I have made no attempt to hide the fact I love the Punisher and I love Garth Ennis and the combination of Garth Ennis and the Punisher for these many years has been the one constant joy for me in comics.

Well, admittedly, it hasn't been quite as constant as I'd like to convince myself. I've made references in a few past posts about the storyline that almost made me give up on Ennis's Punisher, but unless you actually read it, it's hard to imagine just how bad it was. One problem I've long had with Ennis is his need to periodically take a break from good solid storytelling to do something completely bizarre for pure shock value. Let me stress there is a difference between bizarre to promote a storyline--such as the guy in Preacher who cut off people's faces and stapled them back on upside-down--and bizarre for shock value alone--such as the guy in Preacher who made a sex doll out of raw meat.

Fortunately, Punisher moved from the Marvel Knights line to the MAX line a few months after this, following an over-the-top battle between Frank Castle and Daredevil, Wolverine, and Spider-Man that reunited Ennis with Hitman co-creator John McCrea. The move to the adult format revitalized the character and Ennis's interest.

Before even discussing the story, I have to give Tom Mandrake some credit for his work outside this run. As the artist on Spectre for about 60-70 issues in the early 90's, he was very good. His style, however, doesn't really work for the Punisher's urban war. Admittedly, Ennis's story has some of the horror story elements where Mandrake shines, but for the other 90% of the story, Mandrake's art is just plain ugly.

Every issue of this arc begins and ends with a flashback to this creepy looking cartoony kid and his collosally fat mother.In the present, Ennis makes some kind of attempt at social commentary, addressing the homeless problem in America. In doing so, he portrays the homeless as ranting lunatics unable to speak complete sentences without meaningless gibberish and those who help the homeless as bleeding heart liberals who see "uncaring" as the only evil in the world.

At a homeless shelter, people are lined up to get food when one of them starts throwing a fit and babbling about the "man down below."The social worker at the shelter asks this obviously psychopathic man to take her to meet the "man down below," certain she can't be hurt while cloaked in her goodie-goodiness. When her friend tries to convince her it might not be a good idea to follow a mentally deranged man into the bowels of abandonned subway tunnels, he's immediately dismissed for not caring enough about the downtrodden masses.

Meanwhile, the Punisher sees fit to make an appearance in his own book, pursuing mobsters into the subway. One of them runs down a tunnel and Punisher takes chase. Unfortunately, both he and the criminal get lost in the underground labyrinth. Eventually, the criminal runs out in front of a train wrapping up that plot device and allowing the Punisher to turn his attention elsewhere, just in time to save our social worker friend, who has surprisingly been betrayed by the homeless sociopath.

The social worker finds herself staring down a group of a dozen or so homeless men and starts screaming for help, which the Punisher provides in the form of a hail of bullets.Another group of homeless thugs comes after them and the Punisher and the social worker are separated. She falls through a manhole, though it's never clear why there is a manhole in a subway access tunnel, and lands atop a pile of dead bodies... about seven stories high.

The flashbacks continue with the weird little boy's extremely obese mother telling him a bedtime story while eating two dozen hot wings.Back in the present, we see what became of the little boy as he emerges from the Mount Everest of murdered bodies, setting up a scenario that makes Preacher's meatfucker look as mild-mannered as Clark Kent.The story is that this guy pays some homeless guys to kidnap people "who won't be missed," toss them on top of the pile, and bleed them out. He then lives in the pile, where he squirms around naked.

When his mother died, we learn, it was almost a week before her body was discovered. He was pinned beneath her enormous girth that entire time, and had to eat her flesh and drink her blood to survive. It was the happiest time of his life and he's taken to the murder of thousands to relive it every day.What's unclear is where this guy got the money to pay his homeless army. He doesn't appear to have a job, as I doubt most employers would hire someone who came in smelling like the rotting juices of twenty thousand corpses. There couldn't have been a legal settlement as his mother didn't choke on a defective hot wing. He doesn't have rich relatives to inherit money from because he's taken to an orphange after his mom dies.

Argh! So little of this story makes sense, I'm almost embarrassed to focus on something like the financials. Anyway, the Punisher shows up with a flamethrower and burns all the bodies, blows up some homeless people, and the pacifict social worker comes to understand the all-important lesson that there are times in life where you just have to kill a whole lot of people.

PUNISHER: SILENT NIGHT
No matter how many times I see his work, I can never really decide whether I like Kyle Hotz's artwork or not. All my Google searches of Kyle Hotz refer to him as the "master of the macabre." A Google search of "master of the macabre," however, forces you to wallow through names like Edgar Allen Poe, Berni Wrightson, Stephen King, Ambrose Bierce, Vincent Price, and H.P. Lovecraft long before you get to Hotz.

I was prepared to declare this grandiose and arrogant, but, upon further reflection, I suppose there can be more than one "master" of a given craft. Universities hand out Masters degrees to thousands of people a year. Every year at Augusta a new golfer wins The Masters Tournament. Yoda, Qui-Gonn, and Mace Windu all were able to coexist as Jedi masters. I guess my issue is with the use of the article "the" instead of "a." Regardless, I can't say Hotz's art in this issue is necessarily "bad," but it definitely doesn't work for this story.

Andy Diggle is trying to do his best Garth Ennis and the opening scene almost works, though I'd say it ultimately reads more like Carl Potts than Ennis. Punisher is watching a drug deal go down on a wharf, kills all but one of the guys with a sniper rifle, and goes in to interogate the last one. He learns that a mobster who has gone deep deep deep into hiding may be coming out of his hole to kill another mobster who'd turned rat and gone into witness protection. So, obviously, it's a holiday tale...

Actually, where it gets its Xmas twist is when the Punisher tracks down a mall Santa who epitomizes both why Hotz's style earns him the macrabre master seal of approval and why Hotz shouldn't be drawing this book.The grey Santa's overbite just gets worse and worse and he looks less and less human with every page. He tells the Punisher that the witness protected mobster is back home to make up for his sins of the past by throwing a big Christmas party at the orphanage where he grew up. The other mobster is so determined to kill him, there's going to be a big firefight at the orphanage. Punisher in his desire to both kill mobsters and protect orphans heads up to the orphange with Ghoulish Santa in tow.

Oh, yeah, and Frank gets a Santa suit of his own.This seems pretty stupid to me. Why couldn't either A) the informant be one of the elves helping the mall Santa or B) the Punisher put on an elf costume? Santa and an elf makes sense, but two Santas is stupid. There's even a scene where one of the mob bodyguards asks why there are two Santas, so it's not like this thought didn't occur to Diggle.

From there it's standard--and seemingly rushed--typical bad Punisher story. It's stories like this that make people like one of my fellow Guys Buying Comics (cough... Chris... cough) think of Punisher as a one-trick pony. The mobster and his guys come to kill the other mobster and his guys, the Punisher blows up all the soldiers with claymores in the above mentioned snowmen, and the first mobster tries to get away, leading to the Punisher chasing him in a reindeer driven sleigh and giving us a line so bad I hope Andy Diggle is forced to have it tattooed to his forehead."No. With Heckler and Koch." Also, see what I mean about Gross Santa's overbite?

So, Punisher catches up to the guy, who drowns in a frozen lake after Punisher cracks the ice. He then goes back and kills the other mobster for good measure, dresses him up in the Santa suit, and leaves the body for the orphan kids to find. You know, because the Punisher is all about protecting innocence.Merry Christmas, kiddies!

Overall Rating: 1/5 and that's only because I don't want to stoop to 0/5's just yet. When Punisher stories are good, they are very, very good, but when they are bad, they make Rann-Thanagar War read like Bronte.