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The Punisher MAX: Girls in white dresses

As should be abundantly clear, here at Fightrunner HQ, we are the Punisher’s biggest fans. And although the movies in the past have generally been a bit of a let down, the comics almost always come up with the goods, especially if we are talking about Max titles. I have read a good few and most of the best ones are written by the main man Garth Ennis himself, so when I saw that this was written by another dude, I wondered to myself if this newbie had the balls to make old Frank Castle as gritty as the mad Irishman did.

“Girls in white dresses” is set in a small Mexican town where the local girls are being systematically abducted and then subsequentaly dumped a few weeks later with their eyes and lungs missing. The distraught townsfolk have heard only in folklore that there is a man from the north that will do what needs to be done and go where the police are to afraid to dare… You guessed it, Frank Castle, AKA: The Punisher. They manage to track him down and eventually convince him to help them get their loved ones back and make the bad guys pay…

Making Bad people pay is what the Punisher is all about!!!! And boy do they get it in this book. Frank beats, shoots, stabs and explodes his way up the criminal food chain in order to get to the bottom of this one. In true Punisher Max style, the violence is brutal and fairly graphic… MAGIC!!! I love nothing more than seeing the king of vigilantes chain five drug dealers ups by their feet and pound the living shit out of them until they spill the beans!

The art in this is quite stylised and it works well with the gritty realistic storyline and the general mood of the Punisher Max series. Never really come across this artist, “Laurence Campbell” but he has made an impression on me. His grainy style and sharp lights in the deep shadows really brings out the bleakness of the situations Frank finds himself in.

The Writer too is a new one to me, “Gregg Hurwitz”, but I swear to god if he had jacked a few more bizarre sex scenes in there, you would be forgiven for thinking it was Ennis Himself… In fact, Ennis is quoted on the cover saying “This is The Punisher, all right. This is how it’s done”. So with approval from the big man, how can you go wrong?

If you like your comics dark, gritty and brutal… Bobs your uncle!

VERDICT: 8.5/10

Like hitting a piñata with a grenade launcher… effective and fun!