I thought Punisher Noir would follow the same vein of its first issue throughout the remaining three. Dull, bland and cliched, a story that uses the thirties and the “noir” genre as more of a gimmick, trying to add weight and importance to a plot that has been in more movies than imdb.com is capable of listing: father being harassed by mob, training son to deal with the world…
I was wrong. Punisher Noir, in a single issue, has gone from bland to utterly putrid. It is so bad it nulls out the decent artwork. Either Frank Tieri simply isn’t too into this, or he was, dunno, beaten up and drugged while writing this, or he writes like this all the time — and if it’s the latter, it boggles my mind how he stays employed. I don’t follow his work so I can’t tell, but it’s rare that a single issue of a comic makes me doubt someone’s talent as much as I’m doubting his right now.
Even after Garth Ennis wrote sixty fucking issues of what could be described as the definite Punisher, a perfect portrayal of the character, there, great, period — writers like Tieri still fail to grasp the concept and in Punisher Noir #1, we saw Frank Castle during World War One leaving the cover of a trench, wielding two pistols and spraying everything with bullets while standing out in the open like a moron. And the story remarks its own dumbness by having that work out pretty well for him.
Written by Ennis, Soap was an incompetent and terribly unlucky detective, but extremely determined and associated with people who could make up for his faults. In Punisher Noir, Soap is given a moustache and is actually a… pretty good detective, as the scene that introduces him tries so hard to make clear. Also, no pigeons shit on his head or anything of the sort, so he isn’t unlucky either.
The Russian shows up on a flashback, with Frank Castle fighting him on a train. I wonder if this is a reference to the James Bond film “From Russia With Love” — it looks very obviously like one, but I cannot fathom why anyone would think it’s an appropriate reference for a flashback happening in 1918 and about the Punisher. Still, the flashback, aside from being very badly written, is utterly pointless. A filler and a blatant attempt to use Ennis’ success once again. It’s actually funny how Tieri tries to give this scene a point by having Castle tell it to his son and add “this is what happens when you get caught unprepared”. Sure, Tieri — a whole fight scene on a train between The Punisher and The Russian wasn’t an attempt to give someone else’s character a lenghty cameo, it was The Punisher teaching his son a lesson, of course.
Then we get Barracuda. While Soap got a moustache to distinguish him from his 21st century counterpart, Barracuda is turned into Karl Marx. Apparently, Tieri has a hard time coming up with his own psychotic mercenaries, so he sticks a huge beard on an Ennis character and uses him shamelessly — while not adding any of the stuff that made Barracuda a great character, like his omnipresent optimism.
And there’s Jigsaw, too, your instant go-to character when you want a villain for a Punisher story. I swear, if I ever find myself by some strange twist of fate writing the Punisher, I’ll start the story with Jigsaw being killed with no possible means of ressuscitation even for a comic book. Fuck him. He’s a shitty villain. “Oh, he has a face like a jigsaw, that makes him –”
This shameless, careless use of other people’s characters — which isn’t necessarily bad if you can do it right, which Tieri doesn’t — is one of the two things that sinks this comic. Aside from those two things, the rest of the story is just bland and unremarkable.
Sorry, Dutch Schultz was actually a real New York mobster during the twenties and thirties. But I didn’t read anything about cutting off his henchmen’s fingers or killing them for no reason, as Tieri’s Dutch does. Which makes me wonder why Tieri uses Dutch Schultz’ name if… oh, hahaha, sorry again, I am still considering the possibility of Tieri having any ability whatsoever to come up with characters of his own. So he uses a real life mobster and makes him cartoonishly evil. I half-expected Schultz to let out an evil laughter after killing a henchman he had previously crippled.
Charlie Adlard’s art continues to be as efficient and clear as it always is, with his great panel distribution and, especially, the composition of those panels. He’s careful to leave space for Rus Wooton’s good lettering without sacrificing the beauty of his angles. Cliff Rathburn’s gray tones are very good but almost unecessary considering Adlard’s talent for shadowing. At this point, him and Kirkman are practically reading each other’s minds, almost in an Ennis-Dillon fashion. I highlight Rick’s excellent facial expression when the leader of the cannibals reveals something to him — it’s such a fitting expression you’ll recognize it when you see it.
It’s a good series. It is. But it used to be excellent. Now it’s a bit like it’s wandering around aimlessly. Sure, it’s character-driven, but even these characters are starting to lose their appeal and become repetitive shadows of their former selves, and while we’re just at the beginning of this slippery slope and Kirkman can still reverse this with relative ease, if it remains ignored it will just turn into another zombie story without that distinctive storytelling that made it something else.
