Just the one X-book this week.  That hasn't happened since February 2003, when for some reason Marvel felt that Mekanix #5 should take to the shelves on its own.

This time around, the lucky beneficiary is the first issue of a new Wolverine / Punisher miniseries.  It's the third time these two have shared a miniseries, but the last one involved the angelic Punisher, so we don't talk about it in polite company.  The format is fairly well established.  The Punisher likes to kill people.  Wolverine is marginally less enthusiastic about killing people.  Wolverine tries to stop the Punisher, they team up against the shared villain, and the Punisher escapes at the end.

Okay, so none of that has actually happened in this book yet.  But that's only because Wolverine doesn't turn up until the final page.  It's more of a Punisher book, to be honest.

Back at the start of his career, the Punisher is hunting down Napoleon, a crime boss.  Seeing the writing on the wall, Napoleon pays an awful lot of money to be spirited away to Erewhon, a hidden paradise for top criminals, where the Punisher will never find him.  Except it's a scam - Erewhon turns out to be four huts in a clearing.  But Napoleon knuckles down and builds it up into a real hidden community of criminals.  And now they're planning to lead the Punisher there so that they can kill him.

Now, you might have thought that the last thing a hidden community would want to do is lead the Punisher to their doorstep, even if they are planning to kill him.  It doesn't make an enormous amount of sense, if we're being honest.  But then, it's not unexpected to see writer Peter Milligan being upfront about the artificiality of the whole thing.  Milligan uses a rather toned down version of the deadpan approach of X-Statix, giving Napoleon an inexplicably stupid Silver age gimmick (he actually does dress up as Napoleon), and having Erewhon residents sit around arguing about who deserves to shoot the Punisher first.  ("As a person of breeding, I've suffered most.")

It doesn't entirely work, though.  Generally I really like Lee Weeks' art, but on this story it doesn't quite seem to fit.  The art seems to be taking the story a little bit too seriously, rather than playing along with the joke.  The tone's not quite light enough.

Still, it's not bad as these team-up things go.  There's some amusing ideas in there, and if it's contrived... well, it's a Wolverine and Punisher team-up miniseries.  What do you expect?

Rating: B-

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