Between the "Will he or won't he?" presidential debate and the American economy undergoing total protonic reversal, it's easy to understand that quite a few noteworthy stories got swept aside this week in this week's news cycle. Here's one such interesting tidbit - the FDA has released a proposal for regulating genetically modified animals. And by genetically modified, we mean an animal that has had genes or DNA sequences taken from another animal or microbe and inserted into it's genetic sequence. And by regulated, we of course mean not labelled as what it is. For those of you playing along at home, this means that the government has taken the first steps toward allowing livestock that has been altered on a genetic level into the food supply, meaning that your fast food hamburger may have been tinkered with in a lab before it arrives on you plate.
In a sense, this is old news, or at least a foregone conclusion. Making live stock bigger, stronger and tastier has been a long term goal of agribusiness since there has been agribusiness - in a sense, biotech enhanced animals are just the next logical step from animals that are pumped full of growth hormones, treated with antibiotics from birth and fed on high fat, high protein diets that increase yield. But this next step is a doozy, transforming animals on the most basic level, making their bodies do think that nature never intended. Still, with the pre-eminence of genetically engineered food crops in today's market, it was only a matter of time until we saw GM livestock enter the marketplace.
Needless to say, bioengineering animals can produce positive results, such as pigs that whose manure is low in phosphates that contaminate water supplies around the world. No one would be sinking billions of dollars of research and development money into bioengineering projects if great (and profitable) results weren't a possibility. Likewise, it would be silly to assume that the people working on these projects are mad scientists, rubbing their hands together and cackling wildly about the havoc their transgenic creations will wreak upon the world.
But the FDA proposal as it stands reeks of boundless optimism, giving biotech companies the benefit of the doubt that all of these animals are safe for human consumption in the long run without actually feeding them to any humans. Until, that is, you buy you're next side of smoky, delicious bacon made from a pig that has stopped passing phosphate in it's stool.
As the proposal stands, which you can read here stands, FDA regulators would have to approve any genetically modified animal before it entered the food system. Companies like Massachusetts based Aqua Bounty Farms, which has is seeking a patent on a strain of Uber-salmon that it would like to sell to you would be required only to prove that the product they are selling is still almost entirely a salmon in every meaningful way. Perhaps most disturbingly, in the name of trade secrecy, no peer review of the animals concerned will be required.
On the plus side, think of all the incredible animals we'll soon be able to eat! Love the taste of veal but hate the dirty looks you get from fellow patrons and servers? Those are a thing of the past when older cows can be just as tender and succulent after a long, happy life on the range. Have you always wanted the low calorie goodness of chicken with the taste of a tenderloin? We can make that happen. And Kirk Cameron, after long last, will be free to dine on the moist, gamy flesh of the croco-duck. Truly, this is a brave new world.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Big Bust
All too soon after a beautiful beginning, during which all of its proton beams fired true, super-cooled substances have brought about our downfall once more, and it will be spring before the Large Hadron Collider gets turned on again. After a blown transformer caused a leak of liquid helium inside the world’s largest particle accelerator, it became clear that the problem, inside a part of the collider that runs so cold it will take weeks to return to room temperature, would not be fixed by the time the CERN staff leaves on it’s winter vacation in November. Stupid helium.
This means that dark matter, Higgs bosons or tiny black holes will be created by the LHC until the spring of 2009, leaving us all wondering, for at least a few months more, just what IS the nature of the universe?
But on the other hand, the thing didn’t implode the universe on activation, so for right now, it’s probably safe to call the situation a wash.
This means that dark matter, Higgs bosons or tiny black holes will be created by the LHC until the spring of 2009, leaving us all wondering, for at least a few months more, just what IS the nature of the universe?
But on the other hand, the thing didn’t implode the universe on activation, so for right now, it’s probably safe to call the situation a wash.
R.I.P. - Irony in Politics
After 26 year Washington veteran John McCain accused Barack Obama of being a beltway insider this week, you might have thought the campaign couldn't get any more ironical.
You would have been wrong.
Recently, Republicans in Fairfax County, Virginia asked themselves a question. "Who do we know who can really reach out to minority voters in our area?" And the resounding answer came back - Confederate Flag waving, noose displaying former Senator George "Macaca" Allen, who will be a featured speaker at a minority voter outreach event this weekend. This is really the absolute limit - it's so balls out stupid that it's just sad - right before it crosses back over to being funny again. That this is the person the GOP thinks represents their best chance of pleading their party's case to voters, then they're is in even bigger trouble than we thought.
Meanwhile, if the Grand Old Party is looking for someone to help get out the youth vote in Florida, can I make a reccomendation? Former state representive Mark Foley, who has demonstrated an unparalleled skill in connecting and developing dialogue with young males - albeit not quite those of voting age.
You would have been wrong.
Recently, Republicans in Fairfax County, Virginia asked themselves a question. "Who do we know who can really reach out to minority voters in our area?" And the resounding answer came back - Confederate Flag waving, noose displaying former Senator George "Macaca" Allen, who will be a featured speaker at a minority voter outreach event this weekend. This is really the absolute limit - it's so balls out stupid that it's just sad - right before it crosses back over to being funny again. That this is the person the GOP thinks represents their best chance of pleading their party's case to voters, then they're is in even bigger trouble than we thought.
Meanwhile, if the Grand Old Party is looking for someone to help get out the youth vote in Florida, can I make a reccomendation? Former state representive Mark Foley, who has demonstrated an unparalleled skill in connecting and developing dialogue with young males - albeit not quite those of voting age.
Making Your Money Work For... Someone, Somewhere, Presumably
Today saw markets around the globe soar, mostly on the happy thoughts of investors whose moods have been buoyed by a U.S. plan to rescue American financial markets from the consequences of a decade of fast and loose money management. The hope is that the plan, whose speculated cost runs somewehere in the trillions of dollars, will, like Homer Simpson's ample rump, "turn a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island" of economic collapse.
So what will the plan to stem Wall Street's bleeding and keep the current kerfuffle from growing into a full fledged fiasco look like? We don't know yet. We do know that it will cost a lot of taxpayer money, without a guaranteed payback of said funds. We know that President Bush today called for the speedy passage of legislation "as quickly as possible without adding controversial provisions that could delay action," which one can assume means that the administration doesn't want to see any meaningful penal measures that would make investment banks think twice before doing anything like this again. Whatever the end plan is, it will involve borrowing more cash from China. We'll probably know exactly how much is going to be spent by early next week, as Bush assured the American public, like Fed Secerarary Paulson before him, that lawmakers will be working through the weekend to cleanup a mess it took them years of lax oversight to make. Which is admirable, even if you have to wish they'd stop acting like they deserve medals for coming into work on Saturday.
So, other than spending your money, what is the government doing about the financial crisis? They've also prohibited short selling of 799 financial stocks for the next two weeks. This move was lauded by investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman, who in the past have made money for their clients (and thus themselves) by... you guessed it - short selling stocks. Naturally, when they do it, this is a good thing for the economy, but when it's done to them, the sky is falling. But taken together with banks that are soon going to be artificially propped up by government funds and false confidence, the facts that some of the best watchdogs for corporate malfeasance and dodgy accounting (keep in mind it was short sellers who brought about the falls of companies like Enron and Worldcom), and it may be a while before we really know what sort of damage has been done to the economy. and that means it will be even longer before we even start fixing it.
So what will the plan to stem Wall Street's bleeding and keep the current kerfuffle from growing into a full fledged fiasco look like? We don't know yet. We do know that it will cost a lot of taxpayer money, without a guaranteed payback of said funds. We know that President Bush today called for the speedy passage of legislation "as quickly as possible without adding controversial provisions that could delay action," which one can assume means that the administration doesn't want to see any meaningful penal measures that would make investment banks think twice before doing anything like this again. Whatever the end plan is, it will involve borrowing more cash from China. We'll probably know exactly how much is going to be spent by early next week, as Bush assured the American public, like Fed Secerarary Paulson before him, that lawmakers will be working through the weekend to cleanup a mess it took them years of lax oversight to make. Which is admirable, even if you have to wish they'd stop acting like they deserve medals for coming into work on Saturday.
So, other than spending your money, what is the government doing about the financial crisis? They've also prohibited short selling of 799 financial stocks for the next two weeks. This move was lauded by investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman, who in the past have made money for their clients (and thus themselves) by... you guessed it - short selling stocks. Naturally, when they do it, this is a good thing for the economy, but when it's done to them, the sky is falling. But taken together with banks that are soon going to be artificially propped up by government funds and false confidence, the facts that some of the best watchdogs for corporate malfeasance and dodgy accounting (keep in mind it was short sellers who brought about the falls of companies like Enron and Worldcom), and it may be a while before we really know what sort of damage has been done to the economy. and that means it will be even longer before we even start fixing it.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Ridiculous
A short list of things you should not, under any circumstances, do while texting:
- Cook a meal
- Order dinner from a server
- Drive your car
- Manage your finances
- Drive a goddamned train
Condolences to the families of everyone the 25 who passed away and the hundreds who were injured because this conductor couldn't wait ten minutes to find out "What R U doing 2nite?"
Now, if you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago whether we needed technology that made trains more or less capable of operating their own brakes, I would have told you no, it seems like STOPPING AT A RED LIGHT is something so basic, so throughly ingrained in our collective psyche, that people who have presumably been trained to operate commuter trains, or at least given a brochure one how to do so at some point, would be well capable of doing so. But apparently, as is so often the case, it appears that we must bring in robots to do jobs that we're too stupid to do safely and reliably.
- Cook a meal
- Order dinner from a server
- Drive your car
- Manage your finances
- Drive a goddamned train
Condolences to the families of everyone the 25 who passed away and the hundreds who were injured because this conductor couldn't wait ten minutes to find out "What R U doing 2nite?"
Now, if you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago whether we needed technology that made trains more or less capable of operating their own brakes, I would have told you no, it seems like STOPPING AT A RED LIGHT is something so basic, so throughly ingrained in our collective psyche, that people who have presumably been trained to operate commuter trains, or at least given a brochure one how to do so at some point, would be well capable of doing so. But apparently, as is so often the case, it appears that we must bring in robots to do jobs that we're too stupid to do safely and reliably.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine
The Large Hadron Collider goes live in just a few hours, so I figured I'd whip out a quick blog post because...it may be my last night on earth and I apparently want to spend it on the Internet? Deep dark sick things that says about my personality aside, I've been looking forward to the CERN particle accelerator starting up for years now, and I'm brimming with anticipation.
Since it's generous to say that I have a layman's understanding of the actual science involved in the project, suffice it to say that when the 27 km long LHC is up and running, it will essentially recreate, in a laboratory setting, a small scale version of the universe just after the Big Bang. This will, theoretically, allow scientists to better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe, and provide clues as to the nature of the Higgs boson, or 'God particle,' which theoretically gives explains why objects have mass. In simplest terms, the groups of experiments that are about to start will hopefully tell us why stuff is stuff, and also give us a hint as to just what stuff that isn't stuff is. For a better explanation of this, you can visit the CERN website, where you will once again be reassured that the LHC won't do the other thing it could do - annihilate reality as we know it.
There's a really small chance that this will happen, but the (drastically oversimplified) theory goes that, if you recreate the Big Bang, it will do what Big Bangs do - create a new universe. Naturally, there won't be enough room for two universes, and our old crotchety universe will be dragged out into the street, beaten and left for dead. Now, though this prospect if frightening, it's nothing to panic over for two reasons. First, there is an incredibly tiny chance it will actually happen. And second, if it did, the universe would end so quickly that we wouldn't even have time to register that it was ending, thus rendering the entire exercise moot.
And while I would miss...well, the universe, it would be almost worth the vanishing of all things everywhere from all of time/space to prove that the exclusion theory was right. It would mean that when living beings discern the meaning and nature of the universe, that universe is instantly destroyed and replaced by a new universe with completely different rules. And frankly, I think I could die happy if I died knowing that Doug Adams was absolutely right about everything all along.
Aside from a) leading physicists to a much sought after unified field theory or b) erasing everything that ever was and leaving no more trace behind than a faint cosmic residue, there's a third option - that researchers find something completely unexpected. There could be something out there that throws all of understood physics for a loop, which would be really frustrating for theoretical physicists and really exciting/terrifying for the rest of us. Imagine just throwing out the entire rule book for How We Think Things Function At The Most Basic Level. And on the plus side for theoretical physicists, they would still have jobs! And all of us would get to start together from square one trying to figure out what everything is made of and what it all means.
I think that sounds really nice.
Whatever happens, I look forward to writing more about it once we know what 'it' is. Until then, if you can read this, the world is still pretty much the same, except for that it might be utterly different at it's very core. And if not, well then, it's been nice knowing you. Not all of you. But most of you. And that's good enough.
Mazel tov and goodnight, everybody!
Since it's generous to say that I have a layman's understanding of the actual science involved in the project, suffice it to say that when the 27 km long LHC is up and running, it will essentially recreate, in a laboratory setting, a small scale version of the universe just after the Big Bang. This will, theoretically, allow scientists to better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy that make up most of the universe, and provide clues as to the nature of the Higgs boson, or 'God particle,' which theoretically gives explains why objects have mass. In simplest terms, the groups of experiments that are about to start will hopefully tell us why stuff is stuff, and also give us a hint as to just what stuff that isn't stuff is. For a better explanation of this, you can visit the CERN website, where you will once again be reassured that the LHC won't do the other thing it could do - annihilate reality as we know it.
There's a really small chance that this will happen, but the (drastically oversimplified) theory goes that, if you recreate the Big Bang, it will do what Big Bangs do - create a new universe. Naturally, there won't be enough room for two universes, and our old crotchety universe will be dragged out into the street, beaten and left for dead. Now, though this prospect if frightening, it's nothing to panic over for two reasons. First, there is an incredibly tiny chance it will actually happen. And second, if it did, the universe would end so quickly that we wouldn't even have time to register that it was ending, thus rendering the entire exercise moot.
And while I would miss...well, the universe, it would be almost worth the vanishing of all things everywhere from all of time/space to prove that the exclusion theory was right. It would mean that when living beings discern the meaning and nature of the universe, that universe is instantly destroyed and replaced by a new universe with completely different rules. And frankly, I think I could die happy if I died knowing that Doug Adams was absolutely right about everything all along.
Aside from a) leading physicists to a much sought after unified field theory or b) erasing everything that ever was and leaving no more trace behind than a faint cosmic residue, there's a third option - that researchers find something completely unexpected. There could be something out there that throws all of understood physics for a loop, which would be really frustrating for theoretical physicists and really exciting/terrifying for the rest of us. Imagine just throwing out the entire rule book for How We Think Things Function At The Most Basic Level. And on the plus side for theoretical physicists, they would still have jobs! And all of us would get to start together from square one trying to figure out what everything is made of and what it all means.
I think that sounds really nice.
Whatever happens, I look forward to writing more about it once we know what 'it' is. Until then, if you can read this, the world is still pretty much the same, except for that it might be utterly different at it's very core. And if not, well then, it's been nice knowing you. Not all of you. But most of you. And that's good enough.
Mazel tov and goodnight, everybody!
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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 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.
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