The Punisher Annual 1 - The Evolutionary War

The Punisher encounters an Evolutionary War on Drugs.

(Due to the large number of creators the labels for some have been put in a separate post.)

The Punisher Annual #1

1st story: Evolutionary Jihad
Script: Mike Baron
Pencils: Mark Texeira
Inks: Scott Williams
Letters: Jim Novak
Colors: Janet Jackson
Edits: Carl Potts
Eliminator in Chief: Tom DeFalco

The problem with a line wide crossover, or at least one encompassing all the series with annuals, is that it's going to take in some extremely different series with very different power levels and perspectives. Both this annual and the next one demonstrate the extremities of this as they take in what were in 1988 Marvel's hottest new series.

The Punisher had been running for less than a year when this first annual came along and so it's very likely The Evolutionary War was approved before it was realised there would be an encounter on such a scale. The nature  of this crossover overall is such that individual events can be easily added or dropped from the overall plan but the different power levels can result in some very strange aspects to the plan.

The solution here is to tell a relatively straightforward typical Punisher story in which one faction is armed with high tech weaponry. The High Evolutionary's Eliminators aren't that much more advanced than some of the other more technological foes the Punisher and so don't feel out of place here whilst the Evolutionary himself is never seen, only mentioned. However the goal in this annual is ridiculous.

Here the High Evolutionary has launched a war on drugs and comments by his Eliminators imply that they're going after the whole chain from producers all the way through to users. It just feels absurd that such a broad target would be selected for such physical resources. It would be easy to refine the target to some particular drug variant only grown in the vicinity but as it stands it's an unbelievable goal. Still the practical result is that the Punisher gets to fight some hi-tech guys in Colombia.

This is yet another tale of a fight with a  Latin American drug baron, a cliche even at the time. However Mike Baron's script gives some good development to "El Caiman", presenting him as also a devoted father and popular philanthropist who has done far more for the local people than their own government. He and the Punisher end up in an alliance of convenience against the Eliminators and there's a real sense that they've come to respect one another enough that they'll let each go when the threat is removed. However both know that this cannot be and so when they find themselves in El Caiman's aquarium at the end the Punisher has no option but to fire a bullet to break the glass and feed the drug lord to his own pet from whom he takes his nickname.

As a Punisher story this is a good one-off tale that doesn't require an in-depth knowledge of the character and his continuity to understand it. But as a chapter in The Evolutionary War it's struggling to disguise just how difficult it is to fit that event into this series. The Evolutionary's goals are just too unrealistic to make sense.


2nd story: 3 Hearts
Writer: Roger Salick
Artist: Mike Bosburg
Letterer: Ken Bruzenak
Colorist: Max Scheele

This solo tale for Microchip is named after a Japanese proverb that a person has three hearts - the one they show to the world, the one they keep to themselves and the one they don't even know about. Microchip finds out what he is capable of when he goes to the help of the widow of an old friend whose new husband has become an assassin for hire and is even trying to kill his wife lest she report him. Although Microchip has developed many weapons for others, here we see his private nervousness over whether he himself can pull the trigger when he tracks down the assassin reporting back. We also get the comedy as he smuggles an anti-tank gun into a hotel. And then the story ends with showing his deviousness and ruthlessness as he confronts the assassin and seemingly makes a deal.

It's a good exploration of Microchip's character and capabilities when he doesn't have the Punisher around him but the story's title is rather over laboured with excess dialogue seeking to justify it. But otherwise this is just the sort of piece that super-size annuals should have.


3rd story: The High Evolutionary: Pet Project
Story: Mark Gruenwald
Pencils: Paris Cullins
Inks: Tony DeZuniga
Letters: Ken Lopez
Colors: Gregory Wright
Editor: Ralph Macchio
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

Herbert Edgar Wyndham was expelled from Oxford after losing his temper with key professors and then he found his home was insufficiently isolated to carry out his experiments. Salvation came when he met again with Jonathan Drew whose wife had inherited land in the Balkans and so they set up a laboratory there.

It's a relatively straightforward chapter that continues the themes of Wyndham being in a hurry, impatient with the conventional speed of science and being detached from conventional society. But it also exposes a problem with the character's name and aims. Evolution is the development of a species as it adapts to conditions with beneficial mutations coming to dominate as best able to survive. By definition it is not possible to stick an organism in a machine and flick a switch to turn it into what a later evolved descendant will be. Yet that is precisely what Wyndham is shown attempting. At best he can accelerate the individual organism's development to deal with the rays of his machine but nothing more.

This flaw goes back to the character's original appearance and suggests that his creators did not have the strongest understanding of evolutionary science when they named him. It raises the question as to what is the character's actual goal.

Also included is a guide to the Punisher's Battle Van and a diagram of his New Jersey warehouse.

Overall this is a good Punisher annual but a disappointing The Evolutionary War one. The Punisher was always going to be one of the hardest characters to fit into the overall event but even so the draw here just doesn't stand up well. It is unfortunate that both the first two annuals in this event have been disappointing.

Essential Punisher volume 4

Essential Punisher volume 4 contains issues #41-59 and annuals #4-5 from the Punisher's first ongoing series. Mike's Amazing World of Comics allocates a 1991 Summer Special to the series, but it's not included here. Annual #4 is part of "The von Strucker Gambit", a crossover with Daredevil Annual #7 and Captain America Annual #10. Annual #5 is part of "The System Bytes", crossing over with Daredevil Annual #8 (that's the fourth year in a row the Punisher and Daredevil annuals were part of the same crossover), Wonder Man Annual #1 and Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #2. Once again only the Punisher issues are included in this volume.

The bulk of the regular issues are written by Mike Baron, with Chuck Dixon doing two fill-ins. The main artist is Hugh Haynes, but other issues are drawn by Bill Reinhold, Mark Texeira, Neil Hansen, Tod Smith, Ron Wagner and Tom Morgan. A back-up strip in issue #50 is written by Marc McLaurin and drawn by Roderick Delgado. The stories in the annuals are written by variously Baron, Gregory Wright & Dan Chichester, George Caragonne, Peter David, Rob Tokar and Roger Salick, and drawn by Morgan, John Hebert, Mike Harris, Steven Butler, Vince Evans and Val Mayerik. Due to the large number of creators, I've created a separate post to carry the labels for some of them.

The series in this period also run a number of pin-ups in the regular issues but usually at most two. The dates on some suggest they were drawn from inventory but it's unclear whether they had been used before or not. I don't know if this was a way of slightly cutting the regular artists' workloads, a chance for other artists to get some exposure or even royalties, or just a way to clear out some backlog material. In general the pin-ups add nothing to the narrative but are kept alongside their original issues so they're not really intrusive.

The only crossovers in this volume come in the two annuals, though one manages to stand on it own rather better than the other. Annual #4 comes without the rest of "The von Strucker Gambit". It might have been more use to present the entire storyline. Here we get a rather confusing middle parter where it's hard to tell what's going on - there's an ongoing conflict between the recently returned Baron von Strucker of Hydra and Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D., with the former testing genetically engineered assassins. There's some interaction with Nick Fury, but it would have been more interesting to give the Punisher another encounter with both Captain America and Daredevil, since the stories in volume 1 showed them to be the best heroes to contrast the Punisher against and it would be nice to see a later take given subsequent developments in all their careers. The back-up stories are far more interesting. Again Microchip gets a solo story and this time he goes to a weight loss health farm, only to discover a criminal operation being run in it. There's also two brief three page affairs, one retelling the Punisher's origin (I've seen a few others of these in other annuals from 1991 but I don't think they were in all of them) and the other featuring him escaping from being taken prisoner by a yuppie and demonstrating why car passengers should always wear seatbelts.

Annual #5 is an improvement on its predecessor and if it wasn't for the banner on the cover and first page proclaiming "The System Bytes" it would be easy to overlook that this is part of a bigger story at all. The main feature sees the Punisher taking on a business that's a front for drug smuggling, with the added complication of a rival smuggler trying to muscle in on the territory. The twist is that the rivals have infected the business's computer system with a virus which complicates the Punisher and Microchip's attempts to obtain information about shipment times. Today in 2013 this may seem like small stuff but back in 1992 computer viruses were very much a major real world concern. Modern readers will easily recognise Microchip's reaction to his system freezing up as he smashes his hand on the keyboard. I'm guessing that the rest of the crossover involves the other heroes dealing with the virus, named "Ultra Max" after its creator, but one can just read this annual and not come away feeling the story is incomplete. The annual's back up stories are a mix as well. Once again we get a Microchip solo tale as he demonstrates his abilities with disguises to infiltrate a hospital to obtain information on a criminal who was only wounded by the Punisher and then having discovered the criminal's contact is his doctor, Microchip uses his hacking skills to alter the criminal's prescription, killing him and setting up the doctor. Another story sees the Punisher take on a gang of vandals in an icehouse. But the feature that's common to just about every annual from 1992 is a three pager presenting the top ten villains of the series or character. Such features are often interesting as a statement of who are considered the biggest foes at any one point, and this one is presented as narrated by the Punisher. However he has the particular problem that most of his foes get killed on their first encounter. So his list consists of:

10. Jigsaw
9. Gregario
8. Sgt. Cleve Gorman
7. The Rev (Sammy Smith)
6. Spider-Man
5. Daredevil
4. The Reavers
3. Saracen
2. The Kingpin of Crime
1. Bruno Costa, Skinner, Kolsky

The inclusion of a couple of heroes on the list is justified by the Punisher on the basis that they get in his way, but indicates the problem in finding enough recurring and/or significant foes for a list of this sort. Most of the other eight have been seen in the Essential Punisher volumes so far, but Sgt. Cleve Gorman appeared in Punisher: Return to Big Nothing, a graphic novel from 1989 in which the Punisher ran into his former drill instructor who had turned crooked. The trio of Costa, Skinner and Kolsky were responsible for killing the Punisher's wife and children so it's understandable that they would be at the top of such a personal list, even though they, like Gorman, Smith and most of the Reavers (following events in Uncanny X-Men), were dead by this time. With Gregario based inside prison (actually called "Riker's Island" here rather than the usual Marvel spelling of "Ryker's Island") this leaves just three significant recurring foes on the loose - Jigsaw, Saracen and the Kingpin. All four appear in this volume.

Otherwise in the regular issues the Punisher faces another assortment of one-off foes in these issues including a group of women terrorists trying to destroy New York's water supply for a mixture of revenge and money, the head of a military academy who produces illegal porn on the side, another Latin American drug dealer and a dodgy doctor who helps with torture, amateur drug manufacturers in a small town facing rapid changes, a serial killer who murders taxi drivers, latter day Nazis, arms dealers, Middle Eastern dictatorships, high ransom kidnappers, an engineer who's built a huge substandard dam and retreated to a special biosphere to live detached from the world, Chinese gangs and ex-military and a woman who steals babies from the poor to be adopted by the rich. Interestingly on more one occasion a foe is motivated into revenge for rape, but rather than taking it out on the individual rapist or rapists in general, the first (actually a friend of the victim rather than the victim herself) focuses their hatred on the whole of New York City and the second on its cab drivers because none would stop to take her from the neighbourhood she found herself in that night and the tragedy occurred as she walked home. In the latter case the Punisher comments that had she instead targeted rapists his reaction to her would have been very different, offering advice on weapons and tactics.

Overall these single parters continue to put the Punisher through a huge variety of situations but as highlighted above there are some signs of repetition in both the types of foes and the motivations. However the series does take some steps towards a greater ongoing narrative with recurring foes. The lack of Essentials for Punisher War Journal really shows itself here when the regular Punisher #47-48 see the return of Saracen, who has become the Punisher's considered greatest enemy after events in Punisher War Journal #25 & #27, which would presumably be covered in a second Essential volume for that series. It's a similar mess to that in the Spider-Man Essentials where the Hobgoblin and alien costume sagas have had their epilogues or conclusions published before much of the previous story. Here's hoping it gets rectified soon, as currently Saracen's shift from one-off ally to recurring villain is left unexplored. The aforementioned issues #47-48 contain a two-part tale about arms in the Middle East. Originally published in February and March 1991, they show the dictatorship of "Trafia", led by President Jekohadeem, a mustachioed military dictator who shoots a subordinate in his own office. Trafia has built a giant supergun for attacks on neighbouring states. Trafia's traditional enemy is the neighbouring Islamic regime "Zukistan" and tensions build between the two, but Trafia is also threatening other states with weapons of mass destruction, most notably Israel. The covers to these issues are even more explicit, with #47 proclaiming "Caught in a Desert Storm!" and #48 shows the Punisher tied to the muzzle with the caption "Next stop: Baghdad!" (It's an odd caption when you consider the gun is located in the parody of Iraq rather than Iran.) It's surprising to see such a direct take on events in the real world from an early 1990s comic, though Jekohadeem has a different fate from Saddam Hussein - he is assassinated by a Mossad agent whereas Saddam did not fall in 1991, despite expectations and hopes.

The last seven issues in the volume feature another multi-part story that originally saw the title go biweekly for the season. "The Final Days" sees the Punisher undergo a marathon of endurance under pressure from the Kingpin. First Microchip is captured and has a finger chopped off to force the Punisher into removing one of the Kingpin's rivals. Then the Punisher gets captured and sent to Riker's Island where amongst the inside violence he once again encounters Gregario and Jigsaw, with the latter being presented rather more seriously than the comic element he sometimes became in previous encounters. Before the Punisher escapes his face is badly slashed, forcing him to seek medical help whilst also being pursued by the Kingpin's men. Meanwhile Microchip has been released, albeit in Thailand, and makes his way home to help the Punisher. By the end the Punisher had found a plastic surgeon and undergoes a startling transformation.

It's a very downbeat saga in which no one is left unscathed. Microchip has been developing a computer game on the side which proves quite successful; unfortunately thus leads to his capture at a toy fair and subsequent wounding then humiliating trek home from being dumped in rural Thailand. The Punisher is shown here to not trust his one friend completely, and maintains a private weapons store that even Microchip doesn't know about, guarded by a loyal dog called Max. Sadly when Microchip is sent to refill Max's feed the Kingpin's men follow him and Max is shot. It's a particularly sad moment when the Punisher finds the dog too wounded to save and has to put him down. Even the Kingpin's men come out badly, with anyone who survives and returns to report failure soon meeting finality at the hands of the crimelord. The Punisher himself endures the fate he's inflicted on Jigsaw when the latter cuts up his face. And the story (and the volume) ends on a shocking moment, though the impact is lessened in black & white as it lacks the most obvious give-away. The Punisher asked the doctor to make his face so that no-one will recognise him and she does just that - by making him black.

I have no idea just how scientifically plausible this scenario is, but there's dialogue about the doctor having conducted experiments with tissue regeneration and melanin, so it certainly sounds scientific enough to convince the lay reader as being realistically possible (and in 1991 the average reader wouldn't be able to just look this up on the internet), give or take the character of the doctor. Melinda Brewer trained in medicine and experimented on the side but found the pressure of hospital work drove her to drugs and was struck off for stealing them and now she works as a prostitute to feed her addiction. So the character is a little far fetched, although it's not as if the Punisher could go to a major stable plastic surgeon who might otherwise treat the likes of Michael Jackson. Melanin is a real word, being the pigment that determines skin colour, so it lends the situation an aura of credibility. But the real test is how the scenario is handled in practice, for which we'll have to await volume 5. If Marvel makes a go of Essentialising Punisher War Journal and bringing it up to speed then we may be waiting a while.

As well as the development of villains, we also see a little development with Microchip, who remains the sole supporting cast member in the title. As seen at the end of the previous volume he has spent some of his time developing a new computer game and some of the issues here show him in the process of refining it until it wins an award at a toy fair, though for Microchip personally this is a double edged sword. We also see his powers of disguise developed, not just in annual #5 but also in "The Final Days" storyline as he adopts a disguise that's notably thinner than his usual bulk and poses as the Punisher's lawyer. The pain and humiliation he undergoes in that storyline serve to underline just how loyal he is to his friend and willing to take almost anything for the greater mission. There's a bit of fleshing out of his background, with issue #46 revealing his father was forced to work for the Nazis in developing destructive weapons before escaping to the States, and issues #47-48 brings a clash from his strong Zionist opinions when the Punisher saves the engineer behind Trafia's supergun, when that state is committed to the destruction of Israel. In this story Microchip makes his own way to the Middle East to help Zukistan destroy its rivals' gun, and cuts a deal with that state to save the Punisher's life, even though it means letting the double-agent Saracen live, an arrangement the Punisher is none too happy with.

It's thanks to putting more development into both the Punisher's aide and his foes that overall this volume feels much more complete than earlier ones. The only story that stands out as a mess is the middle chapter of "The von Strucker Gambit" in annual #4, and that really reflects the wider problems of the annual crossovers in the early 1990s. It's easy to see why the tactic was generally abandoned after 1992. The rest of the series is reasonably high octane, putting the Punisher through some quite tense and gritty situations. In this period Marvel was still putting out its books with Comics Code Authority approval but it would appear that by this point either the Code was largely a rubber stamping formality or else Punisher was really pushing it right up to the permissible limits. The result is one of the more solid and consistent runs on the character and series so far. However the cliffhanger at the end is a sufficiently bizarre move that the next volume may test that...

Essential Punisher volume 3

Essential Punisher volume 3 continues the journey through the Punisher's first ongoing series, containing #21-40 & Annual #2-3, with the exception of one back-up feature from Annual #2. In addition it contains Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entries for the Shadowmasters and the Reavers. All the regular issues and main features in the annuals are written by Mike Baron, with some back-up features by Roger Salick and Gregory Wright. The regular issues are mostly drawn by Erik Larsen and Bill Reinhold, with others drawn by Mark Texeira, Russ Heath and Jack Slamn, and the annuals see contributions by Reinhold, Texeira, Tod Smith, Jim Lee, Neil Hansen, Eliot R. Brown and Lee Sullivan.

As noted we're already into the period when he had two titles a month, but we've yet to see an Essential Punisher War Journal, though there are occasional references to events there. Fortunately we're not yet faced with rampant crossovers between the two titles. That's not to say the series didn't take part in other crossovers though.

This volume contains the Punisher issues from three crossovers. Annual #2 is part of "Atlantis Attacks", which was a mega-crossover told in fourteen separate annuals in 1989. (The other thirteen annuals were Silver Surfer #2, Iron Man #10, X-Men #13, Amazing Spider-Man #23, Spectacular Spider-Man #9, Daredevil #4, Avengers #18, New Mutants #5, X-Factor #4, Web of Spider-Man #5, Avengers West Coast #4, Thor #14 & Fantastic Four #22, plus interludes in the regular Marvel Comics Presents #26, New Mutants #76 & Avengers West Coast #52. Due to an error the Daredevil annual is actually the second one numbered #4; the following year's annual saw the numbering restored to #6.) As well as the main event the annuals also included "The Saga of the Serpent Crown" which once again sought to reintroduce and tidy up the continuity of a key plot device; the relevant chapter is omitted but the whole crossover can be found in a Marvel Omnibus edition. The following year Marvel changed tact and switched to shorter storylines that ran in only a handful of annuals. Punisher Annual #3 was part of the "Lifeform" crossover (the other three parts were in Daredevil #6, Incredible Hulk #3 and Silver Surfer #3). Meanwhile issues #28 & #29 of the regular comic were part of the "Acts of Vengeance" crossover, a tale so long it encompassed no less than sixty-eight separate comics and takes up two separate Omnibuses (one has the core parts of the crossover, the other the tie-ins).

(Rather than fill up this post with a list of the other "Acts of Vengeance" issues, I'll do a special post to reproduce the best attempt at an order that I've yet seen.)

"Atlantis Attacks" is a convoluted saga involving plans to resurrect the serpent god Set. Punisher Annual #2 involves one phase of the plan, namely to convert the human race into serpent men using a special formula developed by the Viper and tested on drug addicts. The Punisher teams up with Moon Knight to take down a front for the operation, with the Punisher temporarily drugged up in the process. The story tries its best to marry the demands of the crossover with the tone of the Punisher's series but just doesn't really succeed. At US $2.00 an annual, the full set of "Atlantis Attacks" cost $28.00 in 1989, not counting the handful of additional tie-in issues. If a reader was only buying a couple of the regular series then they had to pay over an amount that was almost equal to 100% of their regular yearly comics expenditure on the rest of the storyline. And that was even before "Acts of Vengeance" loomed later that year. In such circumstances it's easy to see the switch to smaller crossovers in the 1990-1992 annuals as an improvement. But better still would have been stand alone annuals that presented a big standalone story that both regular and casual readers could enjoy. "Lifeform" is an attempt to cover both bases by portraying a creature steadily evolving in power levels, with a corresponding increase in the successive heroes' powers. Punisher Annual #3 is the opening portion of the story, concentrating on the son of a radical politician trying to obtain a biological weapon, only to be mutated into a monster who eventually turns on his father, with AIM along for the ride. Once again it's a rather fantastical step away from the more technical, non-powered world the Punisher's adventures normally take place in. The back-up features in both annuals are relatively similar, with both including features on the Punisher's fighting techniques and solo stories for Microchip that show how ruthless he can be when taking out those who hurt the people around him. I guess with no other supporting cast members there wasn't a lot of choice about what to include.

If the 1989 reader had some money to spare after buying Punisher, Punisher War Journal and all of "Atlantis Attacks", then for at least US $64.00 (probably more if some series had a higher price) they could get the entire "Acts of Vengeance" crossover. With sixty-eight issues in total, this was slightly excessive and it's not surprising that the following year's Avengers annual ran a summary of the key parts of the adventure. Both of the Punisher's titles contributed to the story but it seems the stories were kept separate and so only the original book's issues appear here. Issue #29's cover is reused for the volume as a whole but it's highly misleading as most of the superheroes and villains appear in just a single panel. The basic premise of the story involves an alliance of leading villains working together to bring down the superheroes by pitting them against foes they haven't fought before. As part of the rivalries amongst the top villains, Doctor Doom declares he will eliminate the Kingpin's most financially damaging foe, the Punisher. This proves harder than expected and the Punisher in turn opts to travel to Latveria to steal a vital possession of Doom's. This brings him into conflict with the other Doctor Doom (Kristoff, a boy who had Doom's memory and personality implanted into him when the real Doom was presumed dead), who rules Latveria. The overall premise of the crossover makes such an unusual match inevitable, but wisely Doom is kept to his scientific side and so apart from the two separate Dooms (part of a wider convoluted continuity in this era), the story fits in reasonably well with the general tone of the series. And although the basic set-up of the alliance between villains isn't really explained here, the story is sufficiently self-contained that one can get away with not knowing the details of the wider crossover.

Just in case a reader in 1990 had any money left over after all this, issues #35-40 represent yet another attack on their wallets. In the early 1990s several of the most popular titles had their frequency increased for a specific season (usually summer, occasionally autumn) and often used the increased frequency to tell longer stories that wouldn't take so many months to get through. Here we get a six part saga entitled "Jigsaw Puzzle", featuring the return of a couple of old foes. On the one hand it's nice that the additional expenditure required to get the whole story did at least go on some actual Punisher material this time, but on the other the story itself is stretched out more than necessary and the art suffers because of the need to bring in extra pencillers to handle the increased workload. Mark Texeira and Jack Slamn both have their own styles but they're different from each other and from Bill Reinhold, with the result that the visual look of the story can change significantly between chapters. The story is also let down by some elements that are rather at odds with the general scope of the series. For Jigsaw is working for the Rev. Sammy Smith, the evangelical preacher seen back in issues #4-5, who has now turned to the dark side and gained healing powers from a being called "Lucifer". The Punisher is sceptical, assuming Smith is in fact a mutant using conjuring tricks, but during the story Smith heals the faces of Jigsaw (though the Punisher subsequently "corrects" this), the Punisher and Joy Adams, a woman from a local hotel. "Lucifer" himself appears in the final part, and is presented as the genuine article. Otherwise the story is liberally ripped off from the Bond film Moonraker with a fanatic, aided by a deformed henchman, planning to destroy much of the human race through a special poison found only in a plant in a remote part of the South American jungle. The plan is to sterilise most of the human race by releasing the toxin into the water supply but the Punisher takes out the operation. Although some of the plot elements fit the norm for the series, there's a bit too much in the story that makes it too over the top and just not a natural Punisher tale for my liking. Yes the Punisher occupies a universe shared with everything from the Norse gods to a foul talking duck from another dimension, but normally he manages to keep away from all that and even when elements do cross his path they tend to be the more down to earth heroes or are else focused on their technological side. Encounters with the Devil just aren't the norm here.

Another out of the norm encounter comes in a two-parter when the Punisher and Microchip fight the Reavers, cyborgs more normally found in the X-Men titles. It's a fairly simple two parter as Microchip's hacking accidentally reveals the Punisher's warehouse to hostile forces and he and the Punisher have to face them off and escape, then have a showdown at a salvage yard run by Microchip's cousin. This battle allows for quite a focus on the high tech side of the Punisher, with the climax seeing him adopt an experimental exoskeleton armour to fight off the Reavers. Although the foes are on the fanciful side, the story itself feels more like a typical Punisher adventure. In the process Microchip's cousin is killed, a sign of the high mortality rate for those around the Punisher.

The same rate hits one of his allies in the mini-epic that opens the volume. What starts off as an investigation into match fixing in the boxing world soon transforms into the pursuit of a poisoner that leads first to a fake ninja training camp in the States and then to Japan to meet the genuine sensei and aid him and others (including the Shadowmasters, previously seen in Punisher War Journal although not fully until after the issues in Punisher War Journal Classic volume 1) in battling against a criminal political Japanese organisation, during which the sensei is killed. It's an interesting tale given the chain of events that leads the Punisher through successive situations, and also sees him being offered the legitimate American franchise for the ninja school; however he declines it preferring to continue his own war on crime.

The remaining stories continue the trend of pitching the Punisher against a wide variety of criminals, ranging from arms contractors working with corrupt military officials to a devout Catholic serial killer to a biker gang running drugs. Once again, the individual stories are generally well told, but overall there is no real sense of development. Microchip remains the only other recurring character in these stories and there are some tensions between the two over priorities and other pursuits, but these aren't really developed into an ongoing evolving relationship and once again it would be reasonably easy to rearrange the order of the stories without much trouble. There are a few signs of recurring foes but the impression given by the "Acts of Vengeance" story is that the Kingpin isn't really that bothered about the Punisher and there isn't a personal degree of enmity between the two, unlike the crime lord's relationships with both Daredevil and Spider-Man. This really leaves just Jigsaw, the Punisher foe who keeps on surviving and here he's left alive simply because the Punisher realises that to kill his foe will mean the end of the Rev. Smith's healing powers before they can be used on the Punisher's face. Jigsaw's history with the Punisher isn't properly recapped, despite his having not been seen since the Punisher's first (limited) series some four years earlier, and his recurrence making him the nearest the Punisher has to an ongoing archenemy. At times he's written almost for laughs, and more would be needed if he was to become a more credible threat in the future.

This remains the fundamental problem with the series - there is no sense of clear direction. The Punisher has declared war on all crime but moves between the many different types of offence without ever really stopping around long enough to focus on a particular type or source. The supporting cast remains confined to Microchip and one-off characters in individual stories, and so there's no prospect of really exploring why the Punisher does what he does and how his approach to life affects those around him. The move toward longer, multi-part epics suggests does at least offer the prospect of a greater exploration of individual situations, but the problem remains that this series tries to chart a middle course with the character and avoids both intense psychological examination and out and out over the top fun, and the result is that it continues to meander.

Essential Punisher volume 2

Essential Punisher volume 2 contains the early issues from the Punisher's first ever ongoing series, carrying #1-20 & Annual #1 and also Daredevil #257 which carried a crossover with the series. Annual #1 was part of the "Evolutionary War" crossover that ran through eleven Marvel annuals (or twelve if one includes Alf) but the others aren't included here. (The only missing material that I can spot is the chapter of the history of the High Evolutionary that ran in all the annuals that year and which sought to clarify a rather convoluted continuity.) The Punisher issues are all written by Mike Baron, bar a back-up in the annual by Roger Salick, and drawn by Whilce Portacio, Klaus Janson, David Ross, Larry Stroman and Shea Anton Pensa, with Mark Texeira and Mike Vosburg handling the annual. The Daredevil issue is written by Ann Nocenti and drawn by John Romita Jr.

Looking back it seems amazing that it took so long for the Punisher to gain his own ongoing series. The most likely explanation is that Marvel were cautious about having a series with a violent protagonist who set out to kill his adversaries. (A similar concern presumably hit Wolverine.) But over time tastes change, as do censors, and this series was launched in an era that saw the rise of heroes who were either loners or had very few allies and who were willing to adopt violent methods to get the job done. In an era with the likes of a grim & gritty Batman, Timothy Dalton's take on James Bond, the A-Team and so many more, the Punisher was a natural fit. Of course not all these heroes were portrayed in quite the same way - there's a wide gap between the A-Team's almost cartoon violence where few people get hurt or killed, and the hard edged violence and blood of Licence to Kill.

Curiously it's a very different series that springs to mind as the most obvious starting comparison for these issues. At about the same time as the series was launched, so too was the second Silver Surfer series (the first eighteen issues of which can be found in Essential Silver Surfer volume 2). Both series rapidly became amongst Marvel's top sellers, as seen most obviously when both were part of a 33% price rise on the nine top-selling titles at the start of 1988 (taking effect from issue #8; the other seven titles were Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Avengers, Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor and the New Mutants) and both were among the only eleven superhero titles to have an annual that year (the others were the same list as before plus Fantastic Four and the West Coast Avengers). Both starred long established Marvel characters who had previously been used relatively sparsely, and both were in settings somewhat detached from the mainstream of the Marvel universe. But the contrast in approaches is clearest between the first issues. The Surfer had a double-sized first issue that contained a complete story (as well as setting up threads that would run throughout the first thirty issues), summarised all the key points of the character's history and sorted out the key issue in the status quo to allow unlimited adventures. By contrast the first issue of Punisher is a regular sized first part of an ongoing storyline that doesn't really introduce the character at all.

Perhaps realising the mistake early on, issue #2 opens with a text box with the Punisher rapidly summarising the key points in a very quick and to the point manner. Most subsequent issues include either a thought box or dialogue that recap the Punisher's origin with the same information. The obvious omission each time is just why the Punisher went down the route he did - not every relative of a victim of crime turns vigilante and even if they do, many don't go in for the arbitrary killing of criminals. Punisher stories can veer off to various extremes on this point - either they implicitly acknowledge the issue and just present the Punisher as an exaggerated killer of almost cartoonish shallowness, or else they delve deep in his mind, trying to reconcile the factors. This series, however, follows a more middling course (at least in this volume) by presenting the Punisher as a straightforward man with a general mission but without delving into just what it is that drives him so. I'm not persuaded that this is the best approach as it leaves the Punisher as a somewhat hollow character. This is enhanced by the state of the series around him.

The supporting cast is rather limited. We hear about Microchip before we're first introduced to the computer hacker and equipment developer. His son "Junior" also appears, but is soon killed off. There's an indication that Junior could perhaps have become a questioning voice to draw out details of the Punisher's actions such as how he prioritises, but it's also clear that such an approach can't work when the Punisher invariably operates solo. Junior accompanies the Punisher on a couple of missions but can't always obey orders to stay in the van. The first time he saves the Punisher's life but the second time he loses his own. His father sticks around for the whole series, providing the Punisher with much needed equipment and support at times but rarely taking to the field himself. Microchip is the star of a back-up feature in the annual in which he has to protect the widow of an old friend from her new husband who has become a assassin. We see how resourceful and ruthless 'Chip himself can be, but otherwise don't learn too much more. The only other characters who come close to recurring are the small band the Punisher assembles to take down the Kingpin - Reese McDowell, a student, and Vernon Brooks, a teacher, both from a rough inner city school that the Punisher briefly teaches at whilst tracking down a radical revolutionary hiding there, and Conchita Ortiz, the widow of a soldier turned prison guard who helps the Punisher in trying to advance a convict's execution. Over the course of the story the attrition rate is high with only Vernon living by the end. The possibility is dangled of Conchita becoming a recurring romantic interest, but she is then immediately killed, a reminder of how grim and lonely the Punisher's path can be.

The Punisher's methods invariably don't leave many foes who can recur. We get a variety of archetypes - Latin American drug barons, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, right-wing political extremists, cultist preachers, insider traders, serial killers, people traffickers, left-wing revolutionaries, drug dealers and mobsters. Many of these could be taken from the news though I don't know just which of these types were actually dominating the headlines in the late 1980s. The Kingpin appears in a multi-part storyline but curiously both he and the Punisher act as though they have never met - in fact they did so back in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #82. Still he's the only foe to walk away alive after Microchip and Vernon realise that it's the only way to prevent a vicious gang war.

The volume contains material from two different crossovers. One is a two parter with Daredevil and, as I previously discussed, Ol' Hornhead is one of the best heroes to contrast with the Punisher due to their very different views of the system of law & order. On this occasion we get a standard clash of values but presented in a novel approach - rather than a direct two part story each issue first focuses upon the title character's investigation of a disgruntled ex-employee of a pharmaceutical company who is taking revenge by poisoning bottles of its products until they encounter the other on a rooftop and fight over what to do with the criminal. Whilst the Punisher issue shows a conventional fight between the two, the Daredevil issue shows the same fight from the perspective of the killer who listens to them and concludes the two are more alike than they realise. We also get to see the Punisher acting as a detective, trying to quickly track down the killer and resorting to the unusual method of turning to the Jehovah's Witnesses to see if they have seen anything whilst door-knocking.

The other crossover is the second part of the "Evolutionary War" storyline. Although there had been stories told over a couple of annuals before this was the fist time such a large story was told there, taking up no less than eleven of the mainstream annuals (and also a humorous piece in Alf). At US $1.75 an issue (at a time when the regular Marvels cost $0.75 though most of the books were from the $1.00 line) it cost nearly $20.00 to own the entire crossover on first release - an early sign of the mess whereby readers increasingly found they either had to fork out large additional amounts for comics they wouldn't normally buy or else not get the full story. (A better approach in my opinion would be closer to that adopted by Secret Wars II and DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths whereby the main story is concentrated on a central limited series that individual ongoing titles feed off, but in such a way that a reader doesn't have to buy loads of other ongoing titles to know what's going on - and for that matter the limited series can later be collected by itself in a tradepaperback.) Fortunately most of the individual annuals are structured in such a way as to be reasonably self-contained with the High Evolutionary's plans as the sole common theme, and one can read them in isolation, as the Punisher annual is presented here on its own (and the same approach has been taken in the relevant volumes of Essential X-Factor, Essential Silver Surfer and Essential X-Men), though if one wants the entire story, including the back-up detailing the history of the High Evolutionary, it's available in an Omnibus hardcover edition (be warned though that this edition omits other back-up strips from each annual not related to the crossover). What makes the crossover stick out even more like a sore thumb is the poor motivation for the High Evolutionary's Eliminators (the High Evolutionary himself doesn't appear). This small squad of armoured humans are trying to wipe out all drugs across the world as a prelude to plans to forcibly advance humanity to the next stage of evolution, and also to eliminate potential threats like the Punisher. It's very hard to accept the High Evolutionary has anything like the resources for a global instantaneous war on drugs and as for the idea the Punisher could threaten his plans, it just doesn't seem likely.

The series doesn't limit itself to New York and instead takes us to many different parts of the United States and even abroad, with visits to variously Bolivia, Guiana (that spelling is used over twenty years after it became Guyana...), Colombia, Mexico and even the Australian outback. The multiple settings and situations help to keep the series fresh, showing the Punisher having to adapt to different situations and circumstances with some interesting results. That helps to make up for the shortfalls in character development and exploration.

Overall this series is quite mixed. The individual issues are generally well written and drawn, and it's easy to see why Whilce Portacio developed into one of the big name artists of the early 1990s. But fundamentally the main problem I have with the series is that there's very little sense of development and, with the exception of a few details, the stories could be rearranged in almost any order. Whilst the individual tales offer plenty of diversity and interest, with only really the annual sticking out as badly conceived, overall the whole thing just doesn't go anywhere. The Punisher has a mission against crime, but it's not always clear if he's just after organised crime or all criminals. There's no real overall strategy to his approach and instead he targets a succession of different crimes, sometimes responding to tip-offs, sometimes going after a particular wrong-doer them himself. Was this another series created by popular demand without thinking through its raison d'être? It's odd as all the issues in this volume have the same writer and editor (Carl Potts), so it's not as if it was a book handled by an endless succession of creators doing just a few issues at a time.

I'm not sure the basic problem lies with the Punisher's character - he's hardly the first example in comics of a bereaved relative with no actual super powers turning vigilante, and he's starting from a position of greater training than the likes of a young Bruce Wayne. Perhaps it's the way his approach of not adopting a secret identity and not being able to maintain a permanent base means that he rarely stays around any one place long enough to develop any roots, but again the wandering hero is common enough in fiction that it can be pulled off more successfully than here. Probably the deepest problem is the lack of any in-depth exploration of the Punisher's motivation and drive. Apart from his brief argument/fight with Daredevil there isn't any direct exploration as to just why he lacks faith in the system of law and order and instead has set himself up as a one man judge, jury and executioner. When the Punisher guest stars in other characters' titles it's often possible to contrast his outlook and methods with the title character's, but in his own title where the only supporting cast members are his technical support there just aren't any voices who can draw out the dilemma. Ultimately the Punisher is a difficult character to write a good developed ongoing series for, and unfortunately this volume doesn't hit the target.