4 out of 5

There are a few tactics with Punisher besides paring him off against villains-of-the-month: study his background (done to death; perfected by Garth Ennis); study the legacy of Frank Castle’s violence on himself and others (oft attempted; blips of perfection realized by Mike Baron‘s glibness and Ennis’ dourness); and prop The Punisher up against a like-minded killer or killers and watch the results.  Steven Grant – infamously, from my perspective – boffed that with the first Punisher mini-series – but a couple of years later, Jo Duffy and artist Jorge Zaffino would try again with much better, much more compelling results in Assassin’s Guild.

Grant’s use of The Trust – an organization of civic-minded folk wanting to do the vigilante thing – held no weight because he turned them into an evil corporation with a power-hungry boss after, like, one panel.  In Duffy’s graphic novel, she crafts a family business of assassins that had come up in the city, brokering contracts for hits with a moral imperative – rapists and the like.  Skillfully to the point, we see how the Guild operates without having it explained; we sense that they have guidelines without pointer fingers telling us so.  At the same time, some of the members clearly ‘enjoy’ the work, and when Frank has need to work alongside them – when they both end up hunting the same extortionist – he constantly remarks on their professionalism.  Meanwhile, he reminds himself, he’d attempted to halt the Guild’s businesses before…

It’s a rewarding mash-up of killers’ conveniences, and Duffy juggles the emotions just right, dangling before us a relationship between Frank and one of the Guild members, Keiko, precipitated on pretend identities the duo both maintain – and both know are false – while they investigate each other prior to teaming up.  Maybe not coincidentally, Grant did something very similar with The Trust which rang equally hollow to his story, as there felt like no common ground on which to build Frank’s feelings in that case… whereas the deception Keiko runs, and the way they both casually shift into their murderous personas, makes perfect sense as a way for wooing The Punisher.

Zaffino’s art is a little too shading-excessive on closeups of faces, but this only happens once or twice.  It’s otherwise majestically animated, with heavy blacks keeping the mood intense, and Julie Michel’s light-handed colorwork a perfect offset to maintain subtleties in emotions and reactions.

Ultimately, as this is a standalone GN, Duffy has to wrap things up perhaps a tad too simplistically, but prior to that, she manages to really twist the knife regarding Punisher’s / Keiko’s “professionalism.”  I also wish we could’ve gotten a whole book of the Lupin III riff that opens the story… but I’ll expend that readerly energy on checking out other stuff from Duffy and Zaffino.