3 out of 5

I always found this arc of Garth’s Punisher run particularly unpleasant.  It might be the art – Lan Medina draws in a more typical Marvel house style versus the gritty stylizations of Leandro Fernandez and Goran Parlov, setting the established tone of the book somewhat at odds with the look – or it might be that the story doesn’t feel like it does much except exhibit tragedy and violence.  I think, though, in combination with these factors, it’s that the structure – though I understand the intention – feels like a complete sidestep around that intention.

The idea is smart, and has potential: five recent mob widows have decide to team up, learn from their late husbands’ mistakes, and off the Punisher for good.  Each of the widows gets to pick up the baton of doofus tropes and race stereotypes their respective wiseguy dead hubbies did, making this seem like a consolidation of the various mob arcs, and a likely wrap-up to the plotlines not wrapped up in the last arc.  We do start there.  Garth introduces a cop struggling with good cop morality weighed down by job and life politics, and does a good job of poking and prodding at the grey area of the effect Punisher has on the lives of those related to those he puts down, though having all these cliches gathered together makes him apt to take personality potshots.  The complication comes from another counterpoint character introduced, paralleling the hero cop, in a way, from a different perspective.  I don’t know if it would’ve worked better if we had started with this character, instead of moving to them from Frank, then backpedaling to give the explanation, but while their story is certainly compelling, and rife with further potential, the tone of the tale is too uneven and the story, perhaps, too packed, to effectively meet that potential.

Which is why Widowmaker ends up feeling like just a roll call of tragic highlights, repeating some thoughts Garth has expressed before but not necessarily expanding on them.