Is there anything more generic-sounding than a team-up between Wolverine and the Punisher? Normally, I wouldn't go anywhere near such a '90s nostalgia team-up, but the art team of Weeks and Palmer and the decidedly un-mainstream style of Peter Milligan made me curious. As it turns out, not even a talented art team can really rescue this pairing of characters from a somewhat run of the mill and generic story. Don't get me wrong, the art is indeed solid and Milligan's tale is competent, it's just that this reads like pretty much every Punisher story you've ever read in this first issue, and the inclusion of Wolverine doesn't seem likely to take it off in startling new directions either.
Mind you, Milligan does write a good Punisher. He's ultra capable and dangerous, but slicker and more overtly heroic than Ennis's darker take, like Dirty Harry played by Tom Cruise. I enjoyed seeing the fear in "Napoleon" and his henchmen, and Milligan definitely gets to the heart of the appeal of the Punisher as crime revenge fantasy. Unlike Ennis, Milligan doesn't really keep us in Frank Castle's head very much, but instead lets us see him from the criminals' point-of-view, which makes him seem more dangerous and inhuman. And when Castle does speak, it's usually to make threats which he then follows up on. Milligan almost veers into over-the-top territory ("He did what with their heads?") but he plays it a little more straight than most of Ennis's comedic version of the character, and it works for the most part.
There does seem to be something of a disconnect, even from page to page, about whether this is a more gritty Marvel Knights crime book or a straight Marvel Universe superhero book. There are some panels where the Punisher is wearing his street clothes rather than his familiar skull, and yet when we see the villain, he's in a goofy Silver Age style Napoleon outfit. Likewise, Milligan hangs his tale on the notion of Erewhon, a legendary place where criminals can retire in safety, which is the height of fantasy, but the actual nation is a rundown third world nation, hardly the most interesting of settings, even if it is more realistic.
I've really enjoyed a lot of Lee Weeks art of late, especially the work he's done with Tom Palmer on inks. His work on a Tangled Web story by Bruce Jones, and indeed his work with Jones on the Hulk, was gorgeous, so good in fact that it made me overlook flaws that I now can't help but see when I read Jones's work. Wolverine/Punisher, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good as the work that Weeks and Palmer have done recently on those stories and on the Gibbons Captain America run. Which is not to say that the art is bad, in fact it's solid stuff, with good staging and distinctive characters, it's just that the backdrops are kind of boring and indeed the action sequences are as well. This may be due to the slow starter nature of the plot as much as anything else. I certainly hope that a story focusing on Wolverine and Punisher will at least deliver in the mindless action department.
In the end, Wolverine/Punisher, despite its creative pedigree, is very much like the recent Wolverine/Captain America miniseries. A pointless bit of fluff that teams up two popular characters with a paper thin rationale, largely geared at those fans who already read several stories of these characters every month. The real failure of Wolverine/Punisher isn't really that it's bad, just that it's more of the same, and it's downright tragic that this book will probably outsell more unique and interesting stories like Gotham Central, Runaways and Sleeper just because of familiarity and fanboy inertia.
