I know this is an older comic, but I swung by the comic shop today and saw it and thought "Aha - another cynical attempt by Marvel to draw in readers with a "death of"!  The art was by Richard Corben, writing by Garth Ennis, so I thought: let's see how ol' Frank "dies" in this particular co-

holy shit

D:

D:

If you intend to read it, spoilers ahoy:







Still here?

The Punisher: THE END starts off with an unnamed governor phoning Sing Sing prison, ordering the guards to execute all of the prisoners due to either an impending or an ongoing nuclear war.  The guards (with a couple of exceptions) follow through with great gusto, turning the prison into an abattoir, until they come to the maximum isolation wing where an elderly Frank Castle resides.  Along the way we get some exposition as to how Frank wound up there, and just as the guards are about to fall on their prey, a nearby nuclear explosion causes a power loss, leaving the guards literally in the dark.  The guards' commander tells the group not to panic, that they are mere yards from the prison's command bunker/fallout shelter.  Frank has other plans than getting shot, however...

A year later, Frank and another prisoner (Paris Peters) crawl out of an escape tunnel from the bunker beneath Sing Sing and begin a odyssey across the ruins of New York state.  Frank tells Peters that with the background radiation (fallout and indeed burning clouds are still present in the atmosphere) they have 72 hours to live.  Peters comes because he doesn't want to "rot in that bunker"; Frank of course has a "mission" to complete.  

If you've read Cormac McCarthy's The Road (or if you've seen the film) then the type of visual there is the wasteland portrayed by Richard Corben.  Miles of cars line the highways, the dessicated remains of those fleeing urban areas still within.  When Peters wonders at this, Frank comments that EMP likely disabled most of the cars, and with the massive fallout coming, the dead knew trying to run away would be futile.

Still, life such as it was continued on somewhat: Peters and Castle find the remains of a food distribution point.  However, it's surrounded by dead, bullet-riddled bodies.  Frank's grim observations on human nature are spot on.

As they travel, Frank outlines why he is walking through a deadly radioactive wasteland.  One of the (now deceased) prisoners in the bunker explained to Frank that thousands of the world's richest people built survival shelters throughout the country, knowing the war was coming (sounds a bit like The Morrow Project...).  Rather than prevent the war, or provide for more shelter for more people, they instead hid themselves away, using the cover of the War on Terror to mask their intentions.  The prisoner, an engineer and architect, grew disgusted with this cabal and their plans, so they had him framed and sent to prison.

When the pair find themselves in the ruins of Manhattan, beneath the former site of the World Trade Center towers 1 & 2, Frank reveals that the dying architect had given him passcodes to allow entry into the bunker.  Once the pair is inside, they're gassed (Frank had been expecting this) and awaken in the bunker's infirmary.  The doctor, wearing heavy protective gear, tells Frank that he has mere hours to live but that "They" wanted to question him first, hence her reviving him with adrenaline.

Frank grabs a scalpel and threatens to cut the doctor's suit open, irradiating her.  Guards come in to try and protect her, and Frank quickly dispatches them.  When the doctor begins to plead for her life, Frank kills her and tells Paris that "she was part of this whole thing."

Frank dispatches waves of security personnel, fighting his way to the main hall of the shelter, confronting a gaggle of businessmen and women.  A "spokesperson" for the cornered oligarchs plays back a recording for Frank, apparently from the White House's bunker of the President raping and killing the Secretary of State.  The spokesman then goes on to say that transmissions from every other bunker the world over for the last year have all ended the same way: the people inside going insane and murdering one another.  The bunker in Manhattan is the last bastion of humanity.  Additionally he tells Frank that thousands of frozen embryos are stored in the bunker and that humanity can be restored.

The Punisher's judgement is swift and final: "Humanity...well, you know where that leads."  Frank kills them all, (not even sparing a mother trying to shield her child) and then turns to Peters and demands to know how Peters, a seemingly "petty" crook, wound up in the same block of the prison as serial murderers, rapists, and the like if he was (as he had claimed) a petty, white-collar criminal.  Peters confesses and says that he was a serial arsonist hired by a businessman to burn down a number of buildings, but the fires got out of control and one also burned down a daycare full of children.  Frank tells Peters he knew all along, and that Peters' presence for the scene in the shelter was his judgement, as well.  Frank then strangles Peters and leaves, walking out into a burning, radioactive New York.  He hallucinates that it is 1976 again, and that he is on his way to Central Park to meet his family (and prevent the gang shootout that took their lives) even as his clothes burn and his skin sloughs off...

...

In this comic, the world ends with a bang and with a whimper.  And the whimper is ours.  In one scene Frank opines that the notion they'd find some vestige of humanity left after a year, and Frank retorts that it wasn't going to be bands of survivors holed up in forts fighting off mutants; there would simply be nothing.  There is of course a left-wing slant to the comic: kill the rich (because they just want you dead and gone so they can recreate the earth as they'd like), and the "President" raping the "Secretary of State" definitely hints at a Bush administration with Condoleeza Rice as SoS.  But that can be overlooked: the grim...no, the utterly black vision of the book, from the terrifying beginning to the bleak denouement is a work of utter, gut-wrenching hopelessness.  Where The Road gave us a final moment of comfort, there are no moments of comfort in THE END.  Frank is dead a few "panels" after the conclusion (or at least we know he will be), and he has just flipped the last off-switch for humankind.

Chilling, depressing stuff.

Highly recommended.

This is why the Punisher is my favourite superhero. He doesn't want to do the right thing or save the day he just wants to punish.

"After a while CO's started to say sentencing a man to sing sing was like feedin' a tiger meat."

Every once in a while I see this thread and open it, expecting to see something about the Punisher: Warzone movie.

No, I don't know why, but I thought I'd share anyway.  


That said: The sheer nihilism expressed in the comic, as reviewed, seems wildly over the top.  It moves the Punisher from an avenging anti-hero firmly into a genocidal maniac (omnicidal?) who is simply to single minded to actually think of a good way to pull it off... waiting instead for his victims to do themselves in while he kills time picking them off one by one.


I'm starting to see Garth Ennis's name linked more and more to stuff that makes me think that... well... I don't actually want or need to read his stuff. Regardless of subjective quality of writing/storytelling, he is just too profoundly unpleasant to actually say anything interesting or meaningful.


EDIT::: I guess I can add that I am also singularly unimpressed with the plotting as exposed in the review.  It seems to rely very heavily on Forced Stupidity and Stupid Plans Always Work (since I'm too lazy to look up actual TVtropes for this shit), along with, of course, an unrealistically grim view of humanity (see earlier comments about Garth Ennis...) to drive it.

I don't need a comforting ending ( the Road, as mentioned... didn't see it though I understand it shares much in common with the end of The Book of Eli...), but I DO need more plausible, relatable storytelling to get to the extinction ending.