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.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The Punisher walks into a police station with a duffel bag. He walks up to the desk sergeant, opens the bag, and says, “Have you been looking for this dead Assistant District Attorney? Well, have I got a deal for you!” Punisher confesses to the torture and murder of the D. A. and is taken into custody. Punisher takes the opportunity to perform a little selective surgery on a low-level mafioso and his goons while he’s in there, and is then assigned a public defender who enters an insanity plea on Punisher’s behalf, to try to get him out of the confession he made, while also trying to get evidence of his multiple prior crimes kept out of the courtroom. She’s not totally successful, in that some people get to testify about things they have seen Punisher do… but none of that seems to matter to Frank, who only seems to want another pen to work on his little worksheet: something written in a code that makes no sense… that he just calls his “to-do list.”

Once again, the coolest thing about this book is to see The Punisher be The Punisher again. When the only Punisher you get is as part of The Thunderbolts, you tend to be lulled into the sense that what you’re seeing isn’t normal; it’s like watching the Timothy Dalton James Bond movies: the dude’s called James Bond, and he is doing James Bond style things, but you don’t notice anything’s wrong until you see Casino Royale. So seeing Punisher actually in New York, killing criminals (even from a jail cell) was more refreshing than I thought it would be. And considering Circle of Blood, the Steven Grant / Mike Zeck miniseries from the 80s that started The Punisher as an A-List character, started out with Punisher in prison killing wiseguys, the setting’s even comfortingly familiar.

But it’s not just the fact that it’s good to see The Punisher back in New York killing street-level garbage again that make this comic an entertaining read. Guggenheim sets up a fairly effective mystery here, at least in the sense that we really don’t know what Punisher’s end game is here. Guggenheim has Punisher give himself up right out of the gate, and he has Punisher’s lawyer question whether Punisher has some kind of greater plan going on… and frankly, Punisher makes it clear he’s after something, and he seems to need an awful lot of different pens with which to accomplish it, based on how often he asks people for them. So there is a nice little mystery to hook you in here.

The downside to that is that there is an awful lot of the movie Seven visible in this story, starting with Punisher’s surrender at the start of the story. Through flashbacks via the testimony of people who’ve seen Punisher in action, we get visuals of Punisher doing some really twisted shit to criminals – as an example, we see him pump a cocktail of different drugs into a dealer to make him feel the effects and keep the guy awake to suffer as much as possible. Which is interesting, but which also has never really been part of Punisher’s M.O. Yeah, he kills criminals, but he’s always used simple lethal force, for the most part. Ironic, poetic justice-style killings have never been Frank’s style; he’s a shooter, not a wrath of God / punishment-fits-the-crime kind of psycho. Those kinds of killings with the whole criminal-turns-himself-in gimmick are two quick things in a row that jump from Seven, and it’s a little distracting.

Leinil Yu’s art is actually a pretty good style for a Punisher story. His stuff is all sketchy and sharp angles and a million scratched-in detail lines, which gives the visuals a noirish, dark and dirty tone that works for a murderous vigilante. Some of his panels are specifically without backgrounds, giving those images a stark color-on-white contrast that is striking. Everything sort of has a look that is reminiscent of Klaus Janson’s, which is a look that is good for a Punisher story.

The Trial of The Punisher #1 isn’t perfect, but it is one thing: old-school, goon-killing Punisher. And it’s that guy in a story with some hidden elements and a pretty interesting mystery running at its core – we will eventually find out what Punisher is doing with all those pens, and I am hoping that it is awesome. But it’s that first thing that’s most important here: if you’re a fan of the old school Punisher and have missed Frank Castle hunting criminals while he has been otherwise occupied running secret missions for General Thunderbolt Ross, you’re gonna want to check this out.