1.I can't say that I ever thought that I knew the equation for how to write an enjoyable superhero comic book, but until reading Rick Remender and Tony Moore's "Franken-Castle: Punishment Chapter 4" earlier today, I thought I knew a great many of the ingredients which a very poor superhero 22-pager would inevitably contain. Of these, a great many can be found at the first page-flick of this book;
- twenty-two pages of fighting ending in a showdown which changes none of the characters lives a whit
- a guest appearance by Wolverine
- and another by Daken, Wolverine's tedious son
- a story founded in a great weight of continuity, including references to Norman Osborn, the Punisher's origin, Daken's mutant powers and, please help us, the life-protecting powers of the Bloodstone, which I last recall coming across in the late Seventies in one of the era's Marvel try-out books.
2.Putting aside the excellent Europeanesque artwork by Tony Moore and his collaborators, which I intend to discuss in a coming blog, Mr Remender's script manages to fulfil every single one of the cliches of modern superhero writing and yet never fails to be anything less than utterly enjoyable. In particular, he succeeds in making the requisite brawling palatable to those of us who care not a whit if we ever see Superboy punch through the walls of the universe again, let alone Spider-Man bop a bank-robber, and he does so by making every punch and each cruel and telling wisecrack a deeply personal business for all concerned. Where far too many creative teams think that the very business of fighting a super-villain is exciting in itself, Remender knows that conflict isn't about the left hooks, but about what the left hooks stand for. And in this context he even manages to make Daken interesting, and indeed rather fascinating, by having Logan's boy reveal himself to this unfamiliar reader at least as a psychological sadist, declaring to Frank Castle at one point that the Punisher's crime-slaughtering career has been nothing more than;
"... compensation for a profound inferiority complex born of one abject failure-- You couldn't protect your family."
It's a profoundly insightful and deeply wounding thing for Daken to taunt Castle with, and it's a far more impressive way of establishing the character as a callous antagonist than simply having him setting light to stray passers-by or stabbing lost cats trapped high up in trees. After all, Frank Castle's already quite dead and he couldn't have been said to be truly alive even before Daken killed him. He's been shot, drowned, tortured and punched out by an army of various super-folks on either side of the good/bad divide. Violence isn't anything that bothers the Punisher, but his failure to save his wife and his children is as raw in Frank Castle's otherwise-dead heart as it was on the day they were murdered. Consequently, Daken's cruel and carefully-judged words tell us about both characters in terms far more interesting than who can bench-press what. Castle's deepest weaknesses are revealed in a context which makes them real and moving again for the reader far too familiar with his shallow psychology, and Daken becomes a fearsome opponent not because he can leap around and cut folks into little pieces, but because he's incredibly smart and knows how to slice a man's ego as well as his body.
And Mr Remander's clever script, in working to make the conflict between hero and antagonist as personal as possible, reveals a unsuspected weakness in the tradition of the superhero's mask and secret identity. For how can an antagonist wound a superhero like this when they don't know anything of personal importance about the good gal or guy they're trying to destroy?
3.Yet for all Mr Remender's hard work, it couldn't ever be argued that either Daken or the Punisher were terribly interesting characters. They're fundamentally one-note roles, differentiated basically by the difference between "I kill because I like to" and "I kill bad guys because they deserve it". It's something of a counter-intuitive stroke of narrative ingenuity, therefore, for Mr Remender to have introduced Wolverine, of all people, as the audience's point-of-view character in this tale, a fact emphasised by the last page, where only the X-Man is left on-stage at the battle's end to represent how baffled and impotent everyone beyond Castle and Daken are when the two of them fight. And unlike so many of his familiar incarnations, this take on Logan is no have-a-go psychopath coated with a rather repellent sentimental approach to lost causes and little children. Rather, Mr Remender's Wolverine is a subtly different beast who actually expresses his emotions in a straight-forward fashion, in clipped sentences which aren't designed to display a tight-panted bravado so much as an old man's weary honesty. "You're right about the kid." he tells Castle, referring to Daken. "Rotten hearted. But I can't kill him." This isn't a man running away from his emotions or bravely suppressing his audience-winning secret heart, let alone a have-a-go psychopath. It's a grown-up accepting what he is, acknowledging his feelings and even his own hypocrisy.
It's not that this is a new-age Wolverine, all deeply-caring and re-tooled for a role as a parental school governor, for the claws are recognisably unsheathed and slashing through the air as expected. But it is a clever use of the character to be so unexpectedly the audience's player in a strip that's otherwise inhabited by no-one but cold-hearted and bloody-handed monsters.
4.I. So, Mr Remender unexpectedly ensures that the conflict is personal and that the story has what might pass in a superhero tale as a human-ish point-of-view character. He also makes sure that the climax of his story is based upon a well-foreshadowed and yet quite unexpected and satisfying plot twist, providing the story with an audacious big idea that closes the book with a shiver of repulsion and a hard-to-resist belly laugh. (In essence, Castle uses the Bloodstone to give Daken "super-Lupus", a mutant disease of Logan's son's immune system, which results in an entire rooftop being smothered by a rapidly-expanding tidal wave of the villain's diseased flesh.) It's a business that's as amusingly daring as it is stomach-turning, but it's also surprising and clever, the sign of a writer quite willing to give the audience what it thinks it wants, while also adding that something more that marks the work out as quite separate from its fellows on the racks of the comic book stores.
II. It's also worth noting that "Punishment: Chapter 4" is, for all its roots in cross-company continuity, an absolutely transparent story quite open to the first-time reader, and that that lack of an alienating opaqueness is ably furthered by an unusually informative re-cap page.
Why, it's as if Mr Remender and the editorial team on "Franken-Castle" wanted their story to be read and enjoyed by more than just a few hardcore, continuity-literate fans.
5.What's most curious about "Franken-Castle" as a script is indeed that it's on the surface and at first glance pretty much everything that I would have said was wrong with the modern Marvel and DC comic book. And yet Mr Remender is here making an excellent case that what's problematical with the contemporary superhero isn't the interminable fight scenes, the over-familiar guest-stars or the never-to-be-significantly-disrupted status quo of the established characters. Rather, the lessons to be taken from "Punishment; part 4" are that the standard-issue form of present day mainstream fare can be used to deliver a familiar and audience-securing product which at the same time is spruced up by clever characterisation, imaginative and un-continuity-cluttered plots, and the presence of recognisably-if-broad human emotions at the heart of the story.
It ain't, if you like, what you do, but the way that you do it.
Which seems rather obvious now, of course, but it didn't just a few hours ago.
I wonder if this is a typical example of Mr Remander's work on this title, and whether anybody would care to recommend, or indeed not, any of his other work?
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