The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!
THE PUNISHER #8 - March 2002
Of all the Punisher comics I own, my random comic selector offers me this one . . .
After a brief period of time working as a literally Heaven-sent avenging agent of death, Garth Ennis neatly discarded all the spiritual nonsense and returned Frank Castle to New York doing what he does best: killing mobsters. After that short mini-series, Ennis began an ongoing but his original plan was to do the first six issues, miss the next six, then return for the following six and so on. As it was, he only missed issues 7 to 12, returning full time from 13 onwards.
However, him skipping out gave us this done in one issue by Ron Zimmerman which starts with Frank coming up with a plan to travel back in time and kill Al Capone who, apparently, was the original source of organised crime.
So he gets in touch with Nick Fury who gets in touch with Mr Fantastic who just happens to have a time machine laying around that he's happy for Frank to use:
No sooner is Frank back in Chicago 1929 than he finds a way to ingratiate himself to Capone - by killing Capone's enemies. After pages of this, Castle is invited along with several other Capone lieutenants that Al doesn't trust to dinner. This gives Zimmerman the opportunity to play on the baseball bat legend, having him take care of five traitors rather than the traditional three:
Of course, he leaves Frank till last, giving him the opportunity to escape and turn the tables, fighting Capone to the death, the pair of them dying together.
And then, on the last page . . .
That's right, folks - it was all just a dream! One of the lamest cop-outs to a story ever, and not even a particularly well written one, either.
I own a lot of comics and many of them, if I'm honest, aren't very good - they sit in their bags and boxes simply helping complete my collection. This single issue, though, has stuck in my head for years as one of the worst I own.
And I had to re-read it for this post.
Sometimes I hate these Monday Memories posts.
Whoa! An interesting idea, but given the subject matter, and way time travel was used, I guess maybe it's not that big of a stretch that it was a dream fake out. Man Frank sure does have some fucked up dreams, eh?;)
ReplyDelete