2 out of 5

The collected edition of these five issues, The Punisher’s first solo series, is called ‘Circle of Blood.’  Don’t worry: you will never forget this while reading, as, besides being the title of the first issue, Frank Castle likes to remind us at various points along the way that the ‘circle of blood’ around him is tightening.  Being bludgeoned with this repeated imagery is but one of many bludgeoning in Steven Grant’s clunky script, which lands on some good ideas and juxtapositions – some of which we’d see repeated years later in the vastly superior Welcome Back, Frank by Garth Ennis – but twists its ankle during that landing, stumbling from page to page through pieces of plot that are spoken to but amount to nothing.

While it’d be easy to lay this at the feet of this being a long while prior to Frank having more of his identity solidified, setting aside the vacuousness of his character – or of every character here – the structure of the book just isn’t all that sound.

It starts with Frank locked up in prison, doing his “you’re all locked in here with me” routine, foiling a prison break with his planless plans of hiding guns in his waistband and climbing “impenetrable” guard towers.  Mainly, though, it gives us a way to meet The Trust, a group of seemingly like-minded citizens who want to have Frank help wage their own war on crime.

Over the course of the remaining four issues, Frank questions his own methods – a bluff that he killed Kingpin ends up resulting in deaths of innocents instead of just mob members, warring amongst themselves – and so is also brought to question The Trust, as they similarly seem okey dokey with a few unintended casualties on the way to taking down bigger targets.  This is a valid seed for a story.

Unfortunately, it never grows.  The concept of The Trust is hardly explored, and they sort of disappear right after we meet them, only to come back reconfigured as just another version of an evil corporation with a manipulative boss.  Similarly, Frank meets a girl and then she disappears from the story as well, only to pop back up for Frank to mention that he loves her, or some such.  The kid of a mob boss who Frank offed is also hanging around, and there’s also some potential there about the legacy of violence, but when Frank finally comes around to delivering that moral, the dialogue bungles it.  The last page – a very dark ending to the story – is the only point when it felt like Grant finally had a handle on what he was trying to do with Circle of Blood.

Mike Zeck illustrates with a Commando-era gusto; it’s all big shoulders and muscled ridiculousness, rather matching Grant’s angsty tone, but his figures are so stiff that the contortions of the action sequences don’t end up looking right.  I can appreciate that Zeck is ‘classic,’ and his pin-ups of Pun look great, but he seems to fall into that classification of artist that’s great at one-off shots, but not the most appealing, to my eyes, for sequential stuff.  When Mike Vosburg fills in on issue five, his style is looser and perhaps not as polished, but there was suddenly more humanity to the character, which contrastingly sold the grittiness better as well.  (Jo Duffy took over on scripting there as well, resulting in much better narration versus Grant’s, though it seems like both fill-in artist and writer weren’t sure what Grant / Zeck had intended for an escape sequence at the beginning of the issue, keeping Frank covered in shadow for most of it.)

It was 1986, and it was time for The Punisher to star in his own title.  Steven Grant had some big ideas about studying the character’s nature – as most writers on Punisher seem wont to do – and fittingly seated that study in a surprisingly ‘adult’ Marvel book with death and sex, but all the layers of grit and forced ‘Circle of Blood’ imagery lay uncomfortably atop a script that just can’t juggle its good ideas amidst its overwhelming go-nowhere ones.