The "Widow Day" makes a striking entrance: it's Princess Python! She hisses with a forked tongue, when the Cat Burglar tries to lay down his game at her; that was new. The Prowler explains why he was there: when he had been just a window-washer, Stilt-Man nearly killed him trying to get away from Daredevil. DD saved him, but being pissed at Stilt-Man still inspired Prowler to put his own gadgets to work and costume up, briefly as a villain. Everyone's drinking and remembering better times, when super fights were just shenanigans; at least until the Rhino picks a fight with Armadillo and the bar goes nuts. It's mostly fun and games, no one really getting hurt.
The fight stops dead when Spider-Man arrives, with a stern "at his wake, guys?" He also scolds Prowler out of there, while Princess Python throws up at him. This was post-Civil War, for the like 20 minutes that his identity was known, so she drunkenly calls him "Peedershpidermun." Spidey tells everyone, be careful: "The world's not...it's not so fun anymore, you know?"
The Eel calls Spidey a class act, but is shouted down by the Masked Marauder, who can't believe a bar full of villains just let him lecture them and then go. They could be great again, he argues: they just have to want it. Which is about when people start puking. Not because they couldn't hold their liquor, but because they'd been poisoned, and the Marauder sees a cocktail napkin with a Punisher-skull on it, before things start exploding. The Marauder may have been the narrator for part of the story, but it switches back to Frank in the end: "I don't know about you, but I celebrate loss every day. But some days I get to celebrate it with fireworks."
...how often do we see Frank poison anybody? I know he's a "work smarter" kind of guy, and going against villains with powers would need an edge, but still. And there's a bunch of guys there, that maybe don't deserve to be murdered? Although I'm sure Frank would say, "lay down with dogs..." I have a soft-spot for Princess Python, from her disasterous stint in the Serpent Society: she quickly realized, she was equipped for theft and light-to-medium grifting, not fighting things like MODOK. Gibbon is a sad sack in a funny gorilla suit, who seemingly dies tragically every other appearance: he just wanted attention. Puma and Armadillo get roped into a lot of nonsense, but I don't think either was a bad guy. This felt a lot like some late 80's Flash comics, where Barry's old Rogues' Gallery was portrayed as wacky crooks with a competitive streak, not murdering monsters: of course, most of them were transitioned into murdering monsters eventually.
Also, the back cover of this one is a Nissan ad, suggesting "You could pretty much live in it," which, um. Not aged well.
5 comments:
I have to say, the way Frank took out all those guys (and gal?) was pretty damn clever AND funny. It really does make you wonder why he doesn’t go after super villains and other costumed crooks with gimmicks more often, especially given that Frank mainly operates within NYC, the main hotbed of superhero & villain activity. I know Fraction attempted to answer that question with varying degrees of success, but by & large, it still didn’t. I’m personally thinking it’s because he’d make the heroes look bad & ineffective in comparison, take out a good bit of their rogues gallery so there wouldn’t be a lot of quality bad guys to fight, eventually he’d get killed and finally it’d wind up being a mixed bag of satisfaction and disappointment for readers.
Btw, that Nissan ad kinda did age well in that the way things are going in this economy, we might all be sleeping in our cars at some point 😩
It doesn't feel as sure as Frank might like: that poison was maybe just to slow them down, but you could blow up a town and probably not kill Rhino. Which might be intentional: anybody who survived that, well, they were behind Rhino, and...
Well yeah, sure, but not for lack of trying? Ok maybe he wasn’t trying hard enough like he does with his usual targets, but still….plus aren’t they all subject to the whims of writers & the ever present threat of plot armor?
I'd assume Castle doesn't use poison much because if he can't get close enough for that, he'd just shoot them or slit their throats. Like Googum said, it's not enough a sure thing.
I tend to prefer Punisher stays clear of costumed super-villains. Yeah, we don't need him depleting other characters' rouges gallery, but also it'll make him look ineffective. Spider-Man stops the Vulture from making a jewel heist and gets him sent to jail and Vulture escapes later, that's on the cops or the prison. Frank shoots Vulture in the head, but Vulture turns up alive again later (and he will, inevitably turn up alive again) it makes Frank look incompetent.
And I'm not sure how good he'd really do against guys with powers without Garth Ennis or Frank Miller providing plot armor via making everyone else morons. I mean, Jigsaw's got no powers, no cool armor or weapons, and Frank can't even make that guy stay dead. But he's going to take out Hobgoblin or Hydro-Man or somebody like that?
Point, yet it also doesn’t make sense for him to NOT engage with these types of criminals as well given how many of them populate where he lives.
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