GARTH ENNIS: MAX-ING OUT THE PUNISHER

[MattBrady]

The new series under the MAX imprint just started, The Punisher is receiving critical and commercial accolades. We sat down with writer Garth Ennis for a chat on the character, the new imprint, and his approach to writing a “monster”

Newsarama: Starting off with the big picture – Marvel's moving the character to the MAX imprint. How does that change your approach to the character as well as the stories that you write?

Garth Ennis: First off, it’s a little bit the other way around. This wasn't something that came down from Marvel. I wanted to change my approach to the Punisher, and the only way to do that was by getting them to move it to MAX. I find that writing a character like that in a world and in stories like that – hard, harsh, criminal dramas with lots of action – I found it difficult to write those while the previous restrictions were in place, and I was moving the Punisher further and further away from the over the top, almost goofy material that I started out with, and into darker territory.

While I was writing Born, I realized that was where I wanted to take the regular series as well – I wanted to take it into that kind of grim, uncompromising territory, and really, MAX seemed the only way to be able to do that.

NRAMA: So, for lack of a better word, he’s in his own world now, there are no more superheroes or other…outlandish aspects that were in the Marvel Knights series? .

GE: No – I have no plans to use any of those characters. I feel that once they show up, they shatter any suspension of disbelief that the readers managed to form while reading the Punisher. It’s okay, if you’re writing a story with characters like Spacker Dave and Joan the Mouse, and outlandish things involving giant squid and so are happening, but it doesn’t work so well if you’re trying to present a more traditional crime story background. If you are, these superheroes tend to stand out for a mile and ruin the story for you.

Although, I do have an idea to use Nick Fury in the second year of the book, but it would be very much the Nick Fury that I wrote about in the Fury miniseries a couple of years ago – it wouldn’t be the guy in the jumpsuit with the shoulder holster and team of bright-eyed, busy-tailed agents backing him up. It would be very much the burned-out cold warrior that I wrote about. I think he could fit into the Punisher’s world quite well. Again, he’s not a superhero.

NRAMA: When you say that you wanted to go down this road with the character when you were writing Born, what clicked for you? Had you just written enough tongue-in-cheek stories of the Punisher working in a world with costumed heroes?

GE: Yeah, I think so. I think I’d kind of taken the more outrageous Punisher as far as I could go and stay interested in it. With Born, I was able to go further into the character’s past, and what I tried to get across there was the idea that the central factor in the Punisher’s makeup, this massacre in Central Park where he lost his family – rather than that turning him into the Punisher, that simply flipped a switch that was ready to be flipped all along. The groundwork for that had been laid much, much earlier. There was something in Frank Castle that Vietnam brought out. It was because of that that I really felt that we needed to go back to basics, and start all over again, hence the new series.

NRAMA: With the new series under the new imprint, it allows you a lot more latitude, obviously…

GE: That it does, yeah.

NRAMA: So do you have, looking at the first issue where he mows down all the gangsters at the birthday party here – an internal line between realistic and gratuitous violence? Does that affect what you, in this case, would tell Lewis [Larosa] to draw?

GE: Regarding what Lewis draws, I tend to give most artists I work with a lot of leeway in terms of just how extreme they want to go with their portrays of violence. Some want to splatter the page with blood, some want to pull back a little bit. Really, it’s a question of what the artist wants to do there. Frank is killing 40 or 50 people by using a heavy machine gun on a crowd. That’s obviously going to result in absolute carnage, but exactly how that carnage is shot is largely up to Lewis.

My intentions with that scene was not so much to revel in the violence of it, but to use it to establish the Punisher character from issue #1 as a guy who is not particularly interested in getting to grips with his enemy, so that he can kill them one at a time in supremely ironic ways. He’s not so much into the face-off, the gunfight or the fistfight. He has a military background. He’s a soldier. He’s a guy who’s decided to go to war with the mob, and for him, war means war. He’s going to use his military skills and military training, and military philosophy.

So, for Frank, the easiest way, the most efficient way is to wait until you get a couple of hundred of them all in one place, and then hose them down with a machine gun. It’s something very far away from the idea of the “fair fight” that most superhero comics would put forward, but it is how wars are fought, and how they’ve always been fought – try to take your opponent by surprise and wipe out as many as possible with minimal risk to yourself.

NRAMA: It’s interesting to hear you describe it that way. Thinking about you and your influences, I was trying to fit the Punisher into the mold of a modern Western, with Frank Castle as the Man with no Name, but instead, it’s, in your view, a war story?

GE: Well, I see it as a crime thriller, but with a strong vein of action in it. I don’t see it as a Western, because I don’t think that the characters’ ethos is one that resonates particularly with the West, unless you want to delve into the idea of the Wild West more deeply, and talk about some of the more genocidal aspects, such as the Calvary’s campaign against the Indians. But that’s not what we’re talking about here at all. I think when you mention the Western; you’re along the line of one man standing for justice, one man on the vengeance trail.

I don’t see that really being what Frank is about anymore. As I said, I see the deaths of his family being less important to what he is now. The deaths are what flipped the switch, but as I think I’ve said in the book, he’s killed something in the region of thousands of people by now. I’m sure he’s killed the people who killed his family, the people who ordered the shooting, and the people who the shooters were originally shooting at, that caught his family in the crossfire. He’s taken his revenge. What he’s doing now is something that he has to do – something that, probably if he was prevented from doing, he’d kill himself if he couldn’t, because his life would have no meaning.

And so, I don’t see that with having much to do with the myth of the West. As for a war story, Frank uses military tactics and techniques, and has a very military philosophy about his approach, but I don’t see this so much as a war story as I see it as a crime thriller – an action-based crime thriller.

NRAMA: And as you said in the first issue of his motivations – he goes out to make the world sane.

GE: Yeah – if he couldn’t do it, he probably would go insane. He probably would take his own life. It’s an odd sort of a character for a major, mainstream company to be publishing a monthly about, but thank God they are doing it, otherwise I wouldn’t have any established characters that I’d be interested in doing.

NRAMA: Something that you once spoke of when you were writing Preacher was that violence, however big or small, from a fistfight to a paramilitary maneuver, has consequences – no one gets away free. That kind of still applies here, right? The effect of all this violence on Frank over the years – this has made him, philosophically, not human anymore…

GE: I think you’re right there. He shows moments of humanity, and he probably even shows moments of heroism – I mean, if Frank’s walking past a burning building, and he sees a little girl on the third floor screaming for help, he’d risk, and possibly even sacrifice his own life to save her. But, in the way he goes about his business, he’s not heroic, and in fact, he has become inhuman the way he goes about it. He’s almost more like a machine.

The consequences of this violence for Frank are really that he’s become a monster. He’s become this terrible thing. What’s interesting for us as readers is watching how he goes about it.

NRAMA: Right.

GE: In the previous Punisher series, I probably got pretty far away from honestly showing the consequences of violence – that was a much goofier, more ridiculous approach towards violence. In this series, I think I am putting a bit more thought into that.

NRAMA: In that light, you’re telling the story with one central character rather than a cast. What do you put in there that’s…for lack of a better word, appealing in him to get readers coming back month after month? Or are we beyond talking about putting something in Frank that people can relate to here? I don’t think you’re aiming for folks to come back to see which new ways Frank kills people…

GE: No.

NRAMA: So what do you put in there that people can identify with to bring them back? His anger?

GE: Well, first of all, I’d like to think that the stories themselves are intriguing enough that people will want to come back and see how things turn out. There is something fascinating watching a character like this operate. This implacable human tank that absolutely will not stop at what he does. There’s something kind of darkly fascinating about that.

But – the major approach I take is that I accept that Frank is what he is. I don’t try to change him; I don’t try to develop him. You hear an awful lot of talk in comics about “character development.” Most characters don’t develop though. They might change slightly throughout a run as a writer develops his themes, but as in real life, most people don’t really develop that much. They reach a certain age or a certain maturity, and they stick like that. Perhaps they mellow a little, but most people are fundamentally the same throughout their entire life barring a catastrophic event, either of their own making or not, and they’re forced to change their behavior.

Anyway – I tend to take Frank as set. He is what he is, and he’s not going to change. What’s interesting for me is to introduce new characters, other characters to the book, and see how they respond to Frank, whether it be a mob family that are at war with him, or law enforcement officers who, in some cases, might feel quite ambivalent about Frank, or aren’t sure how to respond to him; or innocent bystanders that sometimes get caught up in the storm that rages around him. Obviously, villains don’t come off very well in the Punisher – most are either killed, or if they escape this time, the next time they won’t.

In a way, for the development of the book, that all is healthy – it keeps you on your toes and means that you constantly have to create new characters and new villains. The first arc of the book has Frank up against a mob outfit, while a CIA unit attempts to capture him at the same time. The second story arc of the book which runs through issues #7-#12 is a gang story set in what’s left of Hell’s Kitchen with three or four different Irish gangs all going after a particular prize, with Frank and a couple of other characters who’ve taken an interest in this, circling this killing ground, and waiting for their on chance to pounce.

Yeah – my main thrust here is to keep coming up with interesting characters for Frank to interact with. Not necessarily kill in every single case, but to see how they respond to him and sometimes to see how he responds to them.

NRAMA: Outside of the regular series, and on the other end of the spectrum – you’ve also got Punisher: The End coming in April. What made that story one you wanted to tell?

GE: It was either Joe Quesada or Axel Alonso that mentioned these books that would literally end each Marvel character, and I started to think about what would happen to Frank in the end. I cooked up something that I don’t think people will be expecting, really. In a way, it takes some of the themes from the Born miniseries, and takes them to their conclusion. Richard Corben is drawing it, and it’s going to look great. I’ve seen some of his pages, and it’s an absolute treat to work with him.

I don’t think people are going to be quite ready for what they get. I think it will surprise a lot of people. I don’t want to give it away – but yeah, I think it will be an interesting one.

NRAMA: It’s a pretty unique position to be put in, to write both the modern origin, ongoing, and end of a character like this…

GE: I suppose on a commercial level with the movie coming out, they’re going to want to get as much Punisher material out there as possible, and I love writing it, so it’s a great position to be in.

[scan2001]

I think so far the Max issues of the Punisher is great. I like that it a little more serious this time. I have to think that the Punisher: The End sound interesting.

[den888]

I wasn't aware that they re-started Punisher again. So this new series is now, what, Vol. 6?

I stopped reading Ennis' previous Punisher series right after the IRA storyline -- things just got sillier and sillier and the artwork became abominable.

However, I picked up this new series after hearing that Ennis was finally going to take his tounge out of his cheek and tell get into some badass, amoral, soul-killing Punisher action, and I haven't been dissapointed. Issue 1 is one of the best (if not THE best) single Punisher issues I've ever read. I'm very happy that this character continues to hold his interest (I remember after the "Welcome Back Frank" series there was some question as to whether or not he'd come back permanently, and then with all the Wolverine-being-run-over-by-a-steamroller crap I started to wonder if he wasn't just treading water to cash some checks) and I look forward to a long, healthy run.

This is really Ennis' best stuff in years, and Larosa's art is excellent. Let's see if Marvel can avoid splitting up this team for a while. If we get into another musical chairs with shite fill-in artists, I'll be pissed. This is a solid book that deserves a clean run.

[leez34]

I'm pretty indifferent about this. I read Punisher every month, and it's alright, but I'm not all that excited about seeing more blood or swearing. Although it'll be for mature audiences, the Punisher will never be in a truly "mature" story like the Sandman.

[SpyGuy]

Garth, buddy, I'm beggin' ya...Please stay the hell away from Nick Fury. I love what you're doing on THE PUNISHER, especially the first two issues of the MAX series, but just say no to Nick, okay?

Thanks.

[Aaron Weisbrod]

As time marched-on the Marvel Knights PUNISHER mini-series got to be a little hit-and-miss (no pun intended), but this new MAX relaunch has thus far been...

WOW.

Welcome back, Garth!

Chompin' at the bit,
Aaron Weisbrod

P.S.-- And an Ennis/Corben PUNISHER: THE END collaboartion to boot? Great-googily-moogily!!! It really *IS* my birthday!!!

[StoneGold]

Good interview. I've been loving the first two issues of the new series. There was one thing I wish was asked though, although a little spoilerlicious....









spoilers........
















I just wish Ennis was asked if Micro's way back when was going to be addressed. Not that I want to know how it would be addressed, just if. But that's just the continuity geek in me. Honestly, you could write your way out of it by saying he wasn't really dead, just really injured.

[TheFoo]

Can anyone tell me if the new number one was any good? I'm been comtemplating picking it up, but I really really really didnt like the MK title at all.

[IanZL]

Originally posted by TheFoo
Can anyone tell me if the new number one was any good? I'm been comtemplating picking it up, but I really really really didnt like the MK title at all.

If you liked the darker elements of Welcome Back Frank (like the first issue) you will probably like this.

[White Knight]

I liked the Original welcome back Frank with Dillon art.

Towards the end, the last Punisher series was disapointing me, but I still picked it up.

The storyline of the new series is certainly grittier, but I don't like the art. I've picked up both issues so far but I might drop the title if the story isn't good enough to compensate for the mediocre art.

[sstcrew]

If you are into Ennis' writing you will love this book. I would almost compare it to the Saint of Killers mini that he did on Preacher. Deffinetly the best Punisher I have read in a long long time. Can't wait to dive into #2 this week.

As for the art I really like what they are doing. My image of the Punisher has always been a very rough looking stockey guy with a blocky looking head. I think they have really captured how the punisher would look if he were a real guy.

[grphxkindaguy]

Originally posted by MrAlarm
I stopped reading Ennis' previous Punisher series right after the IRA storyline -- things just got sillier and sillier and the artwork became abominable.

I also dropped this title, but more recently after confederate of dunces concluded (as did the series).

I read the new issue #1, but I could care less. I thought the new art and coloring were ugly and the more "mature themes" they introduced added *nothing* to the story IMO.

Without Dillon on art, it just isn't the same. I think Ennis has lost his writing edge over time. His stuff just doesn't excite me the way it used to...

[MikeHuffman]

I enjoyed the Marvel Knights series, but after reading "Born" I found myself asking, "Why can't Ennis write the Punisher more like this?" Once I heard about his take for the MAX series, I knew it would be good, and I haven't been disappointed yet.

This is a case of the writer being the real star of the book. As a character, I had no interest in the Punisher until Ennis got involved. It's cool that, even after a few years with the character, Garth still has plenty of stories to tell.

— Mike

[StoneGold]

I'll admit, the artwork is something of an acquired taste. It's not first mini-era Zeck, but it more than fits the book. I'd say it's something like a cross between Maleev, JRJr, and like a hit of Pat Oliffe or something. It's weird though, going between an almost photorealistic look at times, to a much sketchier feel at others. I find it really sets the dark tone for the series pretty good though.

[TLR316]

So far I have to say, that the two comics that Marvel's Max series is printing out is amazing. Both Supreme Power and Punisher are at the top of my list every month. Both books' writers and artists are awesome. Thank God for well written well illustrated R-rated comics!

[tralfaz]

so Punisher doesnt exist in the Marvel universe anymore?

[WebHobbit]

Nice interview Matt!

[Dan20]

Originally posted by tralfaz
so Punisher doesnt exist in the Marvel universe anymore?

Well....he does, but you likely won't see any mention of that fact within the series. Which is sorta what many Marvel books are doing anyways.
I don't have a problem with this, so long as it doesn't go out of its way to blatantly contradict everything.
I hope that Nick Fury appearance doesn't happen....aside from messing up the continuity of the character, I thought it was just a dumb version of the character.

But enough negativity. I really enjoyed the new Punisher #1, and I'm looking forward to sitting down and reading #2. Great stuff by Ennis and Larosa.

[Scooby2099]

The Punisher is receiving critical and commercial accolades.

Huh? The Punisher under Ennis has been a good read, but I thought it was getting pretty old at the end of its Marvel Knights' run. As for the 'new' MAX direction, it pretty much reads like it used to (except for some unnecessary swearing and violence). The first two issues have been good, but hardly anything worthy of "receiving critical and commercial accolades." This just sounds like the usual PR spin.

[FIG]

I really let it slip after the Born miniseries drawn by Daerick Robertson(awesome work), I mean I picked up the run drawn by Tom Mandrake(i think it was him) but after that the arts been less than satisfactory. Now that Richard Corbens drawing some of it though, I'll definetly be picking it up. Can't wait to see it.

[Chris Hunter]

This is both Ennis and Larosa at the top of their game! Buy it! Buy it now!!

[aries_insaneus]

I think that they are finally writing the Punisher the way it should be writin

[amaraswen]

Words fail me. How can I express my extreme zealotry and devotion for the work of Garth Ennis and specially his Punisher run? Let me borrow Ennis' own words:

It’s an odd sort of a character for a major, mainstream company to be publishing a monthly about, but thank God they are doing it, otherwise I wouldn’t have any established characters that I’d be interested in doing.

Yeah, thank God they're doing it, and hiring you to write it! Charater and author were born to find each other!

[Jeremy Williams]

Richard Corben? Could it be...? Sorry for the simple adjective but that rules beyond anything.