he lays into Blackheart, punching him so hard he pulps half his face. Another punch, and his fist breaks through Blackheart's torso, exiting the demon's back.

From there, Wolverine lops off one of Blackheart's arms, and then Punisher spends a few panels shooting him with what I think are a machine gun ("BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA") and a grenade launcher, maybe? ("POOM POOM POOM POOM"). I don't know; I've never read an issue of The Punisher Armory, so I'm not sure what guns he carries when. 

Soon, Blackheart is just a severed head sitting in a pool of black goo, but as much punishment as his physical body seems to have taken, he can't be killed like this, and his body starts to reform. Before he can do so though, the heroes are all dismissed by Blackheart's dad, Mephisto.

This Mephisto looks nothing like the red-skinned devil with the cape and fright wig that John Buscema and Stan Lee created for Silver Surfer in the late-sixties. Rather, he looks more like a behemoth red humanoid frog of sorts, with a prominent beak, a long, long tongue and prominent breasts, each with a long, ribbon-like nipple. His weird head is crowned with an explosion of thick red hairs or tentacles, and he's surrounded by gingerbread-shaped forms that I assume are meant to be human souls in long-shot.

He scoops up the puddle of Blackheart and swallows him, making a vague threat to Ghost Rider: 

Go now, Ghost Rider-- 

--But we will meet again. 

Soon. And there will be no gray areas involved.

The truth will be revealed.

And that's pretty much the entirety of the adventure, our heroes reappearing atop the hill with Lucy, who they reunite with her mother. And while the skeptical Punisher asks Wolverine if all of that was real, and what he thinks of the business about "us being close to the edge," Ghost Rider gets the last word in, saying that, "As long as the innocent are protected-- --our cause is just."

The price tag would have been fairly steep for a book that's only twice the length of a regular comic book—that month's issue of Ghost Rider was only $1.75, after all—but I have to imagine Marvel fans appreciated the opportunity to see three of their favorite heroes in a single story like that, and Mackie certainly writes them all well (even if Ghost Rider, whose book Mackie was then writing, seems to get the most attention), and he does a fine job in the tough guy, alpha male personas (Originally, I took this as 100% straight; re-reading it today, I wonder to what degree Mackie might have been parodying a certain kind of action hero with Mr. Logan and Mr. Frank's macho portrayals).

I really can't say enough good things about JRJR and Janson's renderings of the characters (colored by John Wellington). They are big, thick and bulky as one comes to expect from JRJR, but they all also look like "themselves" in ways that other artists aren't always able to pull off (And I appreciated JRJR making Wolverine so short, particularly when standing next to the big Frank Castle).

Did the story deserve a sequel? Well, probably not, but it got one anyway, in the form of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Dark Design.

Things have changed a lot in Christ's Crown in three years, and things have changed a lot for at least one of the heroes. At this point, Wolverine has exchanged his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt for his blue and gold one, complete with the shoulder pads I don't think make any sense.

Additionally, he seems to have lost the metal on his claws, as here he has those jagged bone claws he sported for a while.

Oh, and for some reason, his eyes are red much of the time, whether he's wearing his cowl or not. Other times, they are white. Should we blame colorist Paul Mounts for this? Maybe, but we'll come back around to the coloring in a little bit.

The plot begins in media res, with Ghost Rider on foot, carrying a now much bigger and older Lucy, while a woman wearing a tank top crop top with no bra and carrying a big shotgun urges him on. Garney's Ghost Rider has the same basic design as the one I had gotten used to, save for in his drawings of him, G.R.'s skull seems to float in a pillar of flame rather than be connected directly to his torso, and, for some reason (the nineties, I guess?), there is often strings of spittle between his skeletal jaws.

They are on the run from Blackheart's followers, who are apparently members of the town who have been corrupted by his touch. They now all have prominent black veins visible in their skin, they dress in revealing, tight-fitting black clothes that look like they might have been worn to a goth dance club or a fetish ball, and they wield weird-looking sci-fin guns that seem to shoot lasers.

They are after Lucy, who seems to have maybe developed some kind of (mutant?) power around the time she "began...coming of age". 

The town has been physically transformed into some sort of weird hellscape with scary-looking buildings more bizarre than those even the most creative artists might draw in Gotham City. And the population divided between Blackheart's corrupted, who want to capture Lucy for him, and the regular folk, who are trying to defend Lucy from them.

Our three heroes have returned to the city, compelled by psychic distress signals from Lucy who, as Garney draws her, has apparently hit puberty in the intervening years, although her breasts aren't as prominent as those of all the other women he draws in this issue, corrupt and uncorrupt. 

Meanwhile, Blackheart is hanging out in a cathedral of some sort, looking much as he did before, only now wearing a trench coat. He talks to himself, ranting about his descent into madness, while his father, in the form of a dove, seems to torment him.

Ghost Rider, the first hero we see, has his hand touched by one of the corrupt, which spread their infection to him. In order to try and stave it off, he turns back into Dan Ketch.

Wolverine, who Garney draws not with that weird wolfman hairstyle and prominent muttonchops he always sports, but with a long, lion-like mane; after his first skirmish with the corrupt, when The Punisher saves him by gunning down a wave of a half-dozen attackers from a rooftop, Wolvie suits up, and I can't imagine how all that hair fits so snugly beneath his cowl. 

Shortly after the heroes all meet up at a camp, the corrupted attack and make off with Lucy who, back at Blackheart's cathedral, is dressed in a white wedding dress (complete with veil), where she is apparently to become his child bride, and the key to his victory over his father.

Our heroes attack, are briefly strung up on strands of ink black something-or-other and subjected to mental images to torment them. A naked Wolverine, his hair seemingly having gotten even longer, has no patience for this when he seems to find himself in the snow Canadian wilderness: 

GRRR! The north country...Canada! 

Pretty original takin' me back to my roots.

It's been tried too many times.

Don't even know what's real myself anymore.

Don't really care! Get out of my mind, Blackheart!

He's able to get through to Ghost Rider and Punisher, and once again the three triple-team the demon, Ghost Rider beating him with flaming fists, Wolverine slicing him with his claws, Punisher pumping rounds into him.

What's different this time? Well, this time Lucy runs from the heroes back to the fallen Blackheart, seemingly offering him forgiveness, at least according to Mackie's narration. But when Mephisto again arrives to collect his son, Blackheart pulls a knife, the tip of which is dripping with blood.

"I do not need the child," he says. "Only this! The blood of a child. INNOCENT BLOOD!"

So I guess Lucy either slipped him a knife with her blood on it, or, when she went back to forgive him, allowed him a bit of her blood...? That, or he cut her just deeply enough to get a few drops of her blood on his blade a few pages earlier, when the heroes first stormed his base and he briefly held a knife to Lucy's throat.

At any rate, that's apparently all one needs to kill Marvel's devil (temporarily, I assume), as Blackheart stabs his dad to death, and the last panels shows Blackheart standing triumphant, having doffed his trench coat and raised his arms in victory: "Mephisto, King of Hell, is DEAD... Long live the new king!"

I imagine that was a significant event in the Marvel Universe and was probably reflected in a few comics for a while, but I also imagine it was relatively short-lived. Certainly, I've seen Mephisto alive and well since (notably in Jason Aaron's Avengers run, which I read the first two-thirds of or so. And now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw Blackheart in a comic...).

For Mackie's part, I think the script for Dark Design suffers from the classic affliction of so many sequels, that of repeating something because it was popular and there was demand for more of the same, and not because there was anything new to say. The story thus suffers from diminishing returns.

Also, because it is essentially just a few action scenes strung together, only interrupted by Blackheart ranting at his father, it doesn't have anything as fun as seeing the characters in their secret identities...or The Punisher's clumsy attempts at a disguise that we saw in Hearts of Darkness. 

And then, of course, there's no real need for Mackie to meditate on the dark nature of these heroes, because, well, he already did that three years previous, and, in that time, they all just kept on doing what they've been doing with, I imagine, little change (In this story, for example, Ghost Rider refuses to kill human beings, even those corrupted by Blackheart, while Wolverine and The Punisher mow them down without a second thought). 

I did not care for the art at all, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that I genuinely like Garney's art on JLA about a decade or so later (He drew the "Pain of The Gods" and "Syndicate Rules" arcs toward the end of the series). I suppose we can blame much of that on the times, as even a quick flip-through will reveal this to be a very nineties looking book.

Aside from his specific design choices, the colors, the letters and their various fonts and special effects, the layouts, the inset panels...the story reminded me a lot of the look of the earlier issues of Spawn I had read, and seemed a significant departure from the first year or so of Mackie and company's Ghost Rider, or Hearts of Darkness. 

Indeed, because it's just a page-turn away from Hearts of Darkness, I think Dark Design suffers in comparison, although I wonder how much of this is really a matter of, say, the JRJR/Janson team being better at telling a comics story than the Garney/Milgrom one, and how much of it is due to the first being published in 1991, and the second in 1994. 

Certainly, the advances in comics coloring technology and lettering style (and/or technology?) seems to have informed the latter book, which seems to take full advantage of all the new choices a colorist had to work with in the mid-nineties, whether it necessarily ended up benefiting the book in the long run or not. 

Reading both stories back to back today, Dark Design looks much darker, muddier and harder to read than Hearts of Darkness. (Also, one can't tell from this particular collection, but Dark Design was apparently published on glossy paper, which might have accounted for its higher cost, whereas I don't think Hearts of Darkness was. I'm now a little curious what similarly glossy paged books from the time might now look like in trade collections, but I'm not even sure where I could look to see...). 

Anyway, I disliked Dark Design as much as I liked Hearts of Darkness, and I would hesitate to recommend this particular collection to any reader...unless, of course, said reader was simply curious about Marvel Comics in the first half of the nineties, in which case I guess this book is a decent encapsulation, both good and bad.

Oh, and as I mentioned on Bluesky, after reading this particular trade paperback, I now find myself, for the first time in my life, as a person with opinions about Wolverine. Those being that the brown and yellow costume > than the blue and gold one, and that metal claws > bone claws. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 7: Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1

A mere two months after Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire, a second DC/Marvel crossover featuring the two characters hit the stands, this one featuring the actual Batman, Bruce Wayne, rather than his temporary fill-in, Jean-Paul Valley. 

I thought it was the better of the two comics, and not simply because of the fact that it was what a reader might expect from a crossover of the two characters. The creative team also seemed better suited to the task, with the art especially being of a magnitude greater than that of the previous comic, at least according to my own personal tastes.

That creative team was writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist John Romita Jr. and inker Klaus Janson.

By 1994, Dixon was both a prolific Punisher writer and a prolific Batman writer, and thus an ideal choice for a book in which the pair cross paths with one another. While I've never read his Punisher output, I have read a lot of Dixon's Batman comics (and those featuring other members of the Bat-Family, particularly from his long run on the first Robin ongoing). 

While not my favorite Batman writer (that would have been, at the time, probably Alan Grant), and never one for particularly inspired, imaginative, wild stories, Dixon was still an incredibly solid comics writer, a stalwart whose name on a book guaranteed a certain level of competency and quality. 

I always thought he excelled at coming up with plots for his heroes to challenge and foil, often with interesting crimes that seemed perfect for action movies (And yes, as a fan of his work, it saddens me that his personal politics seem to have alienated him from much of the mainstream industry, and lead to him working on truly bizarre comics like 2016's Clinton Cash: The Graphic Novel, a comics adaptation of Peter Schweizer's election cycle hit book). 

JRJR was an extremely familiar presence at Marvel Comics and had drawn Punisher War Journal, but this comic was his very first time drawing a DC Comics character officially. That was, in and of itself, rather exciting at the time.

And as for Klaus Janson, not only was he a frequent JRJR collaborator, but his work with Frank Miller on 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns meant his was a name every Batman fan would know. 

So the art, which was colored by Christie Scheele, was obviously great, and the intense, dynamic cover of the two characters wrestling the pouring rain you see above is but a small taste.

Romita's drawing of the lead characters' figures are big, blocky and imposing...muscular, but with a sense of animated grace about them. His many mobster characters that populate the panels of the book are similarly big and bulky, with jagged edges to their suits and faces.

Under Janson's heavy inks, there's a tactile sense of grit to the art, and lots of blackness, from busy crosshatching to the rings around the stalactites in the Batcave to the wrinkles and shadows on the suits to the driving black rain of the climactic encounter.

Dixon's script gives a few great opportunities to really show off the Romita and Janson art, too, and they do not waste it.

Both characters are introduced in interesting splash spreads that require the reader to turn the open book from the standard horizontal orientation to a vertical one (no easy feat with a 1,000-page hardcover omnibus!) and read them that way, not unlike a pin-up in an old girly magazine.

The Punisher is introduced first, in a low angle standing atop some crates, a series of muzzle flashes and arcs of spent bullet casings emanating from the guns he has in both hands (They look like uzis to me, although he calls them "MACs" in narration later in the story; are those different things? I am not a gun person). 

JRJR's Frank Castle is bigger and thicker than Barry Kitson's was, and his face is covered in stubble and shadow. A strip of two inset panels along the bottom of the image of Castle keep it from being a true two-page splash; these panels feature regular Batman supporting characters Harvey Dent, Renee Montoya and Commissioner Gordon. 

Batman appears a few pages later, in similar fashion, although he's on the "bottom" of the spread, with a strip of panels above him. He's shown leaping into action, seemingly falling from the sky, with his hands outstretched like claws (and his fingers looking particularly, peculiarly flat, as JRJR tends to draw hands), his face and cape all black.

Later in the book, at the climax, when the pair come to blows for the second time, there's another two-page spread requiring one to turn the book to see it right-side up, featuring The Punisher punching Batman in the face.

I'm not sure about the image, as it affords the moment of biggest impact in the entire story to that particular blow in a fight, and it's not exactly the most dramatic moment of their conflict. It also devotes all that comic page real estate to a moment in which Castle "wins" the fight with Batman, although in both of the instances in which they fight one another in this book, Dixon's script makes clear that Batman would ultimately be victorious in a hand-to-hand fight with Castle (Actually, Lake of Fire also presumed the same about a fight between Punisher and that Batman, although the Punisher won the conflict by resorting to using a gun and a bit of trickery). 

It's perhaps worth pausing to consider JRJR's Batman, as this was his first time drawing the character (He would of course get another crack at the character during his 2016-2020ish stint at DC Comics, where he drew the first arc of writer Scott Snyder's All-Star Batman).

This is, of course, Batman in his "classic" costume, blue and gray with a form-fitting utility belt and a yellow circle around his bat-emblem (Batman would debut his new, all-black, brief-less costume the following year; that's what he would be wearing in his next Marvel crossover, a 1995 team-up with Spider-Man). I say "blue" of course, but it may look black to you, given how many lines Romita and Janson use, and how heavy the inks are; it does appear to be the same color as The Punisher's costume in this crossover, so I guess one could say they are both blue-black or, perhaps, comic book black.

JRJR's Batman is as big and imposing as his Punisher, but, in the few instances where we see him with his cape unfurled and flying behind him, he's also a bit more lithe and athletic, his waist looking almost comically slim below his huge barrel chest.

On the ears front, JRJR is on the longer side of the spectrum, which was the fashion at the time. Unusually for many Batman artists, however, his bat-ears are very thick at the base, forming two big black triangles atop his head.

As for Dixon's plot, it's pretty straightforward, and somewhat perfunctory, basically maneuvering the pair into a rainy Gotham City alleyway so they can hit one another and focus on their differences in crime-fighting philosophy in as perfect a test case as possible: Unrepentant mass murderer The Joker, put a bullet in his head or beat him up and take him to Arkham?

There's no big supervillain plot like Jigsaw's plan to turn the Gotham City reservoir into a lake of fire as in Lake of Fire, nor is there any focus on the interior lives of the characters, as with Valley's struggling with his delusions, and the conflict between his religious programming and his inherited crime-fighting mission. 

There's also, perhaps surprisingly, little real connective tissue between Deadly Knights and Lake of Fire. The characters make passing references to it (The Punisher noting that Batman's fighting style seems as different as his costume, for example, or Batman noting that The Punisher was in Gotham while he was "absent"). It obviously doesn't matter now that the two comics are collected back-to-back in the omnibus, but one could easily have read Deadly Knights in 1994 without ever having read Lake of Fire. 

We open with The Punisher in a massive firefight with generic gangsters in a Gotham City paint factory, his narration telling us he's returned to the city looking for Jigsaw, who never returned to New York as he had expected. Just as Castle is about to execute the last surviving gunman, Batman lands on the back of his head and they fight for a few pages.

"Something different here," Castle narrates. "Last time I was in Gotham this guy was a reckless brawler. Now he seems more skilled. Something refined about him."

Batman, meanwhile, is somewhat dismissive of The Punisher's abilities: "Punisher's tough. Strong. At heart he's just a brawler. All rage and brute strength." 

Though The Punisher gets in a few hits, including breaking a crate over Batman's head, Batman is in the process of throwing him across the room when the burning building collapses, and The Punisher escapes.

Meanwhile, Jigsaw, now drawn with his face bandaged up like a mummy, the work of "the best plastic surgeon that extortion could buy" in the words of his new partner The Joker, is trying to consolidate power around himself, and become the new leader of Gotham's criminal underworld. 

It is perhaps here worth noting that JRJR's Jigsaw looks entirely different from Kitson's. He's a great deal smaller, his hair far longer and shaggier (and a different color, although I suppose that's between the colorists), and he's lost the weird metal neck brace he had seemed to be wearing. 

As for The Joker, I really like JRJR's version, which manages to convey a full range of emotions through the eyes and brows alone, despite the smile being fixed. 

Dixon writes The Joker more as a typical gangland figure than he's usually portrayed, even if a crazy one with something of a schtick. Here he's not as wild or theatrical as in most of his other appearances, even those that Dixon himself had written. And there's no real plan that he's executing here, either; he's simply working to help Jigsaw consolidate power because...well, because Dixon wanted both title characters' archenemies in the relatively short, 45-ish page story, one assumes. 

While the two vigilantes pursue parallel investigations—and their respective computer-savvy sidekicks Micro and Robin have a computer fight, leading to this immortal panel—they both end up in a nightclub with The Joker, Jigsaw, a local crime boss and a whole bunch of generic guys with suits and guns, leading to a big, long 12-page fight scene ("The caped choirboy is holding his own, but he's throwing fists in a firefight," The Punisher observes).

At the end, the crime-fighters end up facing one another's villains, which means The Punisher putting a gun in The Joker's face and saying, "I've got all the therapy you need right here, comedian."

Batman, of course, would appear just before Castle could pull the trigger, leading first to a brief argument, and then that splash of The Punisher decking Batman.

A short fight ensues, in which Dixon has Batman assure us he could totally kick Castle's ass, if so inclined: "I let you have that one because you probably think I deserved it," he says, and when Castle throws another punch, Batman catches his fist and tosses him into a pile of boxes. "I said one...Don't test me, Castle."

Batman threatens him that if The Punisher ever comes to Gotham City again he'll see him locked up with "the other murderers," but seems awfully complacent about The Punisher's last few nights of killing a dozen or two guys in his city, and, rather uncharacteristically, seems content to just let The Punisher go (To be fair to Dixon, he had run out of his allotted pages).  

The Punisher, meanwhile, gets the last word in, but otherwise slinks away. And, to date anyway, has obeyed Batman's command and never returned to Gotham. 

This would be the pair's final meeting...unless you count an off-panel scene in JLA/Avengers, wherein the Justice League, visiting the Marvel Universe, are apparently delayed in their mission by some 20 minutes when Batman stops to beat up The Punisher. But, again, that was off panel.

If Deadly Knights was what we might expect a DC/Marvel crossover of the mid-1990s to be—two popular, top-tier headliners with interestingly opposing philosophies running headlong into one another by a creative team perfectly suited to the occasion—the next collaboration between the two publishers was anything but. 

Which isn't to say it wasn't interesting, of course, just not predictable.

Next: 1995's Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 6: Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1

While none of the prose pieces in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus answer the question of why, exactly, the two publishers stopped collaborating on crossover comics after 1982's Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, a new piece by editor Mike Carlin explains why they eventually resumed a decade and change later.

Carlin's essay notes that several editors and writers had moved from Marvel Comics to DC Comics, including himself, Archie Goodwin, Denny O'Neil, Louise Simonson and Roger Stern, a fact that diminished the sense of "Us Vs. Them" that had previously existed between the publishers.

Additionally, this generation of editors and creators were, unlike those that preceded them, genuine fans of the superhero characters they had grown up reading about, and thus approached something like, say, the possibility of Batman and Spider-Man teaming up for the first time with the same sort of enthusiasm their readers might, rather than simply as a money-making venture.

What Carlin doesn't explain, however, is why in the world DC and Marvel finally resumed with this particular crossover, 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire. It is here that while reading the collection I really started to miss all of those introductions and forewords from earlier in the book, those original to the omnibus and those reprinted from 1991's Crossover Classics, which shared a great deal of behind-the-scenes information and provided a sense of what the publishers were thinking with particular character pairings. 

Of course, both Batman and The Punisher were popular characters. The former perennially so, and the latter was, at that point, not too far removed from the zenith of his popularity, I believe.

Both were urban, street-level vigilantes whose focus was often fighting real-world crime, but they had vastly different, opposing philosophies on how to do so. Batman refused to ever take a life, a position he held to such a zealous extreme that he would often risk his own life to save that of unrepentant murderers like The Joker, who he knew would certainly go on to kill again and again. The Punisher happily, regularly took the lives of the criminals he faced, racking up a body count that could probably eclipse that of any mass murderer, The Joker included (At this point in the character's history, though, Marvel was playing the Punisher as a hero, if a deadly one, and not the unrepentant psychopath that 21st century writers like Garth Ennis would depict him as).

The catch with this particular crossover, however, is that The Punisher wouldn't be meeting the "real" Batman at all, but the temporary replacement Batman, Jean-Paul Valley, the Batman ally codenamed Azrael who would go on to assume the mantle of the bat during the 1993-1994 trilogy of Batman events, Knightfall, Knightquest and KnightsEnd. (As for Bruce Wayne, he was busy elsewhere; after Bane broke his back in the climax of Knightfall, he was relegated to a wheelchair but nevertheless pursued the kidnappers of his girlfriend at the time, Dr. Shondra Kinsolving.)

It's not entirely clear to me why Marvel Comics would necessarily want a crossover with the substitute Batman rather than the real deal or, you know, any other DC character at all, but then, this was long before I paid attention to things like sales charts, so I couldn't even guess how popular the "AzBats" Batman was at the time, and if the Punisher crossover sold well or not. (Ask Mike Sterling, maybe.)

It is clear reading this in this collection and then, immediately afterwards, reading its same-year sequel Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights, that the publishers must have planned both comics around the same time, always intending to follow up the Punisher's meeting with the Jean-Paul Valley Batman with another story in which he met the Bruce Wayne Batman (despite the fact that the books have two entirely different creative teams).

Rather late in the game of Lake of Fire, The Joker appears, coming to the aid of Punisher villain Jigsaw (Who, as far as I can tell, was, like, the only Punisher villain, given Frank Castle's habit of executing his foes).  The Joker is only in five panels of the entire book, presumably because he was being teased for a lengthier, more substantial role in the sequel. 

Though Lake of Fire was the first of what would end up being about a dozen such DC/Marvel crossovers in the next half dozen years or so, it doesn't read as too terribly special a book. It's only 48 pages long, the shortest DC/Marvel crossover to date, and thus lacks the larger scope and more epic feel of the original round of inter-company crossovers. 

It's also somewhat confined in focus, mostly just featuring the two title characters, and not doing much of the way in terms of exploring their home cities, supporting casts, interior lives or even their differing crime-fighting philosophies (Although it's worth noting, I suppose, that this more violent, more brutal version of Batman isn't quite as opposite the Punisher that the Bruce Wayne Batman is; while Jean-Paul Valley and Frank Castle find themselves coming to blows by the end of their team-up, Valley is far more sympathetic to Castle than Wayne would have been).

As for the creators, the publishers chose writer Denny O'Neil and artists Barry Kitson and James Pascoe.

O'Neil was obviously a solid choice, having worked extensively as both a writer and editor for both companies. He had written both Batman and Punisher before and was, at the time of this book's publication, the editor of DC's Batman line. In fact, he had created the Jean-Paul Valley character (with artist Joe Quesada in 1992's Batman: Sword of Azrael) and obviously had a great deal of affection for him, going on to pen a 100-issue run on an Azrael solo title after the KnightsEnd conclusion. 

Kitson had likewise drawn for both publishers at that point in his career but wasn't particularly associated with either character (O'Neil must have thought the two worked well together, though, as Kitson would go on to draw a large chunk of that Azrael series). 

Though I appreciate Kitson's talents and have read and enjoyed some of his later work, I can't say I was particularly dazzled with his work here. The book opens with a two-page spread set in hell, as it was being dreamed by Valley, who was raised and hypnotically programmed by the crypto-Christian cult the Order of St. Dumas (When he eventually starts to lose it in the Batman storyline, a process that seems well underway by the time this crossover is set during, he increasingly has visions of St. Dumas.)

"Draw hell" seems like a great, compelling prompt for an artist to get, affording them a chance to really go to town, but Kitson's splash is a let-down. His hell is cavernous, with seemingly naturally occurring pillars holding a roof aloft, while untold numbers of suffering humans fill the infinite space. But Kitson only draws about 15 of the people, including a busty lady in a torn dress reaching up and screaming and a muscular, pupil-less bald man reaching out and doing...something to another pair of figures, the rest of the horde simply suggested by a brown mass filling most of the cave, little circles here and there intimating heads. 

As far as comic book depictions of hell goes, it looks uninspired and, given the page real estate afforded the image, lazy. The book is not off to a great start.

Valley awakes from his dream, having fallen asleep in the Batcave, wearing his particularly uncomfortable-looking version of the Batsuit. He tells readers that the computers have intercepted and decoded a message from the Pentagon about a formula for rocket fuel that was stolen by an associate of a known Gotham criminal named Bressi. He dons his helmet and rushes into action. 

Meanwhile, a big man in a big overcoat is narrating in PG comic book tough guy language: "Few places are worse than New York. Gotham City is one. I'm here because it's where the trail of a mook named Jigsaw took me...It's cruddy. That's okay. I'm used to crud."

This is, of course, The Punisher, who gets in a barfight looking for information on Jigsaw and ends up getting a lead pointing him to a church downtown. The lead, coincidentally, comes from the guy who has the rocket fuel plans ("You seem real interested in what's in this case. Papers...maybe I'll like 'em as much as you").

Meanwhile Jigsaw, who Kitson draws as a particularly big guy with a face like a quilt and a big, metal neck brace of some kind, explains his plans for the readers' benefit: The new rocket fuel has the ability to ignite water, and Jigsaw plans to use it on the city reservoir and then charge the city an astronomical fee to repair the damages and, I don't know, restore the reservoir somehow...?

The sub-title of the book thus has a double meaning, referring both metaphorically to hell and literally to what Jigsaw plans to do to Gotham's water supply. 

The church lead turns out to be a trap, and The Punisher is splashed with drugged holy water and the building is set on fire. The new Batman comes to the rescue, bursting through a stained-glass window, and getting The Punisher to safety.

After introductions, and The Punisher convincing Batman that he needs him to track down Jigsaw ("I know Jigsaw...How he lives, thinks...breathes."), and some threats (Batman: "We are allies until Bressi is caught. Then— You become prey." Punisher: "Well...Somebody does."), they climb into the Batmobile and drive to a steam bath full of Russian criminal types in towels for a fight scene.

The Punisher manages to slip away from Batman, and they continue their investigation separately. In the end, The Punisher throws Jigsaw out of a window, and Batman is swinging by just in time to catch the villain, who he leaves tied up (For, it turns out, The Joker to discover and free). 

Then it's time for the big fight, which I guess O'Neil makes feel somewhat unexpected by placing it after the cooperation portion of the team-up. It only lasts three pages before The Punisher finally pulls a gun and puts a couple of bullets into Batman's armored chest. That doesn't stop the new Dark Knight either, so The Punisher pulls a gas grenade from Batman's utility belt and detonates it in his face, allowing him to retreat, but not before offering the defeated Batman rather lame goodbye: "Hey, man...I cheated, okay?"

And that concludes the first DC/Marvel team-up in many years...although, as I said earlier, it wasn't exactly the end of Batman/Punisher story. The two would crossover again almost immediately, but next time it would be Bruce Wayne in the cape and cowl.

Next: 1994's Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights

Review: Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness

Hey, I remember this one! It was an extra-long prestige format comic published in 1991. My grandfather and my siblings were shopping downtown, back when my hometown's downtown still had stores in it, including a comics shop, and my little brother, then considering maybe getting into comics, asked my grandfather to buy it for him. My grandfather, for whom comic books used to cost a dime, was taken aback by the $4.95 price tag (which was actually steep even for 1991), but ultimately relented.

I wonder what he would make of this new trade paperback edition, which costs $15.99; hell, having read the 1991 one-shot, I couldn't imagine how Marvel could get away with that price tag. Turns out they did so by including a sequel I didn't know existed until I started reading this new edition, the 1994 Dark Design (plus a five-page Marvel Age interview with Hearts pencil artist John Romita Jr).

The premise of Hearts of Darkness was that the three characters whose names came before the sub-title--Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Punisher--represented a new* breed of hero with levels of darkness in their hearts that pushed them so close to evil that the demon prince Blackheart thought he could tempt the three of them to assist him in assassinating his father, Mephisto who was, of course, one of Marvel's various Satan analogues.

It was probably just a happy coincidence that, in the early 1990s, these were also three of Marvel's most popular characters. Writer Howard Mackie certainly knew what he was doing in terms of proposing a comic book.

It's an extremely simple, straightforward story. Blackheart invites Danny Ketch, Frank Castle and Logan to the town of Christ's Crown--apparently named because of a hill surrounded with thick thickets of thorn bushes nearby--via letters promising them information they might want, signing the missives B.H.

All three show up on the same day at the same boarding house, run by a woman whose little girl Lucy is extremely trusting and takes to each of the dark, scowling men immediately. Her mother portentously notes her daughter strange trusting nature, and how it's almost like there isn't a bad bone in her body.

That night, Blackheart reveals himself to the three anti-heroes simultaneously, and, when they all tell him to get bent--they may occasionally kill their foes, or, in Frank's case, constantly kill their foes, but that doesn't mean they are going to sign up to work with the a devil (There's a lot of hair-splitting and semi-silly speechifying about how they all walk the razor's edge without falling over the cliff, and other such metaphor mixing).

To try to convince them, Blackheart snatches up Lucy, the only pure soul in Christ's Crown, and takes over the minds of the rest of the city, all of whom have enough sin in them that they can control them. He also steals Danny's bike.

Together, the three popular badasses are able to claw, shoot and hot-chain their way through hordes of little frog-like demons, journey to hell, turn Blackheart into gory chewing gum and save Lucy.

The chief pleasure of the book, then as now, was John Romita Jr.'s artwork, inked by a perfectly compatible Klaus Janson. I really loved his Blackheart design. He looks a bit like a giant, humanoid porcupine, with a head, shoulders and back covered in a mane of bristling spines. He has a tail, bit red eyes and no mouth; additionally, Romita and Janson give him what look like thorns all over his skin. It's a sharp, uncomfortable, jittery, anxious design. It's a hell of a devil, really (I wish that's what the version in the first Ghost Rider movie looked like; it might have gone a ways towards improving that film).

The version of Mephisto who appears here was pretty unfamiliar to me, looking like a gigantic, bloated humanoid with large breasts (and long, string-like nipples), and a vaguely avian head that looks like a primitive ceremonial mask of a bird. There's something of a primitive fertility goddess statue about him. He never gets up off his haunches, but is shown big enough to grab the mooshed-up Blackheart in his hand and throw him into his mouth.

JRJR draws the three title characters exceptionally well, of course. I particularly liked seeing how small and stocky his Wolverine looked; perhaps it was the influence of the films, or simply the slackening of Big Two style guides over the decades, but Wolverine tends to be as tall whoever is drawing him these days wants him to be, so it was kinda refreshing to see a little Wolverine standing next to a giant Frank Castle.

Dark Design is...not very good. Mackie writes it, but Ron Garney pencils and Al Milgrom inks. I like both artists, and Garney in particular has evolved in style into something I quite like now, but back in 1994 he was very much working in a 1990s Jime Lee-like style. Unlike Hearts, this sequel doesn't age well at all, and seems to be, visually at least, inextricably linked to the time in which it was published.

Blackheart has returned to Christ's Crown, and is now sort of insane. He has somehow transformed and twisted the town into a goth sci-fi big city, and enslaved portions of the population, who are called The Corrupt. They wear dumb spandex costumes, have visible black veins, and wield weird laser guns.

Lucy, now a tween or teen, is protected by a small and dwindling band of rebels. I'm not sure why Blackheart didn't just take over their minds too, but it may have something to do with her burgeoning psychic powers, with which she summons Ghost Rider, Wolvie and Punisher back to town. After killing their way through The Corrupt, they take on Blackheart again, this time interrupting his wedding to Lucy (Ew).

He gets what he needs from her, though: Her innocent blood on the tip of his knife, with which he seemingly kills his father.

As I said, Garney's style here is pretty much just default early '90s superhero art. His Blackheart lacks all the pointy parts of JRJR's, looks smaller and wears a coat; he reminded me of an extremely off-model Nightcrawler throughout. He draws the weird bird version of Mephisto, but with a few alterations, like some sort of make-up or mask on his face, and huger, blacker nipples.

Wolverine has traded his brown and yellow costume in for his blue and gold one at this point, but Ghost Rider and Punisher have barely changed (the latter traded in his white boots for black ones, but that's the most drastic wardrobe change he made during the years between these comics). The coloring, by Paul Mounts, is much more garish and nauseous in the second story, but that likely has a lot to do with the changing technology of comic book coloring of the day. There were many more new options suddenly available, and colorists went for them.

I'm not sure what the originals cost these days, should you find them in back-issue bins, but I'd be shocked if they had increased in value so much that you couldn't find them there for cheaper than the cost of this collection. On the other hand, new collections are easier to buy. If you really want to. Like I said, this is a nice showcase of JRJR's art from a previous stage in his career, and serves as a nice time capsule of a certain time in Marvel comics history, but it's not exactly literature.



*Created between 1972 and 1974, these characters weren't exactly brand-new in 1991, although they were definitely among the second generation of Marvel characters. This Ghost Rider was introduced just around the time this comic was originally published though.