Review by Paul Dunne
5th February 2025 (Released: 29th May 2024)
The Pitch: The Marvel Universe meets the next generation of punishment! Frank Castle has disappeared, but evil will always need to be punished. As new threats rise to claim innocent victims, criminals become aware of a dangerous vigilante hunting them from the shadows. Who is the new Punisher? What terrible event put him on his path of vengeance? And as he grimly presses on to complete his mission of punishment, will he make it out alive? Barricaded within his fortified tower, the crime lord known as the Offer is defended by an army of guards, the latest in cutting-edge security and a team of stone-cold supervillains capable of slaughtering a battalion. It won't be enough! Plus: The all-new Punisher takes on the Fearmaster - and the terror group known as Jigsaw!
You may find yourself asking: 'How can this be The Punisher? Isn't he effectively dead? Or at least off in some other dimension?’ Indeed, Frank Castle's violent Crusade was so personal, one couldn't imagine someone else just picking up the mantle for shits and giggles. Yet from the opening narration, you sense this could be Castle, back from wherever he went. But this Punisher could just be a case of mistaken identity. Even the opening pages put you back in Castle territory: a dark club, full of criminals. If the last run on the Punisher was a book of the Monsters and Demons that peopled The Hand, then they left some iconography with them for this book to pick up. There's even a moment of Castle-style dialogue badassery ("There's eight of you... For now..."). And then there's the guns...
And the skull.
But this is not your Daddy's Punisher. Or, for that matter, your nephew's or your brother's. Although the motivations are the same and some of the accoutrements are familiar, there's the air of the new about this. Best of all, it leans on existing Punisher mythos without breaking it, so fans should at least be happier than they usually are when someone else steps into their favourite character's shoes.
Here, the lead is also the suspect in a family murder that sets the plot and his revenge in motion. Joe Garrison is his real name. The Punisher is a name that he first rejects, but for reasons of sales and corporate synergy, the book cannot. But the Mission is eerily similar. I'd argue that this Punisher is even more dangerous than Frank in some ways. When he started out, Castle was an Army grunt (battlefield promotions notwithstanding) who had training and maybe heard voices. This guy though... This guy is a trained assassin, who worked off the books for the now-defunct S.H.I.E.L.D. He has their tech at his disposal. even his own Micro, ready-made, in the form of 'Triple A', and she is even more clued into the underworld than Garrison, a man previously known as 'The Gravedigger of S.H.I.E.L.D.' Any moral code that may exist in other Marvel books is absent here. Garrison lives up to his S.H.I.E.L.D. sobriquet and makes sure the people he puts down stay down. By the end of the first issue, Garrison knows what he has to become.
No matter how new the boots and panties of this Punisher, Marvel is still Marvel and whilst we don't get the urban filth and Fury of Ennis' run, we get action and we get recognisable, if sometimes underused villains, like Hyde. As the book progresses more obscure or newer Villains turn up and there's an almost video game quality to the pacing, with each issue representing another level Joe must complete to find out just who put the hit out him. The reveal is not what you might expect and the book as a whole is all the better for it. The action is inventive, with Joe using his S.H.I.E.L.D. tech well, and occasionally having to go analogue to dispatch his enemy. Frank would have been proud. Joe has to take on the moral weight of more revenge as he proceeds from the meta-human underworld, meeting characters who like him, are fallouts from other's legacy. It's actually a lot of fun seeing how Pepose and Wachter get to have their cake and eat it with this book. They replace a character and get to create a new one all in one go, without going scorched earth on the original creation and leaving us sweaty fanboys raging.
Pepose writes a tight issue and overall, a tight trade, keeping the structural foundations of both working. No scene overstays its welcome, no dialogue exchange goes on too long, and his exposition is folded into the action. Most importantly, it left me wanting more of this version of Punisher. There is a level-by-level quality to the separate issues which plays well and gives you both resolution and cliffhanger in each chapter. Whisper it quietly but I'd say this near-perfect comic construction, Wachter's art has the gritty, speedy lines of JRJR, especially in his faces. He balances the absurdist nature of Marvel characters with the grim determination of Joe's war and both creators make the smart play of not using high-profile villains and instead getting into the lower-echelon mechanics of life in the middle. There's still meta-human nastiness going on, but you get the sense that this is a distraction for Joe as he goes about the real mission. And Pepose and Wachter make both those things really sing. If you absolutely, positively have to reboot a popular character, this is probably how you should do it.
Punisher: The Bullet That Follows (TP) is available from your local comic book shop.
