punisher: in the blood

by Rick Remender & Roland Boschi

includes: Punisher: In The Blood # 1-5

the premise:  Recently returned to life after being a Frankenstein monster for awhile, Frank Castle returns to New York, where he's targeted for death by Jigsaw and possibly as many as three of his former sidekicks/ accomplices.  Shooting ensues.

the lowdown:  The final arc of Rick Remender's Punisher reads as a capper to essentially all the "Marvel Universe" Punisher stuff since Matt Fraction's War Journal series.  (Actually, I would buy a book called "Matt Fraction's War Journal".)  I have followed those stories only sporadically, having skipped the first year of Remender's run, and I'd say I was able to pick up about 80-85% of what was going on/ at stake here.  Not sure whether that's an acceptable percentage.  I didn't feel lost but I will say that if, like me, you were brought back to the character by the excellent Frankencastle run, this may not be the best place to jump back on.

The arc itself features Castle squaring off with Jigsaw, who has an accomplice who I'm pretty sure was involved with Fraction's run.  Microchip is also in the book, and I guess there was some stuff with him in the parts of the run I didn't read.  Jigsaw has somehow apparently reanimated Castle's dead wife, who is now a killer and willing to have sex with Jigsaw on camera to taunt Frank.  I mean, really - this happens in the book!  Remender is a twisted dude, that's all I'm sayin'.  So there's a lot of shooting and explosions and people getting burned up and killed in horrible ways - pretty much all the things you've come to expect from a Punisher story.  Obviously this isn't quite at the insanity level of Punisher being chopped to pieces and then re-assembled as a monster, but the tone really isn't all that different, and it's finally a tone that I think mostly works in a Marvel Universe Punisher.  

Boschi was the artist on some of the Frankencastle stuff as well, so there's a good degree of visual continuity, even if the locale and characters are totally different.  There's nothing particularly pretty about the art, but it's not meant to be - it's an illustration of a really ugly world.  Everyone's a bad guy to some degree or another, and the mass-murdering Punisher may actually be the most restrained character in the story, both in actions as well as appearance.

Despite the lunacy, Remender manages to make this a relatively character-driven story.  He makes a point about Castle by having his family reanimated, by having his wife's memory defamed.  It's actually fairly similar to Jason Aaron's take in the MAX book, that Castle has been at the "punishing" game for so long that he really doesn't have any motivation other than inertia.  Though the murder of his family triggered his "mission", he's no longer motivated by their deaths, and really doesn't even remember them all that well.  In Aaron's story, he forgets his son's birthday.  In Remender's, he can't remember his wife's voice.  Both of these takes present Castle as a fundamentally broken person, which inevitably he must be.  You can surround him with all kinds of crazy and spectacle, but at its heart it all stems from his insane approach to life.  Though he is, as remarked in the book, an excellent judge of right and wrong, his approach to "punishing" the latter is the approach of a madman.

So it all pulls together really nicely, with an epilogue that casts some (emphasis *some*) of Castle's actions in a different light.  Remender puts most of the toys neatly back into the toybox, lest you be worried that Maria Castle will be the Punisher-verse's version of Jason Todd.

the verdict:  You've got to be into the Punisher to be into this - it's violent, and mean, and grimy, and over-the-top, and unapologetic about all those things.  It is not an uplifting story.  It is, however, a well-crafted one, and if you do like the Punisher, you will want to give this one a look.