PUNISHER'S COSPLAY and COMICS: UNTOLD TALES OF THE PUNISHER MAX #1 Review

Writer: Jason Starr

Art: Roland Boschi

Colour: Dan Brown

Review by Stewart Loud

With the death of Frank in the MAX ongoing series, Marvel have launched a 5 part mini series telling standalone short stories set before his recent death after his battle against the Kingpin. #1 isn't brilliant to be honest. It's a nice enough story about criminal shenanigans but since the Punisher only appears briefly at the very beginning and end of the comic, and all of the other characters featured are new to the MAX universe, there's not much to connect you to what's going on.

Heavily in debt gambler Jimmy Frisco is offered a way out of paying back the huge amount of money he owes to some local criminals. They want him to murder a jockey. The story follows Jimmy as he sets about carrying out the murder and covering his tracks, all the while narrated by his paranoid inner reason as the guilt and fear slowly gnaw at him.

He goes from re-spraying cars to whacking elderly whitenesses as any doubt that the story is going to end with Frank killing this man is slowly erased.

Roland Boschi does a really nice job of visualising the drama with plenty of shadows and lots of well thought out perspectives and angles in the panels, making it look almost like a very well illustrated story board from a film.

On the whole it's not a bad comic, just nowhere near as good as one-shots like The Cell or Get Castle. Hell, it does have Frank in it so big fans of the MAX, like myself, are gonna want to add it to their collection, it's just unlikely to turn people new to the Punisher onto reading more of his comics.

SCORE 5/10