Back On The Chain Gang: The Trial of The Punisher #1 Review

It turns out I missed The Punisher. Go figure.

Sure, we’ve had a monthly dose of The Punisher in Thunderbolts, but I think we all know that, as fun as that book sometimes is, that’s not really The Punisher. Sure, The Punisher is a member of the Marvel Universe, and we have seen him work briefly with Spider-Man and Daredevil over the years… but The Punisher doesn’t really work with anyone. Sure, it’s a guy named Frank Castle with a machine gun, but it’s not really The Punisher. The Punisher works alone; he sits in a grimy apartment or in some van with a pile of guns and a list of names – a lot of those names are crossed out already, but names – and when he’s gone, you only know he was there from the pile of corpses and shell casings. You certainly don’t find Frank Castle’s name on some government paycheck dated any later than 1969.

Greg Rucka knew how The Punisher was supposed to be, and that’s part of why he left his run on the book. And it’s been a while since we’ve seen that version of The Punisher… but we’ve got a short dose of it now.

The Trial of The Punisher #1, written by Marc Guggenheim with art by Leinil Yu, is The Punisher that I’ve been missing for a while. Not that this team has Punisher running around in a skull shirt smoking bad guys, but instead they have him in lockup, awaiting trial for the murder of an Assistant District Attorney, with criminals all around him and not a single teammate in a red and black spandex costume in sight.

And it is more refreshing than I thought it was gonna be.

This Is Not The Greatest Song In The World: Rocketeer Adventures Vol. 2 #1 Review

When I was a working comedian, some inconsiderate dickface sent some True Believers (and if Stan Lee hasn’t sued the Christ out of that dickface’s estate for trademark infringement, then comics’ lawyers are spending too much Goddamned time keeping me from reading new Miracleman stories) onto flying machines to do something unspeakable. And in the face of this tragedy, we working professionals needed to figure out how to be effective in addressing the scenario in a way that didn’t feel disrespectful to the people affected it. What we did was to write material about the fringes of the tragedy. We didn’t write about the guts of it, we wrote about what people were doing in the face of it. We wrote about how people were reacting to it, and how it affected our understanding of American myths and legends.

Dave Stevens, the creator of The Rocketeer, died of leukemia in 2008 after having written and drawn only a very few stories about a character so compelling it spawned a movie – sure, a movie that John Cartered, but what the hell; it’s still more than Wonder Woman got. IDW Comics is now publishing a Rocketeer Adventures series, and they’re doing what we comedians did right after 9/11: they’re telling stories about The Rocketeer by telling stories around The Rocketeer. And those stories are generally pretty Goddamned cool.