Castle Ex Machina: Untold Tales of The Punisher Max #1 Review

Let’s get the obvious out of the way right now: Untold Tales of The Punisher Max #1 isn’t about The Punisher. Sure, The Punisher’s in it, but only in nine out of 34 pages, which is a ratio that makes calling this a Punisher comic like calling Fight Club a tale of handling insurance claims, or Deep Throat a medical thriller.

No, this is not a comic book about The Punisher. What it is is a reasonably crackling and profane – if not particularly original – little near-noir crime tale about a degenerate gambler in over his head and trying to solve the problem by loading his pockets with lead ingots. It is about organized crime as seen by way of the wrong side of its customer service department, with an engaging protagonist and a compelling plot… provided you don’t stop and think about it too hard.

This is the story of gambling addict Jimmy Frisco (someday I’ll read a crime story about a degenerate scumbag named Quincy Madison Worthington IV… or at least one who hasn’t run for President of The United States) who is twelve grand into a bookie named Shelly, who has an idea for an interesting and novel way for Jimmy to work off his debt. And despite Shelly’s goon’s early question to Jimmy vis a vis which hand he uses to jerk off, it does not involve Old Fashioneds through a glory hole. No, Shelly wants Jimmy – a regular guy who works in an auto body shop – to kill a jockey for him. Otherwise, Shelly’s taking the twelve large out of Jimmy’s ass… which loops us straight back to the glory hole imagery. But I digress.

So what we have here is a noir tale, only with the driving motivation being a savage beating rather than a femme fatale: Jimmy, seeing no way out of his predicament, begins by deciding to consider doing the murder, and then moves to deciding to commit it, and of course something goes wrong and he has to escalate, and escalate… and he finds himself getting deeper… and deeper… and Christ; I’m back to glory hole visuals again.

On one hand, this is a classic crime story; a tale about a dude trapped in the lower levels of organized crime and digging himself deeper as he tries to find a way out is as old as pulp paper. And writer Jason Starr, who by trade is a crime novelist, hits all the notes you would expect from this story: a wife oblivious to the protagonist’s plight for whom he will do anything to protect, an unexpected witness to the crime with whom Jimmy must deal, collateral witnesses to ramp up the body count, and the criminals he’s working for turning out (surprise!) to be untrustworthy. Starr hits all the notes… but you know them because you’ve heard most of them before. Still, they are generally performed competently, with enough character work to mask the familiarity – Jimmy is a fully-formed and sympathetic character (for a multiple murderer) in just 32 pages.

On the other hand, there are plot holes here big enough to drive a Camaro through. Holes like: why the fuck would a reasonably intelligent gangster conscript a guy who, for all we can tell has never held a gun before, to perform a hit? Is Shelly a fan of amateur extreme sports? And why, if the hope was to have a hitman you could whack out after doing the job to eliminate witnesses, would you allow him to live long enough to start killing passers-by? He knows your name, your phone number, and that you ordered the murder? If the cops picked him up, He’d roll over submissively to the NYPD so fast he’d… dammit, I am not getting back to the gay sex shit again in this review.

And frankly, why kill the jockey at all? Sure, there’s an implication that the jockey is in the heroin trade and perhaps a competitor to Shelly, but that doesn’t really make any sense. Shelly is clearly a loan shark and a bookie based on having Jimmy as a customer; is he in danger of losing his franchise because the easily-identified four-foot-nine guy dealing smack under the bleachers at the track is nipping at his profit margin? Rat the jockey out to the cops, Shelly! It’s not like they’ll need to look at a hell of a lot of near-midgets with pockets full of glassine bags before they find their (half) man!

On one hand, I kinda liked the fact that Jimmy, a low-level guy who isn’t part of the business, isn’t able to see the reasoning behind the moves that he has involuntarily become a part of. It feels realistic; that guy wouldn’t know what was behind the things he was being asked to do. But on the other, the things he was being asked to do don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. It makes the story a decent little character study that is damned effective to a crime story fan, but the plot doesn’t hold up as well as it should as soon as you think about it for more than a minute.

The art by Roland Boschi is actually a pretty good match for what amounts to a 40s-style pulp crime story. While his stuff is thin-lined in a way that doesn’t match with old-school pulp illustrations, there is an abstractness to it that matches the look. It is thin-lined yet quickie, work-for-hire abstract, if that makes sense… and that is not meant to be disrespectful. While Boschi’s stuff isn’t as pure and obviously pulp as Francesco Francavilla’s style, it looks like something that you might have seen in the old pulps… provided his fine lines bled on the shitty paper. Throw in the limited and somewhat dark palatte of colorist Dan Brown – deep maroons, dulled colors, with the only bright blue coming from the night light of a television – and you have a good look for a story that could’ve come from Black Mask.

You’ll notice I haven’t talked about The Punisher much, and that’s because, again, this isn’t a story about him. The Punisher exists in this story as a deus ex machina; appearing only as a magical potential out for Jimmy before providing a twist, Crime Does Not Pay ending. Considering this story’s classic pulp roots, The Punisher might as well be wearing a slouch hat and cackling at the end. But again: this is not a Punisher story.

If you like old school noirish crime stories, you could do worse than checking this book out. It’s uneven, but it hits the notes you’d expect, and it does a damn fine job making you care about Jimmy. It has plot holes, sure, but given the possibilities, at least it doesn’t have any glory holes… although after reading this review, I defy you to not see them lurking on every page.

Still and all, if you’re a crime story fan, you could do worse this week.