Finally for this week, the Max imprint launches The Punisher Presents Barracuda.  As the title would suggest, it's a spin-off from Garth Ennis' Punisher series. 

It's perhaps worth making clear at the outset that Presents translates literally as Does Not Appear Whatsoever In.  The same applies for another miniseries launching this week, Thunderbolts Presents: Zemo - Born Better.  Mind you, both those miniseries do feature genuine spin-offs featuring characters from the parent book, and written by the regular writer.  So it's not completely misleading.  If you buy Punisher for Garth Ennis rather than for the Punisher then you'll be fine with this.

Ennis started off writing Punisher as an over-the-top black comedy, before changing tack completely and repositioning the book as a bleakly nihilistic vigilante series.  Barracuda is a character from the second version, but for the spin-off miniseries, Ennis has lurched back to comedy.  This is, let's be blunt, crazily over the top violence with the big scary black guy.

In Punisher itself, Barracuda appeared in a storyline clearly modelled on the fall of Enron.  He was the out-of-control thug who the corporate criminals brought in to do their dirty work.  Although obviously a broad stereotype, he worked because he was so jarringly at odds with the rest of the story. 

In this story, however, Ennis puts him in a more traditional crime/gangland setting.  Instead of being an incongruous element in the story, he's right at home, and his defining feature becomes his absurdly confident cheerfulness while he goes about his ridiculously violent business.  The story sees him being assigned to protect the nerdy haemophiliac son of a gang boss, who has to prove himself by making his first kill.  The kid is an even more extreme caricature than Barracuda himself.

To be honest, there's something a little bit uncomfortable about this book.  Barracuda isn't really a proper character at all; he's a collection of stock gangsta elements, admittedly done with great aplomb by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov.  He's a glaring black stereotype, in other words, and one drawn entirely from other glaring black stereotypes.

This seems particularly strange in the light of Ennis's own recent Chronicles of Wormwood #1, which contained a scene in which two TV producers argued about the relative merits of their output.  We were apparently meant to agree with the lead character's mocking condemnation of his rival's controversy-baiting adult drama Mister Nigger, which featured the outrageously violent exploits of a cartoonish gangsta played by a real-life thug, and which garnered extremely good ratings from the 18-35 white boy demographic.

Well, isn't Barracuda basically the same thing?

Either there's a twist in this series, or I'm misreading Ennis's intentions in Wormwood, or there's some flagrant hypocrisy going on here.  Since Ennis may be puerile but is rarely stupid, I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt for now.  But I do that with real hesitation, and if Ennis really is going to stick with this, at face value, for the whole series... er, then we've got a problem.

That aside, though, if Ennis and Parlov are going to enter into this territory then they undoubtedly do it very well.  Ennis is one of comics' most naturally gifted storytellers, capable of making even the most tired cliche shine, and Goran Parlov throws himself wholeheartedly into the nonsense.  It's got a ton of energy and humour.  I just hope it manages to do more with the character than it seems at first to be offering.

Rating: B+

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