4 out of 5

Coming off of 1986’s Punisher mini-series, Mike Baron’s initial outing on the ongoing is a whip-crack jump-start to the pacing, and a crackdown on the character’s gritty persona.  While this is still a version of Pun that feels a little “off” for nowadays – going after Wall Street crooks, wearing disguises (in a very Bruce Wayne-ish manner) to chat people up and ferret out details – Baron’s blunt, one-thought-at-a-time narration sets up an appropriately sparse tone, dancing around the former series’ Steven Grant’s attempts at suggesting how violence wears on Castle by offering up Punisher’s motivations as: everyone is an asshole.  Each issue’s intro recap of his family’s death is like a mantra; Frank gets obsessed with some imagery – a rose growing amidst garbage – and seems settled with the notion that he has a death wish.  Innocents’ injuries are, of course, to be avoided, but Frank will just as soon shove you out of his way on his path of vengeance; those that assist him – this is our first intro to Microchip – are cast aside as soon as they prove more trouble than they’re worth.  Yes, this all gets scripted with the usual Baron glibness, which also lends itself to weird occurrences he never explains – like two characters with the surname Fryer showing up one story after another – but whereas in Badger this was often applied for the sake of that character’s general ridiculousness, here it amps up Frank’s coldness.  Mike Baron’s The Punisher is a menace with forward momentum.

Klaus Janson kicks off art duties for five issues, and though I’ve never been a big Janson fan – and I’m not sure about the slight smile he gives Castle – his fat, heavy inks give the book a battle-weary vibe which fits.  Unlike Zeck’s stuff, which sort of glorified all of this as big, muscley men enacting feats of bravado, Janson’s criminals are slimeballs, and Frank Castle is a smear of guns and blackness; the gunfire that often erupts between them is sloppy, and messy.

But again: I’m not the biggest Janson fan.  So his departure for two issues with David Ross – one of which has Kevin Nowlan inks, which makes Ross look like Nowlan which = awesomeness – before Whilce Portacio takes over.  Whilce, for better or worse, fits into the MacFarlane style which would start to dominate in a few years (lots of big ol’ ripped bods with tons of muscle striations), but it’s still a good fit for the heightened world in which Baron operates.  If anything, these issues serve as lessons in the value of letterers / inkers / colorists, as constant switchups provide clunky, crowded letters, or flat backgrounds, and then, suddenly – say, Bill Oakley’s letters on issue 8 – calm and rounded word bubbles that offset the harsh art perfectly, or the way Nolan’s inks add incredible dimension to the panels that John Beatty’s don’t.

Mike Baron often isn’t a perfect writer – he embraces whimsy and flaws come with that – and that’s in play here.  But I was surprised at how quick-footed and tough these issues are, even decades later, not balking at taking on stance on certain things but not overtly moralizing it either.  There are, perhaps, questionable politics backing that up, but it never struck me as out of character for The Punisher and, if anything, makes this iteration of him stand out in a way that can easily have been seen as further embellishing his legacy.