Title: The Punisher
Issue: 5
Date: May, 1986
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Steven Grant, Jo Duffy
Artist: Mike Vosburg, John Beatty
Colorist: Bob Sharen
Letterer: Ken Bruzenak
Editor: Carl Potts
This is the final issue of the five-issue limited series that was the Punisher's first series after he was introduced in the pages of Spider-Man and had occasional appearances in other titles.
Frank Castle has been trapped by a mysterious organization aiming to produce a brainwashed army of "Punishers" for an all-out war on crime with no regard for protecting innocent lives. The opening sequence has Castle in one of those ridiculously-slow-deathtraps, although the purpose is brainwashing rather than death. The result is pretty standard. Punisher escapes and takes on his old enemy Jigsaw, now dressed in Punisher cosplay along with a crew of jobbers. The rest of this is mop-up.
While the action never gets all that interesting, the character work here is pretty solid. Faced with his own crusade taken to its logical extreme, Frank Castle suddenly has doubts. The result is a bit at odds with where the story picks up in the two ongoing titles that follow this, but it does make a good conclusion to this arc, and really in some sense, it felt like a conclusion to the Punisher character itself. This was a good walk off into the sunset for Frank Castle, that still left a lot of moral ambiguity, but also gave Frank the chance to walk away from his obsessive crusade. It's almost disappointing that this isn't how things turned out.
Rating 6.5/10
