Ah.  This one.

Wolverine #186 sounded like a bad idea from the moment it was announced, but the reality is many times worse.  It's supposed to be a response to Punisher #16-17, in which a hapless guest-starring Wolverine was humiliatingly destroyed by writer Garth Ennis.

Ennis' evisceration of Wolverine in Punisher is very far from his best work.  Its version of Wolverine was a deliberate conflation of all the cliches that had dominated the character for years - the endless tough-guy talk, the stream of internal monologue and so forth.  It was a calculated piece of bad writing, parodying and mimicking the worst and least inspired Wolverine stories of the last ten years, and showing how one of Marvel's better characters could so easily degenerate into a ridiculous collection of tics.

And then beating the living shit out of him, in the slapstick ultraviolence style which characterises black comedy approach that dominates Ennis' take on the Punisher - one which recognises the obvious absurdity of the character and deals with it by playing it as a consciously ludicrous wish-fulfilment fantasy, for readers to laugh with rather than seriously endorsing.

So, Frank Tieri wishes to answer back on behalf of his character.

Now, if I was a talent on the level of Frank Tieri, I think the last thing I would do is invite direct comparisons with Garth Ennis. On a certain level, I almost have to admire Tieri's insane disregard for common sense in even trying.  Nonetheless, I will resist the temptation to draw direct comparisons.  They would give the unwarranted impression that Tieri is in the same league.  And let's be blunt, Ennis could phone in a script from the pub at 2.30am, and it would still be better than 99% of Tieri's published output.  If I were to say that Tieri was the poor man's Garth Ennis, it would be an insult to the taste of Big Issue vendors.

The issue consists, in its entirety, of a fight between Wolverine and the Punisher.  The nominal basis is that the Punisher isn't very happy that Wolverine installed a new mob leader in the previous storyline, but that's just an excuse for the fight.  Wolverine delivers a rather dry argument to the effect that the Punisher is a nutcase who shouldn't be taken seriously, thereby missing the point of the Punisher's comic by a million miles.  Finally, Tieri's attempt at revenge on behalf of his character is to tell us that the Punisher is gay.

Tieri manages to take aim at a barn door target in the form of the Punisher, and fail to land a single hit.  His criticism of the character is already implicit in the way the character's been written for years, save for that embarrassing period in the mid-nineties when they seemed to be taking him at face value.  The point of the Punisher is that he's a lunatic obsessive on a futile mission; Tieri seems to have missed the fact that this is a deliberate feature of the concept.  Moreover, Tieri proves unable to dramatise any of his points.  His story is just a mediocre fight scene with two people talking at one another.  And protestations of the importance of moral ambiguity sit uneasily coming from a writer like Tieri, whose back catalogue contains some of the most simplistic nonsense Marvel have published in recent years.

Having failed to make any convincing response to Ennis at all, Tieri finally resorts to "Oh yeah?  Well, your character's gay."

You almost feel sorry for the poor sod.  It's like watching a comedian die on stage.  This is quite, quite terrible.  It lacks intelligence, insight, wit, imagination... it's totally worthless.  It's downright moronic.  Moronic can work when it's cut with something a little cleverer - look at Ennis.  But this is just the pure stuff, utterly moronic from start to finish.

Terry and Rachel Dodson are hopelessly miscast with the Punisher and Wolverine in the first place, but this still represents a month of their lives they could have spent on something more productive.

This is horrible.  A self-indulgent in-joke of no merit whatsoever, which should never have made it past pitch stage, let alone onto the shelves.

Rating: D-

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