Punisher V.4 – Marvel Knights Paperbacks available on Ebay
This is the Ennis follow-up to the Welcome Back, Frank storyline. After the first run, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The first one was decent, but not fantastic, and it was so different than the MAX storyline. Ennis surprised me on this one. Instead of making it more serious, he took it outrageously over the top.
The Russian comes back, now he’s got a cyborg body that’s reacted in a certain feminine way to the hormones he has to take. Given how much he loves his new hoots, you could say his body reacted pretty damn well. The Punisher fights him across Manhattan, even teaming up with Spider-Man (by allowing the Russian to punch Spider-Man unconscious) and it gets more ridiculous from there.
Let’s just say that the Punisher helps nuke an island with thousands of people on it, the Punisher and Wolverine fight an army of mafia midgets (keep an eye out for the tiny Spider Jerusalem), Wolverine gets run over by a steamroller, the Punisher gets involved in a supervillain plot by a naked fatso to start a cab war across New York, it’s all over the place. Not in a bad way either, it’s just outrageous.
4.5/5. Much much better than the first Ennis run. It’s absolutely nothing like the MAX run, but when a comic makes me laugh out loud even when you’ve got hundreds of people dying, that’s pretty solid.
