"The End" Week: Punisher #18!

I might have to build up to his most recent last issue, so here's the end of one of his shorter series: from 1997, Punisher #18, "Double Cross" Written by John Ostrander, pencils by Tom Lyle, inks by Robert Jones.

We saw the previous issue a while back: this was around the time of Onslaught and Heroes Reborn. The amnesiac Punisher was hiding out in a half-demolished church that still had a Sentinel head in it. While he seems to instinctually recall his training and habits, Frank tells a familiar nun, Maggie, that he remembers just enough to know he doesn't want to know more. Still, he gets involved in both the return of an abusive boyfriend--Frank had beat his ass before, and promised a broken arm was next if he abused again, but he might as well skip ahead--and some gun dealers. Somewhat unusually, Frank seems to be asking himself, are there other ways of punishing? Maybe not immediately going with murder. He gives the gun dealers a chance to surrender or run, and maybe knocks out one, but once the shooting starts there's no mercy.

Frank tells a boy he might not have his memory, but he had a mission--and that's it? He was left amnesiac in his last issue? This would've been about the same time as Marvel's bankruptcy, and I believe they had some strict rules about profitability when that went down: they maybe couldn't have taken a chance on keeping the book going then. Which is a shame, because narratively it leaves some cash on the table: with the disappearance of a lot of earth's heroes, criminals and villains would have been emboldened, and Frank's role could have been much more important. Of course, the next Punisher book was the "angel" version, which retconned a lot of Frank's history...briefly, as it was almost immediately reversed. Still, Bernie Wrightson art, feel like I should at least flip through it one of these days. (Have I ever read it? I wanna say no, but...)