Fire for Effect: Garth Ennis and The Punisher

Every comic fan has a hook moment, a single panel in which a casual reader becomes a subscription box filling fan for life. For some people it’s Batman materializing out of the shadows of a rainy alley, or The Hulk wiping out a city block with a gesture. For the romantic crowd, it might be Gwen Stacey dying out in Spiderman’s all too human arms, while for many of the distaff fans, it’s Wonder Woman simultaneously putting a madman behind bars and Superman in his place. But for me, the moment I knew I was hooked was a fairly modest (by comic book standards) exploding yacht. But it wasn’t a laser blast or super powered punch that decimated the boat, belonging to a terrorist gun-runner. It was a well planned, expertly timed jet ski loaded with explosives, piloted by none other than Vietnam veteran turned merciless vigilante Frank Castle - The Punisher. I remember thinking for the first time “Oh, man – you could actually DO that!” It was one of the coolest things that had ever occurred to my fragile nine year old psyche.

The Punisher made sense to me. He was everything the superheroes I came up on weren’t. Lacking superpowers, he had to be smarter than his foes, better prepared, and willing to go to lengths others would not. He was brutal and efficient, killing criminals without compunction and using every means at his disposal to do so, laying waste to legions of drug dealers, pimps, smugglers and murderers with everything from knives and chains to assault rifles rocket launchers and Mack trucks. He didn’t have the luxury of mucking around with wisecracks, one liners, or hand to hand combat. This method of crime fighting also meant that, a few persistent vendettas aside, The Punisher avoided the miasma of personal drama that seemed to drown some characters. This single minded obsession with his war on crime and his black and white sense of justice and the made the character totally terrifying – and utterly compelling. I was hooked.

Last month, without much fanfare or acclaim, Garth Ennis’ epic, eight year run on The Punisher came to an end. Though Ennis can’t be credited with literally bringing the character back from the dead (that dubious honor belongs to Christopher Golden), Ennis reinvigorated the character, among Marvel’s most poorly handled properties. After long, solid runs by scribes like Mike Baron and Chuck Dixon, Frank Castle, like so many compelling Marvel characters of the mid-nineties, took a nose dive in quality. This disastrous handling culminated in an inexplicable switching of sides in which the vigilante became a mob enforcer, taking on superheroes and Nick Fury’s SHIELD in Marvel’s ill-fated Edge imprint before being resurrected at the inception of the Marvel Knights series, now possessed of supernatural powers and tasked by the heavenly host to do what he does best – kill criminals. Each of these attempted revamps puttered and ended up in discount crates along titles like Darkhawk and Sleepwalker for all the right reasons – they mostly sucked, and managed to render a uniquely visceral and exciting character leaving one of Marvel’s most compelling characters to languish.

Until 2000, when Garth Ennis, fresh off his award winning and name making series Preacher, received a carte blanche takeover of the character, five years after his widely panned but now classic What If…? style one-shot, The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe. With the relative freedom of the adult themed Marvel Knights imprint, Ennis and Preacher penciller Steve Dillon brought the same moral ambiguity, finely honed storytelling, over the top violence and pitch black humor that the duo discovered working together on chain smoking, ass kicking archmagus John Constantine in Hellblazer and perfected in the pages Preacher to The Punisher, and fans ate it up. Frank Castle was back, and in the finest of form. He was a cold as ice killer, a badass of few words, using gasoline, grenades, shotguns and the Empire State Building as weapons in his renewed crusade against New York’s crime families, just in the first issue. It was everything we could have wanted and more.

In addition to the comic relief provided by Detective Soap and Lieutenant von Ricthoffen, the hapless and harried two person task force assigned to apprehend The Punisher, Frank was…funny. For the first time, the ultimate vigilante had a sense of humor to match his sense of purpose. Sure, it wasn’t a real “Ha-Ha” sort of funny. More “Oh, man would that hurt!” funny, each issue a sort of dire and deadpan Three Stooges episode. With flamethrowers. It was gallows humor taken to it’s ultimate conclusion. The mission remained, but readers got the idea for the first time that Castle really enjoyed what he did. That this was not just a killer or a crime fighter, but an artist at work with a belt fed M-60, whose medium just happened to be legions of unlucky and underpaid goombas. Some characters shoot people with a rifle – The Punisher conducts a symphony with one.

But even in Welcome Back, Frank, Ennis’ seminal and mostly light hearted, if ultra violent, story arc, the seed of something much darker is there, something scarier than even the violent past of The Punisher we know. When Frank finds himself at death’s door once again, his mild mannered neighbor, drawn into the holocaust that is his life, poses a simple question – why does he kill bad people. Castle’s answer couldn’t be simpler. “I hate them.” Gone are the classic pretensions of making the world a safer place, or even of taking revenge for his family, cut down by mob violence. “I hate them,” says Castle. And we believe him. We understand the flipside of the joy Ennis has let Castle find in his grim work. After decades of a mostly solitary life, killing is all he knows how to do anymore. Even the funny moments, watching Frank bemoan Giulani’s newly cleaned up New York City or feed a mob boss to a trio of pissed off polar bears, one gets the sense that Frank enjoys what he does too much, that without the heinous criminals he defines himself against, he’d be lost. Ennis’ Punisher doesn’t just wage war on criminals – he needs it to keep going.

After 37 increasingly dark but just as often hilarious issues of The Punisher on Marvel Knights, Ennis moved the title to Marvel’s adults only MAX line with a four issue miniseries Punisher: Born, which Ennis himself called “…the darkest, most brutal, vicious and uncompromising thing I've ever written.” Born revamped the origin of The Punisher, forever transforming the character and leaving an indelible mark on franchise whose only other distinguishing marks are mostly just stains (see also Dolph Lundgren). With an ‘Adults Only’ series, Ennis was free to make the character, and the trials he faced, as twisted, vulgar and violent and as he could, and this series marked the end of one Punisher era and the beginning of another, one that took both character and reader places that simply couldn’t be explored before. Gone was the jaunty gallows humor of the Marvel Knights series, replaced by an in depth character study of a broken man and his lifelong devotion to a gruesome task. Devoid of the sense of dark humor that had buoyed the earlier series, this Punisher is a damaged individual with no aversion to torture, a seemingly limitless capacity for pain and no qualms about murdering friends and allies should they fail to abide by his strict moral code. In Born and the 60 issues that followed, Frank Castle became something both more and less than human; he becomes a terrible weapon looking for a target, a weapon forged much earlier in the hellish crucible of Vietnam.

Ennis’ Punisher becomes even more misanthropic and hell bent than the characters earlier incarnations. Rather than obsessed with vengeance, or with stopping crime, The Punisher is an extension of the Thanatos instinct, though Ennis himself would probably think me an asshole for framing it in geek-speak. Put plainly, Ennis’ Punisher is a man looking for something to kill. Rather than being a reason for his crusade, the deaths of his loved ones are simply an excuse. With nothing left to live for, Castle became The Punisher not because he was seeking justice for his family, but because it let him kill. Freely, without regret and with only his own shattered moral compass to answer to, Frank Castle pitted himself against the world. He hasn’t stopped since. He can’t.

Ennis’s final story arc, Valley Forge, Valley Forge, brings his run on The Punisher full circle, completing another link in the cycle of violence that began on a desolate hill in Vietnam. Ennis, a war history buff who explored Vietnam and the experience of it’s American vets briefly in Preacher, explores Frank Castle not as a hero, and not even as the hard edged anti-hero he has so often been handled as, but as a terribly damaged war vet, obsessive and psychotic, a brutal and cartoonish exaggeration of the thousands of veterans who have returned from the battlefield but never really came back.

And in Ennis’ swan song on the book, it’s appropriate that the character takes a back seat to the war that created him. Ostensibly the concluding story sets The Punisher on a collision course with a shadowy group of generals who, in their haste to cover up their war profiteering and unspeakable crimes, make him the target of a special forces unit, knowing that Castle, at his heart, is still a soldier, and won’t kill those that he still considers innocent comrades. But this tale shares time almost equally with excerpts from a book about the birth of The Punisher in a doomed encampment in Vietnam. As the arc and Ennis’ run on The Punisher winds down, this story, that takes longtime readers back to the pages of Born, comes to the forefront. The issue 60 finale features a grand total of five lines from The Punisher, whose inner monologues, to be fair, have always been stronger and more prevalent than his chit-chat.

Visually, the arc is tamer than normal, with pages upon pages eaten up by text and Goran Parlov’s blocky, nourish figures going at it with kid gloves on. There are some striking panels, most notably a bas masked, baseball bat wielding Punisher dismantling the forces sent against him. But for the most part, the violence of the present takes a back seat to the violence of the past in Valley Forge, Valley Forge, an arc which eschews gunplay and fireworks for a series of mostly effective if slightly heavy handed emotional gut punches. And while Castle racks up a fair body count in this final arc, his most gruesome work is done off camera. Instead, the reader is treated to TV news clips of the war in Iraq, far more graphic than any the military would actually let be aired. And as these and other soldiers continue dying in new wars, earning new profits for new masters, and continue coming back home to bleaker and bleaker prospects, the forces that created The Punisher will remain. Castle will go on killing, a force of nature running parallel to the worst in us, whose last Ennis penned line is an assurance that his war will go on forever.

The Barracuda

For the last few years, I’ve lived in a college town with a high percentage of Alaskan students. This being the case, I’ve had Alaskan roommates, professors, drinking buddies and Greyhound seatmates fairly regularly for some time now, and while I don’t pretend that this makes me an expert on the one of a kind politics of the Great White North, I can certainly fake it if somebody hums a few bars. That said, I, like many Americans, know almost nothing about Sarah Palin. And that's because there is precious little to know. Palin is a self described "hockey mom" and evangelical Christian who got involved in politics almost accidentally, moving from the PTA to City Council in Wasilla, Alaska before taking over as mayor of the town of less than 10,000. She r won her first gubernatorial campaign running on a campaign to cut spending and clean up government and became Alaska's youngest governor and first female governor in 2006. But what does she really stand for?

Well, one way she managed to save money was by cancelling the construction of the infamous Ketchikan 'bridge to nowhere' - and keeping the federal money for use on other projects. This is apparently what passes for "telling Congress thanks but no thanks." In her short time as Governor, Palin has also developed an unnerving knack for replacing officials who make decisions she dislikes, from the state Board of Agriculture and Conservation to a Public Safety Commissioner who refused to fire a state trooper in the midst of a messy divorce with Palin's sister. So while I’d like to believe that the Palin pick is a silly one that will ultimately hurt the Straight Talk Express, I’m not sure I believe it. It’s a silly pick to be sure – a huge vote of confidence in an untested official from a state whose Republican Party is utterly crooked and notably unpunished for it. But will it hurt the campaign?

That has been worrying me more and more all weekend. First off, I don't think the Public Works commissioner firing hurts her as much as I feel it should. People just don’t much care about Public Works commissioners in states they’ve never visited, especially ones that they often mistake for Canada. The fact that the state trooper she was trying to get canned was by all accounts not exactly a peach shouldn’t be an extenuating circumstance, but it’s certainly not going to help people take the matter more seriously.

The second problem is bigger, and it is this. Earlier, I'd said that Joe Biden wipes the floor with a half term governor with no foreign relations experience or exposure on the public stage. But here's the thing - America doesn't like to see pretty girls get picked on. If Joe Biden goes at Palin with both guns blazing come the Vice Presidential debate, as he would have with Mittens or Pawlenty, he risks coming off as a bully. If he doesn't, then the best the Obama/Biden ticket can come away with from the VP debates is a draw, which frankly isn't good enough. So the question is can Biden land a Lloyd Bentsen-esque knockout punch without looking like he's swinging? The guys good, but if he's that good...well, he probably would have been nominated president by now. Neal Kinnock, where art thou in our hour of need?

Finally, we come to the disgruntled Hillary supporter issue. I firmly believe that even the most disgruntled Hillary voters are not disgruntled enough to see through this gross and pandering sham of a VP pick. I think that most of these people will end up voting the issues, and understand that a fanatical anti-abortion crusader who believes that creationism should be taught alongside real science and who is, via her Selleck mustachioed hubbie, literally in bed with the oil industry does not have the best interests of Jane Q. Soccermom at heart. I think that, disillusioned as they may be, most women who went from supporting Hillary to disappointed fence sitting are smart enough, savvy enough, politically aware enough and virtuous enough to see through this frankly offensive ruse.

That said, anytime I need to believe that many good things about people, I tend to come away disappointed.

But in the interest of full disclosure, Palin loves the Obama energy plan – it says so in a press release that’s since been removed from her website – luckily, you can still access it in Google’s cache for now, here. Thanks, Google!

Wowzers

So, Sarah Palin is the official pick for the VP of the Republican ticket. Never heard of her? You're not alone.

This is being described as a Hail Mary pick, and that's probably fair. But this is not a graceful Doug Flutie wing and a prayer to the endzone. It's more akin to a Rex Grossman, third and long unthinking heave into mid-air. It's a pass off the back foot, made by a stumbling candidate who's panicking under pressure.

A lot is being made of the impact this pick will have on disgruntled Hillary cupporters, but I don't see it. The argument is that women across the nation will choose a fanatically anti-choice creationist with a year and a half of experience as Governor of a sparsely populated state with a history of major governmental corruption (to which Palin has made her own notable contribution as of late) to be the next in line to be President... because she's a woman. Which is just about as offensive to Clinton supporters and, frankly, women in general, as one can get.

I don't think any Clinton supporters are really that disgruntled. The Palin choice may help to energize women who are already in the Republican base, but that base consists for the most part of people who already believe that President Obama will confiscate every firearm in America and enforce mandatory abortions to pave the way for the coming Islamic invasion. The point being, you're probably not picking up a ton of votes here.

The timing is an inspired way of stealing bounce from a great speech by Barack Obama who, in front of a TV audience of 38 million, finally went on the attack against McCain. And ain't it about damn time. The Obama campaign is to be lauded for it's valiant efforts to remain above the fray of the typical presidential smear campaign, but at some point this high mindedness is just going to reduce a great candidate to a punching bag. So far, apart from a couple of ads regarding McCain's housing situation, Obama's campaign has remained frustratingly above the fray. This is American politics, and when someone hits you in front of a crowd of people, you hit them back. It's time to loose the hounds and draw some blood. McCain is not George Bush, but he represents a continuation of his ruinous policies, and that deserves to be said. And with the appointment of an inexperienced vice presidential candidate, McCain just made his age a valid campaign issue. The man is unlikely to make it through two terms, and that means that everyone who is thinking about voting for President McCain has to consider that they also may be voting for President Palin. And I can't wait to see what a debate with Joe Biden makes that prospect look like.

Snap Judgment: Son of Rambow

On the heels of his first feature, 2005’s critically bashed but not half bad adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, director Garth Jennings is hitting from the other side of the plate in his latest effort. Son of Rambow leaves behind the territory of the sci-fi epic in favor of a coming of age tale that’s charming and kid friendly but has enough genuine laughs that it avoids getting stuck in the “aw, shucks” territory that it could have occupied.

Son of Rambow follows two British youngsters, hooligan Lee Carter and quiet, religious Will Proudfoot. Both boys are navigating the path to manhood without the benefit of a father figure. Instead, they find John Rambo to latch onto, and in their raucous, harebrained remake of First Blood, they find strength in one another, supporting each other and bringing one another’s dream (such as a menacing flying dog) to vivid life. And while Jennings is apparently unable to leave his music video background completely behind, which results in a couple of fantasies and dream sequences that are out of touch with the rest of the film, the film within a film crafted by Lee and Will is an unabashed love letter to the joys and catharsis of filmmaking.

And yeah, it’s all a little pat, especially with a third act that you’ll swear you’ve seen before. And some moments will have you scratching your head, like a pee wee new wave club that’s apparently nestled in the halls of a British prep school. But warts and all, Son of Rambow is a fun romp through the perils of childhood that even the most cinematically hard hearted can find themselves warming up to.

Snap Judgment: The Fall

I walked out of The Fall thinking about some things that I don’t understand, and here are just a few.

I don’t understand why director Tarsem Singh has directed only one other feature length film, 2000’s visually stimulating but otherwise abominable Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell.

I don’t understand why Lee Pace doesn’t get more work in film.

But mostly I don’t understand why more movies like this don’t get made. The Fall is hands down the most beautiful film I’ve seen this year; Tarsem’s eye for stirring landscapes and intriguing, surreal images creates some of the most remarkable sequences put to film in recent memory. Images like a blood soaked burial cairn set against a stunning desert horizon seem like they’re pulled right from a dream, or, in the case of the stunning and all too briefly explored Labyrinth of Despair, a nightmare.

Indeed, these scenes are crafted in the mind’s eye of Alexandria, (played by the adorable and perfectly cast Cantica Untaru) the precocious, charming and wily young migrant laborer whose broken arm keep her confined to a hospital in sun washed 1920’s L.A. It’s during her stay here that she meets Roy Walker (Pace), a silent film stuntman who recently lost his legs performing a foolhardy stunt.

Determined to take his own life but powerless to put his plan into motion, Roy enlists Alexandria’s unwitting assistance. As he begins weaving the story of 5 legendary heroes, the bored and lonely girl latches on to the tale, becoming as much storyteller as audience. Eventually, she reluctantly fetches the morphine that Roy needs as much as she needs the escape provided by this epic tale that Roy’s simple story becomes to her. It’s through her eyes that we see Roy’s fantastic tale unravel, and she also provides the frame for the story inside the hospital. It’s refreshing to note that, while less awe inducing than it’s more mythic counterpart, is compelling and carefully crafted, and some of the film’s finest performances take place not in the shimmering fantasy, but the shady and isolated hospital corridors.

But the fantastic elements of the story take the cake. From an elephant swimming through a sapphire reef to a daring raid on a desert caravan to the legion of ebon helmed warriors that floods the staircases of an Escheresque courtyard, The Fall presents one breathtaking image after another, topping itself with grace and ease. Through Alexandria’s imagination and Tarsem’s innovative and masterful vision, we too become enraptured by Roy’s story, staring at the screen slack jawed and moved beyond all reason. Ultimately, The Fall succeeds because it succeeds in making one remember the sense of wonder that we watched movies with as children. I can pay it no higher compliment than that.

The Nature of the Beast

It occurs to me that Robert Christgau might not know what business he’s in.

In his National Public Radio review of Blame it on Gravity, the latest album by the Old 97’s, Christgau decides to spend a good chunk of time openly wondering whether some of the songs on the album reflect actual troubles in the lovelife of frontman Rhett Miller. That’s a reasonable speculation for a music critic to make, great. It's a standard, is somewhat pat, observation. What rankled me was the fact that Christgau follows this statement almost immediately by stating that he’s “not in the gossip business,” and patting himself on the back for not publicly speculating on the condition of marriage.

Now I’m not saying that the gossip business is a bad business. It’s a fine business, nobler than some and better than most. But it is what it is, and when you talk about rock stars for a living, you, my friend, are in the gossip business.

Let The Hate Flow Through You: Towards a Finer Understanding of Irrational Prejudices

Yesterday, I learned to hate Zack Snyder. It's not for his lukewarm remake of George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead. It's not even for his universally overrated adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, a blissfully short film stretched to a terminally long trainwreck by slowing down every action scene to a slow motion crawl. It's not even because I'm pretty sure he's going to trim the incredible story of Watchmen to a whiz bang seminar on how to use CGI effects to make people forget that you're not actually telling much of a story. I find all these things annoying, certainly, and I think they are all reasons to dislike Snyder. And I did. But up until yesterday, hate would have been far too strong a word to describe how I felt about the guy.

No longer.

So what happened? Zack Snyder didn't do me any personal slight in the last twenty four hours. He didn't punch me in the nose or publish a snarky blog post about me or puncture the tire on my bike. In fact, I'm sure Snyder is a perfectly nice guy who calls his mom every week and would never dream of kicking a puppy, even an ugly one. But yesterday, in an NPR interview about the return of Brett Favre, I found out that Snyder is a Green Bay Packers fan. And as a life long Bears fan in the mold of Bill Swerski, I am thus honor bound to dislike the guy.

I put it to you that there is nothing wrong with this.

While I, like any other liberal arts major in the U.S., abhor racism, sexism, and pretty much all "-isms" as a matter of principle, I firmly believe that hanging on to a couple of bone deep long held prejudices do much to build character, to give one a complete and fully realized personality. In this day and age, so much of our identity is tied into the things we like. The bands we listen to, the clothes we wear, teh food we eat - we display the things we like for all to see. But what we dislike, we hold closer to our chests. But as any playmate questionairre teaches us, our dislikes say as much about us as anything we enjoy.

Now, like any properly prejudiced person, I have a few buddies who are gold and green diehards. Some of my best friends and all that. I've learned, through effort and practice, to play down my distaste for this deep and basic personality flaw. I like having beers with these guys. I would be sad if any of them were struck by a heavy object moving at a high velocity, and I would make the appropriate hue and cry. But at the end of the day - well, it's like knowing someone you're close to is a pathological liar. There's not much the poor bastard can do about it, sure, but it's just sort of an oily thing for a person to be.

And why shouldn't it be so? Does this hate make me a bad person? No, it doesn't. It makes me a person who doesn't like things, and we all don't like things. Lots of things. People who, in the year of our Lord 2008, still cannot use an ATM, bad grammar, the clicking of pens, people with no inside voice, cell phones in movie theaters - these are all things that incur our wrath, and rightly so. But rather than grit our teeth at these petty irritations as polite society dictates, I'm urging the opposite. Embrace your hate. Be comfortable with the things that annoy you. As Peter Finch would put it, "Get mad as hell!" and don't feel bad about it. Because it is as much who you are as your loyalties, your loves and your My Top Rated playlist. And it deserves a little respect.