NO! (Don't shoot me in the face! The Punisher Topic)

[anarky]

I'd say the great Batman villains are:

The Joker
Two-Face
The Penguin
Catwoman
Bane
R'as Al Ghul

The second tier villains, who are awesome but not quite up to the standards of greatness, include:

various mobsters (Joe Chill, Lew Moxon, Rupert Thorne, etc)
Poison Ivy
The Mad Hatter
Killer Croc
Mister Freeze
The Ventriloquist
Anarky
Clayface

And I'm sure a few dozen that I'm forgetting right now.

The Riddler does not even place. He is a douche.

Louie the Lilac transcends greatness; he and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, would rule the world if they ever pooled their resources. Maybe with Chandel, Harry, and Shame as their muscle.

[Diabolical]

And I'm sure a few dozen that I'm forgetting right now.

Harley Quinn.

[anarky]

Harley sucks on her own, though. As a foil/sidekick for the Joker, she's golden.

[Diabolical]

Fuck you again Matt Fraction...

Back in the 90's when The Punisher had like 4 or 5 titles (shortly before Marvel started canceling them all) they introduced a storyline where Frank appeared to die and a bunch of wannbes came forward to try and replace Frank.
Most of them were retards. The only one that had any hint of potential was Lynn Michaels, the "hot chick." I figured if there can be a female version of damn near every other hero (Bat, Super, Spider, Hulk, etc.), why not a female Punisher?
Eventually, all of the wannabes faded away or were killed off and forgotten about.

Or so I thought.

Wondering what ever happened to the Lady Punisher (and thinking that she might be cool to see again someday) I looked her up online and found out Matt Fraction used her in his Punisher War Journal mess. I remember those issues and the character but somehow I never realized it was her (due to the shoddy writing, I assume).

Apparently she worked for SHIELD and went deep undercover to get Jigsaw to go after Frank (Not sure what the logic behind that was, but anyway...). At the end of the series, she helps a man shoot Jigsaw in the face (a man she and Jigsaw warped into a psycho) and was arrested.

Fuck you again Fraction.

[anarky]

The man must be blowing Joe Quesada. That is the only explanation.

Most everyone seemed to love his Iron Fist. Slightly fewer, but still a majority, seem to enjoy his Iron Man.

His X-Men seems to be pretty reviled overall, reaction to his Thor ambivalent, and his Punisher downright fucktarded. The bits and pieces I've read (a couple of scattered issues and online previews) haven't impressed me, but haven't left me thinking he's the worst ever (though his PWJ had some major pacing issues that vyn told me were probably not the artist's fault).

Joe Q should probably stop giving jobs to his friends because they're his friends. There's, what, three guys writing everything at Marvel right now, right? And they're not really writing, exactly, since it's all done by committee, blah blah blah.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Y'know, somebody else mentioned that was Lynn and I went back and reread that story arc after that and I still didn't get that it was her.

I'll always just pretend she moved to Omaha with the other Punisher wannabe in the leg brace and they're both schoolteachers and have a three year old daughter.

[Diabolical]

I went back and looked at issues 22 & 23.
Her name isn't mentioned until GW Bridge commends her for deep undercover work.

My new theory: It wasn't her. Lynn and Michaels are common first and last names.

[anarky]

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page ... e&id=28188

Looks to me like Remender doesn't entirely "get" what the relationship between Wolverine and Punisher has always been. It wasn't a matter of Wolverine disagreeing with Punisher fundamentally because Punisher was a cold-blooded killer. It was that Punisher reminded him of what all the evidence said he had been before the Weapon X project, and what he could become again, and it disgusted him. But, IIRC, they only clashed when circumstances put them on different sides.

I'm a bit confused as to why Wolverine would try to protect Daken, too.

Ah, can't we press a reset button and make Wolvie's past a mystery again? That was such a huge part of his appeal. Now he's just a super-powered dick with blades in his arms.

[vynsane]

Ah, can't we press a reset button and make Wolvie's past a mystery again? That was such a huge part of his appeal. Now he's just a super-powered dick with blades in his arms.

much like the prequels, after decades of build-up, no wolverine backstory could ever stand up to the fans' vision and expectations.

[Rollo Tomassi]

If they retconned Spidey's history, they shouldn't have any problems doing it to Logan.

[anarky]

It's not entirely the backstory. It's the contradiction of every previous backstory, the changes to his character, and the addition of the ubertarded Romulus to the mix.

Personally, though, I like the idea of Wolvie being very old, rejected by his father (a chief in a Canadian tribe) in the early 19th century because he was a runt, raised partly by wolves, fought some sort of crazy worm monster in the Old West, had a stable relationship with Silver Fox until Sabretooth killed her, fought alongside Captain America and Black Widow in World War II, joined a secret Canadian ops team, was conned into the Weapon X program as a prototype, and destroyed the project and went batshit insane with total memory loss until the Hudsons found him and dubbed him Wolverine. You could even work in Wolverine: Origin and fudge some of the early dates.

In any case, the knowledge of his past deeds shouldn't shock him enough to dramatically change his character, since he's already had at least the inkling that he'd been an assassin for ages. And it doesn't make sense to have a whole series of him trying to atone for his actions at the same time that he's a secret assassin for the X-Men.

[anarky]

My tenses shifted mid-sentence, but that sentence still isn't as jacked up as FrankenCastle or Wolverine.

[Rollo Tomassi]

The thing about Wolverne is that he's become a parody of himself and no writer can't NOT write him as that parody anymore. It's physically impossible to imbue him with all of his tropes and memes and not be hogtied by them in a literary sense.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Where were we? Oh yeah, bitching about Rick Remender. So, I got Franken-Castle 21 the other day (for 50 cents) and as suspected it was horrendously shitty with Frank fighting a bunch of monsters like Morbius and them guys over a Bloodstone in his chest (which magically healed retconned the whole FrankenCastle stupidity.) Now, if this hadn't had to be renamed from The Punisher, this would've been the 21st issue, and the In The Blood series would've been issues 22-26. But since Remender fucked the series into such a deep dark hole they had to cancel the entire thing, this was the final issue of the series. So they had this Coda tacked on the end of the issue where Frank is back to normal in NYC fucking up criminals. And it was good. Well, it was fair. It wasn't great. But had the entire series been as good as that Coda, I wouldn't be bitchin' about Rick Rememder all the time. unfortunately, six pages of good don't make up for two years of ass.

Remender was on CBR last week trying to defend his run, and a bunch of guys were in the forums giving him head on how awesome he is. I called bullshit. I said if the entirety of the Punisher publishing line since '86 was a stock market, then Rick's run was Black Monday 1929. And some dill came in and threw out the last six or eight months numbers for the Franken Castle run. This turd was doing roughly 20-23,000 copies per month and said "BZZZT. Clearly you are wrong! Thanks for playing." And I'm thinking, well first of all I was speaking in terms of being creatively bankrupt, not saleswise. But secondly, is this guy really showing those numbers as validiction? Those fucking number are EMBARRASING. I didn't even respond to the guy. It would've taken too much time and effort to bury the guy. Plus everybody in the forum was already pro-Remender and the semen on their lips to prove it, so I let it lay. But, still, those are just shitty numbers to be thinking the book was anything but a failure that got put out of its misery.

Also, I was reading some earlier Punisher work by Mike Baron, and that shit was the dope. Him and Carl Potts really did some good Punisher stories back in the day.

Hopefully Greg Rucka can turn this freight train of shit around come August.

[anarky]

Rucka should do the Punisher proud. The only possibility would be he suffers from "Hama Batman Syndrome," where the meeting of a great writer and great character somehow doesn't gel into anything remotely readable.

I still say Dixon did some of the best Punisher work in the 90s.