Writer: Garth Ennis; Artist: Tom Mandrake; Colorist: Matt Milla; Letterer: Dave Sharpe; Editor: Joe Quesada; Editor in Chief: Joe Quesada; Cover Artist: Tim Bradstreet
Monday: The Punisher is sitting in a tree with a rifle, getting ready to shoot Figsy Goleano, a strip-club owner that also deals heroin. Before Frank can pull the trigger, he sees a woman in red approach from behind Goleano. She stabs the drug dealer through the head with twin sais, smiles at Frank and laughs before disappearing. Back at his home, Frank thinks about who he saw: Elektra Natchios, who he knows could have killed him easily if he had been her target instead of Figsy. Castle shrugs and goes to sleep.
Tuesday: Frank goes into an empty bar to eliminate Anthony Balbo and his mob crew during the gangster's birthday party. When he enters, however, he finds the mobsters all dead, sliced to pieces without any of them having time to fire their guns. He then sees Balbo standing up in the back of the bar, but when Castle attempts to question him Balbo's limbs fall off of his torso one by one, sliced through just deep enough to barely stay together until disturbed. The Punisher turns and sees Elektra behind him with her sword, hears her laugh again, and after turning his attention back to the dying Balbo realizes she's again disappeared. Later, at Lucky's Bar, Castle has a meeting with Lieutenant Soap, who is scared to death of the file he's read on Elektra. Frank reads through the file, which includes reports from a SHIELD operation in the 1980s that describes "telepathy, body-swapping, mind-control, and for want of a better word, magic". Still, Frank thinks, it doesn't tell him what she wants him.
Wednesday: Castle finds the Dell'Oro brothers dead in their pool.
Thursday: He finds Jimmy the Gun stabbed through with a sword.
Friday: The Dutchman has been drowned in his cooking pots.
Saturday: Don Alberto Luigi Pariani is found by Castle decapitated while sitting on the toilet. Frank sees Elektra standing outside the house, and hears her laugh yet again before vanishing.
Sunday: The Punisher is on a ledge of a high-rise building, staking out Skinny Vic Strega, a mobster who on Sundays always buys a hooker and rents the penthouse suite at the Remington Hotel. Frank has decided that Elektra is out to kill him, her beating him to his targets must be a tactic to screw with his mind. He doesn't know how she knows who his targets are or how she gets to them first, but tonight is where he ends it. He's wired every access point into the suite with explosives, leaving only the front door and the window where Castle is waiting. Inside, Strega goes into the penthouse alone with the hooker and tells his men not to come up no matter what. While Frank waits for Elektra, he almost misses the hooker stabbing Strega in the chest with a sword. Frank shatters the window, alerting the guards on the floor below. Elektra, disguised as the hooker, has cut out Strega's heart and is standing there seemingly unarmed while Frank holds a gun on her. He tells her to explain what she's been doing, and she admits that it was easy to beat him to his targets; he's fast, but not that fast, a fact she demonstrates by taking the rifle out of his hand before he can react. Then the guards enter, Elektra tosses Castle back his rifle, and he unloads a full magazine of rounds into them. He then asks Elektra "why?", and she laughs before answering "I was bored. I do things like this when I'm bored." Elektra turns to leave, but deciding to take a dangerous chance Frank tells her to wait. She turns back to him, and he asks her if she'd like to have dinner tomorrow night.
Review:
Garth Ennis and Tom Mandrake bring together two of the deadliest killers in the Marvel Universe, the Punisher and Elektra, for their very first meeting.
I'll go ahead and admit it, I'm not much of an Elektra fan. Nor am I much of a Frank Miller fan, to be honest. Outside of "Born Again", which was excellent, I found myself very underwhelmed by Miller's legendary run on Daredevil. Yes, it was absolutely revolutionary for its time, that's undeniable, but it didn't do much for me personally and a lot of that is because of Elektra. She's just not a character I have much interest in because she's always struck me as rather one-dimensional. She's a perfect assassin whose death had way more meaning than any of her living appearances, not because of any attachment I had to her as a reader but because of the emotional tumult that Daredevil experienced because of it. She's also a character who had foundered around the Marvel Universe since her resurrection in the 1990s, barring two unsuccessful solo titles by the likes of Peter Milligan and Brian Bendis, among others.
However, Elektra brings with her a very interesting idea during her time spent flirting with the Punisher. Up until this issue, Garth Ennis had portrayed Frank Castle as an unstoppable force of death that could beat anyone he came across, usually making them look like fools in the process, whether they be heroes like Spider-Man and Daredevil or villains. With Elektra, though, Ennis finally has the Punisher concede that this woman could kill him without any problem, and even when Frank decides to fight back and force the confrontation there's no doubt in the minds of the writer or the readers that if Elektra wanted Frank dead he would be very fucking dead. That's the best part of this story, in fact, that Castle is being led through this grisly game of murder tag by someone he's sure he can't beat and has no idea why she's taunting him.
That, though, leads us to the story's punchline, the joke that it took 21 pages to set up yet also perfectly illustrates my perceived flaw in Elektra as a character. Why has she spent a week screwing with the Punisher? She was bored, or in other words, there is no reason because she's a character without a personality other than "ninja". Don't get me wrong, I quite like this comic until that last page, its a great cat-and-mouse game between the two characters and as always Ennis writes the Punisher with ruthless accuracy. But this is the Marvel Knights series, and Ennis hasn't quite broken away from the farcical premise of the early issues, so we get that insipid ending with the Punisher asking Elektra out on a date. Nothing in Ennis' own interpretation of the character suggests that Frank has any desire to spend quality time with anything other than his guns and nightmares, barring the occasional opportunistic fuck session with Kathryn O'Brien during the MAX run. Castle admiring Elektra's talent and skill, sure, that works. Going out for dinner and a movie does not, even as a joke, and it annoys me every time I reach that last page.
Tom Mandrake is an artist whose work on this series it took me a few re-reads to appreciate, though I've quite enjoyed his work on other projects (particularly The Spectre with John Ostrander, that book was fantastic). He gets the darkness and violence of the series down perfectly, and his horror-influenced art really worked well in the previous "Underground" storyline. He draws a really great Elektra, giving her a playfulness even when she's murdering her way across a room. My only problem with his work is how he draws the Punisher himself, giving his body a build like the Hulk and a baby-face that takes away the battle-hardened seasoning that works so well for Frank. A small complaint about an artist who had too brief a tenure on the series, his work here is pretty darn spiffy.
This was almost a really, really great issue of Punisher. Just ignore the last page (or enjoy the joke, I suppose, if it works for you), which also led to Daniel Way's Thunderbolts 10 years later. Yeah, thanks for inspiring that one, Garth.
Grade: B-
No comments:
Post a Comment