Mercifully escaping the advert deluge, Punisher War Journal returns, only a couple of months behind schedule.  This is one of the Civil War tie-in books suffering knock-on delays from the problems with the core miniseries; for fairly obvious reasons (it repeats key scenes), it can't come out before Civil War #5.

Intriguingly, several retailers have reported big drop-offs in sales with issue #5, and a couple of respected names (including Brian Hibbs) say that their sales are down by 20% from issue #4.  Of course, Civil War can afford to shed a lot of readers and still do well, but 20% drops at this stage are very unusual, and if that's repeated across the board, something is going wrong here.  This will be worth keeping an eye on.  Normally delays don't make much difference to big titles, but then Civil War is 90% event and 10% story, so perhaps it's more important for it to be on time.  Or maybe people just rejected issue #4 after the nonsensical Clone of Thor material.  Or perhaps a badly received issue coupled with a big delay broke up the momentum enough for readers to walk away.  Or maybe it's just a few stores with unusual results.  We shall see.

Anyway, Punisher War Journal is meant to be benefitting from the Civil War tie-in.  And let's hope it hasn't missed the boat, because it's actually pretty good.

The original Punisher War Journal was an utterly gratuitous second Punisher title.  For a time, it was joined by Punisher War Zone, providing three completely indistinguishable Punisher books.  This blatant milking of the franchise had refreshingly deserved consequences: it tanked the character and relegated him to limbo for years.  This time round, though, things are different.  Garth Ennis has taken the Punisher off into very specific territory with his monthly title, leaving an opportunity for Punisher War Journal to offer a genuinely different take on the character, fitting into the mainstream Marvel Universe.

The angle with this book, apparently, is that the Punisher will be going after supervillains instead of his typical organised criminals.  He gets off to a good start this issue by relieving the world of Stilt-Man.  In a sense, I don't really approve of running around killing off other writers' creations for the sake of a cheap gag.  But come on, it's Stilt-Man.  It's just a guy in a stupid suit of armour.  They can always create another one; nobody was particularly crying out for stories specifically featuring the original Stilt-Man.

Even so, there does seem to be an acknowledgement that the Punisher can't really go around slaughtering the supervillain population.  To that end, we've suddenly got characters observing that the Punisher only kills bad guys who are killers.  I don't recall him showing any such compunctions, but if this series is going to work, they've got to fudge it a bit.  It's a little unclear quite what criteria now entitle you to have your head blown off by the Punisher, but apparently the Tinkerer gets away with a mild wounding these days.

And I'm willing to give that leeway because the debut issue is genuinely entertaining.  Matt Fraction's version of the character has a dash of black comedy, but nowhere near the nihilist insanity of Ennis's stories.  Fraction is writing a slightly unstable soldier, almost a more murderous Batman, who looks decidedly out of place among the minor-league supervillains but holds his own with them anyway.  As a gun-toting vigilante, the Punisher has never quite fitted into the Marvel Universe, and this book plays that to advantage.

Fraction and artist Ariel Olivetti are clearly having fun with the idea - the Punisher gets to fight a batch of midget Iron Man robots for a couple of pages - but unlike Ennis' earlier stories, they're not mocking the Marvel Universe.  There's a lot more genuine affection for it here, even while it embraces the absurdity.  The approach is just to dump the Punisher into the mix and stand well back.  The villains are still often silly, but the book is laughing with them rather than at them.

It's been a long time since anyone other than Garth Ennis has written the Punisher regularly, and Fraction is harking back to the early days here, albeit with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek.  Crucially, this Punisher doesn't shoot up supervillains because his creators are being smug.  He does it because they're there, and because his creators think it'll be entertainingly absurd to put these characters together.

A lot better than I was expecting it to be.  I'm actually looking forward to this series now. 

Rating: A

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