Punisher: FrankenCastle

When I was a kid, Punisher was a comic book reserved for my friend’s older brother--far too mature for me, a reader of “pussy” comics like the X-Men and “faggy” characters like Captain America. Punisher isn’t a name like “Spider-Man”—a title used to hide his secret identity--it is his identity, it’s what he is. Frank Castle was not a super hero, as my friend’s older brother reminded me over and over, but a regular man who was on a revenge mission to kill the criminals who took the lives of his family.

But now it’s 2010, and there are two comics with the character “The Punisher”. One of which is the gritty, hard-ass gangster comic Punisher Frank Castle: MAX, which satiates the need for those violent stories that I associated the character with for so long, and what most people want when reading an issue of Punisher. They are continuity based within themselves, they don’t touch the “Marvel 616” events and they're pretty good.

The other is the re-launched Punisher, which is completely within Marvel continuity. Where the MAX title is violent and based more in gritty comic book “reality”, Punisher has Frank Castle using secret caches of weapons containing Pym Particles and Goblin pumpkin bombs.

The comics are the two sides of the same skull encrusted coin, one a gangster fighting, machine gun wielding dick-kicker and the other being a guy who hunted Spider-Man and has fought the Hulk. Both books have a purpose for the character, but honestly, I don’t care about that gangster shit, and like the character much better when he’s a Batman who will fire a gun. And I like him even better as a zombie-type Batman who will fire a gun. Which brings us to the in-continuity weirdness that is "Frankencastle".

Taking chances with a simple character is what makes comics great and when there's two series, and one satisfies actual fans of the series--all those older brothers still out there--it doesn’t matter if you do something crazy like make Punisher a Frankenstein because anyone who wouldn’t want to read it could just read the MAX book. As long as it makes sense and is, you know, good, there isn’t a problem.

Recently, in Punisher, Frank Castle has lost it all, having killed his own resurrected family, and lost his sanity and motivation to do anything but kill Norman Osborn and end his “Dark Reign”. Making Osborn’s “List”—a literal to do list compiling the names of the last few things holding him back from complete power—Frank Castle is hunted down by H.A.M.M.E.R. agents, who are led by the son of Wolverine, Daken. Not The Sentry, not Bullseye, Daken.With no healing factor or set of super powers, Daken overpowered the physically and mentally drained Punisher, literally cutting him to pieces.
Adding insult to injury, Daken threw Castle’s body into the sewers and the grunts of H.A.M.M.E.R. were sent in to pick up the pieces, flying in on Goblin Gliders only to find Moloids picking up the limbs of the murdered man.

Picking off the blind subterranean humans like they were sub-human, the men find themselves face to face with Man-Thing, who burns them with his Touch of Fear, protecting the cowering Moloids, and the Punisher puzzle pieces in their arms.

Punisher finds himself awakening surrounded by a legion of monsters, in fact, The Legion of Monsters, staring down at him. Castle begins attacking everyone in the room, until Morbius the Living Vampire, with the help of the sight of his new face, snap him out of his rage.

Castle finds himself in an underground city, populated entirely by monsters. Not just by big names like Morbius and Man-Thing (those are big names, right?), but every monster you can think of. Every Marvel dragon from issues of Strange Tales, all the Jack Kirby lumpy headed weirdos and red skinned trolls--they all live there. They can’t live on the surface so they’ve made a home for themselves underground.

Morbius and the other League of Monster members have become their leaders, but more importantly, their protectors. Most of these monsters are simply trying to live, they aren’t huge or vicious, they are husbands and wives with children. They don’t have the means to defend themselves when a group of stereotypically Japanese samurai called “Hunter of Monster Special Force” start killing and kidnapping the citizens. Too ugly and scary to live above ground, but hunted in the sewers, they live in fear.

As all of this weird, awesome information's provided for the reader, Morbius is keeping Frankencastle alive with pills that help his brain stay active and keep his mind from turning as ugly as his new exterior. With nothing to lose, nothing to win, with nothing period, Punisher just wants to be left alone, to die in peace. With Osborn in control, and having lost one of the most important fights of his life, he is completely broken. He doesn’t care about the surface anymore, or fighting crime, or living. The Punisher is no more, and even FrankCastle is just a patchwork of flesh and metal designed to keep him alive. He has nothing to un-live for.

Existing on live rats caught with his bare hands, Castle takes one of his pills just to straighten out enough to kill himself when a small, crippled Moloid walks in, one deformed arm and a Devo shirt, brings the suicidal Castle a candy bar, and invites himself to sit down to watch the Fear Agent movie on Frank’s little nine inch television.

This little Moloid, named Kid, but most likely not actually a kid, affects Frankencastle, turning him from monster back to a man. Something that Frank Castle has lacked since the death of his family is compassion. His whole existence since their murder has been rooted in anger and a need for revenge. Now there’s no chance of him ever stopping all the bad men in the world: They are in power, the Green Goblin is an America Hero. However, that’s on the surface, down in the monster’s world, he has the chance to make a difference.

On a tour of the underground facilities, Frank Castle realizes the scale of their operation. It’s not a few abandoned subway stations and a utility room like the Morlocks had, it’s an actual city, with buildings and markets, creatures of all kind live here, united only because they fall under the banner of “Monster”. Seeing a museum of weapons that have been used against monsters, Frankencastle understands what they’ve been against. The character known for his lack of compassion, his hard-lined, hard-nosed, take no prisoners attitude begins to feel something.

Sleeping in his small room, Castle is startled awake by an explosion, and Kid at his door. The small, mute child doesn’t even have the chance to run across the room when he’s shot down by the monster-hunting samurai. Dying in Frank’s arms, Kid dies slowly, and Punisher has a change of heart. Falling apart but stitched together, Punisher is reborn, no longer just seeking to kill the “bad guys”, but to protect the good guys, the little guys, the ones who can’t protect themselves.Frankencastle, the monster, the Punisher, is even more of an unlikely hero than he was while alive, but more importantly, he has a lot more heart. The Punisher has done everything for the memory of his family, but his hate blinded him into killing any and everyone. But it's through a Moloid in a DEVO shirt that The Punisher regains focus and purpose...and it's tempered by something not so problematic as "I'm going to kill any and everybody evil because my family was killed."

"FrankenCastle" is an unconventional approach to reinventing a character, but works better than just having a few one-shots (Wolverine) until the main series comes back, or in Punisher’s case, relying on the MAX series until he has a place in continuity again. Punisher is too bad-ass, and if you think about it, irresponsible and basically a horrible person. There's nothing for a reader to care about, except the violence. Literally taking the character apart and putting him back together again, "FrankenCastle" puts emotion into the character. You root for him because you believe in what he’s doing, not just because you want to see him kill someone. This in-continuity, for-all-ages reboot is as radical and weird as all the canonical superhero deconstructions...and it's a lot less cynical. Your friend's older brother would hate it.

Elephantmen #17

Richard Starkings's Elephantmen has been around long enough for there to be a real danger of the series falling into one of the many traps that can kill a once great and original comic. That the series still feels fresh and new speaks volumes for Starkings's abilities, not only as a writer, but also as an architect of narrative. Throughout the run of the series, Starkings has remained surprisingly true to his intention of largely avoiding long, multi-issue story lines in favor of a series that is accessible to new readers no matter what issue they start with. This is a risky strategy, since a large portion of the comics-buying public stick with a series precisely because they get wrapped up in an intricate plot line. The upshot of this strategy, aside from the ease with which new readers can become engaged with the series, is that it has forced Starkings to be particularly creative in finding ways to keep the series interesting for those readers who've been with it since the beginning.

Having said that, since the completion of the three issue "War Toys" miniseries, the series has been tending toward longer narrative arcs. Issue 17 recounts the death of Tusk, the most tragic of the Elephantmen, and can be viewed as something of a coda to the events related in the "Worlds Collide" narrative that comprised issues 13-15. The story is bookended by several pages at the beginning and end of the issue which show mourners at Tusk's funeral. This framing technique at once highlights the real and very sad tragedy of the pulpy Monster-on-the-Loose story it surrounds and also Tusk's position as the dross of the dross--symbolic of the peculiarly human cruelty inherent in the whole Elephantmen enterprise.

There has always been a little bit of the cinematic Frankenstein in Starkings's book and issue 17 simply makes the reference explicit. From the EC-esque font on the "Monster is Loose!" banner to Tusk's encounter with the kindly, if incidentally offensive, old woman--one can almost see a little of the absurd old grandmother from O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in the way she apparently nagged her son to death, but that's another story altogether--Starkings's tale is structured on the stuff of pulp. As Susan Sontag has noted on the subject of the problematic history of literary adaptations, "it became a dictum that cinema was better nourished by pulp fiction than by literature."

The same can be said for comics and this is a big part of what makes Elephantmen extraordinary. Despite the series's explicit identification as "Pulp Science Fiction," Starkings makes use of the entire panoply of pulp genres to create exciting and atmospheric stories in which he can explore the various social issues that are at heart what the book is about.

Starkings may be giving in somewhat to reader demands that his series feature longer narratives, yet the stories are never so reliant on plot detail that a new reader wouldn't be able to pick up an issue and have a sense of what is going on. As an experiment, I handed my copy of issue 17 to a friend who had never read a single issue of Elephantmen and as I suspected she was able to engage with the story and with the underlying themes without feeling as though she lacked some critical information that would help her make sense of the story.

Brandon hit the mark when he described Elephantmen as Starkings's "slowly-growing masterwork." Having laid an ample foundation by his gradual development of the series's characters and their stories, Starkings now has a vast field in which to play with the literary forms and social issues that mean so much to him. Couple this with his recent branching out to welcome the contributions of new illustrators to the series--recent issues and covers have featured Boo Cook, Erik Larsen and Ian Churchill, while the next few will feature illustrations by Marian Churchland--and readers can look forward to more great "Pulp Science Fiction" for years to come.

Madman Atomic Comics #11 (Second-Take)

Either Mike Allred is on the brink of gumming up one of the most satisfying, longest-running independent comics series in recent memory or he is just a bit cleverer than many of his readers give him credit for being. On the surface, the biggest "story" in issue 11 of Madman Atomic Comics appears to be the impending separation of Frank's erstwhile portmanteau wife. Or, wait . . . maybe it is the now completely unvarnished insertion of Mormon cosmo-theology into the Madman universe. Or perhaps it is neither of these things and instead relates to the revelations of Franks true, true identity.

Though it is ultimately of lesser importance to the direction in which the series is going, the wholesale infusion of Mormon theology into the Madman series is nevertheless significant and deserves attention. The fact of the inclusion of such intimate details of Mormon cosmology seems more a reflection of how neatly these fit into the structure of the science fiction and fantasy genres (see also the novels of Orson Scott Card), rather than any sort of attempt to turn Madman into a vehicle for the propagation of Allred's own religious beliefs. Having said that, the sequence in which Madman is knocking on doors in an attempt to get a telephone call through to Dr. Flem's lab is an obvious allusion to the response thousands of Mormon missionaries receive as they canvass neighborhoods seeking converts.


Brandon is definitely on to something when he suggests that Allred treats the issue of the impending separation of Luna Joe as something of an afterthought, which leads one to ask what is really going on with this issue--or the whole series for that matter. One possibility comes from the revelation of Frank's pre-mortal identity: Prometheus. Of course Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is sub-titled The Modern Prometheus; and this, for the first time, identifies Madman with the title character of Shelley's novel, rather than his creation.

This seems like an academic detail, but if one pays attention to the last several issues in this series, Frank is continually going on about making things go back to how they were. Does this simply mean that he wants Joe and Luna to be individuals again? Or that Allred wishes to return the comic to its roots as a forum for "strange adventures that are wrapped around the very affecting relationship between Frank and Joe and Frank’s personal journey away from innocence?"

The problem of course is that you can't go back to the way things were and any attempt to do so would seem the height of hubris. Perhaps in this sense Frank is being compared to Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who, with the arrogance of his genius tried to give the world the ultimate gift in the form of creating life, only to spend the rest of his life trying to undo what he had done, to his ultimate destruction.

Of course the more obvious comparison would be to Frankenstein's creation, and this not only because Frank was brought back from death. The creature, having been created by Dr. Frankenstein only to be rejected as a monster, spends the course of the novel looking for acceptance--in effect, seeking a replacement for the 'father' who scorned him. This sort of mythical search for a father is one of Frank's obsessions and variously takes the form of his questions about his past as Zane Townsend, his still unresolved issues concerning the loss of Professor Boiffard, and his strained relations with Dr. Flem.


One could also interpret this pregnant choice of names in terms of the Promethean myth itself. Prometheus stole fire from the gods to benefit mankind and was made to suffer eternal torment for his efforts. Frank has touched the hand of God and has the ability to see and know things that the rest of his associates cannot. This knowledge gives Frank insight and understanding, which ultimately allowed him to save the universe from destruction, but it is also a great burden.

There is clearly some rich, if somewhat obvious symbolism to the choices Allred is making in this issue and the series as a whole. The question becomes, then, does this make for a good comic, particularly in light of Madman's history? Readers who judge Madman Atomic Comics solely through the lens of what has come before are likely to come away disappointed. This is understandable, but equally understandable is Allred's insistence on his prerogative in taking his character where he wants to take him and using him to ask the questions that he wants asked.

Despite the somewhat ambiguous response this issue seems to be getting in this forum, there is still a lot to be celebrated about the book. In his weekly haul notice, Sammy mentioned the "dirty, blurred-crayon style drawings" of many of the backgrounds. There is some of this in the series' earlier issues, but it has never been as overt as this and it somehow strikes the reader as a great way to frame in illustrative terms Frank's visit to his childhood haunt. Similarly, the choice of presenting Frank's pre-mortal pal in the guise of Bowie's Aladdin Sane persona, as with substituting Audrey Hepburn's likeness for Haley Fou Fou, allows Allred to maintain something of Madman's fun, pop-cultural legacy in what is ultimately a more serious comic.