Finally for this week, the Max imprint dusts off Steve Gerber's old Foolkiller character for a five-issue miniseries.

Writer Gregg Hurwitz is a crime novelist who did a rather good Wolverine Annual a few weeks back, so I'm approaching this series with an open mind.  I have to say, it doesn't do much for me.  Still, it's got a strong voice and, on its own terms, I think it's probably achieving what it sets out to do.  Whether that will be to everyone's taste is another matter entirely.

The story follows Nate, a low-grade heavy who gets in trouble with his bosses after trying to skim money for himself.  With two of his family killed and a few weeks to repay the money before they come back for more, Nate goes hunting for the local vigilante, the Foolkiller, to help him out.

Hurwitz's take on the Foolkiller is that he's a "punishment fits the crime" figure who kills criminals in ways that are both supposedly appropriate, and exceptionally gory.  To all intents and purposes, in this issue at least, that just makes him an even more sadistic version of the Punisher.  This is not the most interesting take on the character, and it isn't really what Gerber created.  Gerber's Foolkillers were essentially intolerant serial killers who went around killing anyone they looked down on.  The version from the 1990 miniseries started off as a vigilante pursuing criminals, before deteriorating into far more questionable targets as the series went on.

On the face of it, there's none of that here.  The Foolkiller goes after criminals - which he admittedly defines widely enough to include white collar crime - and sadistically murders them.  And that's about it, really.  It's possible that, like Gerber, Hurwitz plans to take this standard antihero as a starting point to be explored over the following chapters, but to judge from his interviews, he really does see the character as a close sibling of the Punisher.  And if so, he's kind of missing the point, really.

In a particularly odd sequence, the Foolkiller is shown mutilating a group of rapists who are identified as lacrosse players in an obvious allusion to last year's Duke University lacrosse case.  The charges in that case were dropped six months ago, so not only does this come across as crass and exploitative, it's also out of date.  I'm amazed the editor let it through.

This is a staggeringly violent and unpleasant comic, without even much in the way of black comedy to make it digestible.  There are no especially sympathetic characters, and it has to rate as perhaps the bleakest thing I've read all year.  No doubt that's intentional, but quite why I'd want to read such a thing, I'm not so sure.

The original Foolkiller characters were deconstructions of the vigilante genre.  This seems to be an attempt to retool the Punisher to appeal to the audience for Saw.  There may well be an audience for that book, but the entertainment value escapes me.  Still, there's no denying that Hurwitz seems to have created the book he set out to make.  In that rather twisted light, it has to be judged a partial success of some sort.

Rating: C

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