MARVEL UNIVERSE VS. THE PUNISHER #3 (OF 4)
OR: Everything old is new again
Full Disclosure: I stopped reading ‘Marvel Zombies’ after the ‘returns’ Limited Series. I felt that the House Of Ideas had strip-mined all good faith from their audience, and their decision to include Howard the Duck into the storyline more or less put the period to the paragraph regarding my level of interest. I made myself a solemn promise that I would never again crack the cover to a comic featuring the brain-hungry residents of the Marvel Zombieverse.
But then Jonathan Maberry decided to take a bite of its rotting, putrid flesh.
The New York Times best-selling (and multiple award winning) author has found the sweet spot regarding a genre that many have written off as hackneyed (or at best, overexposed). In a climate rife with zombie exploitation, Maberry has managed to create a fresh take on the post-apocalyptic world by infusing it with a perfectly apropos tool of destruction: Frank Castle.
THIS motherfucker.
Now I know that last week, when I featured the Punisher: MAX one shot ‘Happy Ending’ as my Book Of The Week, I lamented the fact that he was too often portrayed as a near-invincible superhuman. But Maberry succeeds by boiling The Punisher AND The Marvel Zombies down to their base components. The Zombies are bad, and Frank Castle must kill them all.
Of course there’s more to it than that. The series really starts to shine in this issue, where Frank is forced to make a deal with the devil (or in this case, patient zero) in an effort to save some of the last uninfected people in the world. This adds a layer of complexity to the narrative that refreshes the concept and reveals Maberry’s true talents. He’s managed to make the overused interesting again. I’ll truly admit that I went from being genuinely uninterested about this title when I first heard of it to becoming entranced by its execution, all within the first few pages. (Also be sure to thank him for creating a zombie deadpool that’s actually fun to read!)
This guy? ehh, not so much…
And let’s not forget to mention the work done by Croatian artist Goran Parlov. He’s no stranger to the titular character, having worked on Punisher: MAX in its earlier iteration, and he brings considerable experience and talent to the series this time around. His use of expression adds depth to the Punisher’s usual monotone delivery, and his re-imagining of other Marvel stalwarts that had yet to see the zombie treatment are at once fun and eye-catching.
‘Marvel Universe Vs. The Punisher’ is more than just a great way to re-visit the stories originally told by Robert Kirkman. It’s a way to realize that no matter trite and overplayed we may think a subject is, there are still visionaries out there able to create something fresh, fun, and ultimately readable.
(Jonathan Maberry’s blog can be located here, and Goran Parlov’s facebook page can be found here. Bag And Bored is back on Monday with Coming Distractions!)
