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So, I promised to write up something about 'The Slavers' and I'm trying to psyche myself to read it for the second time to do so, rereading Nico's prophetic words in this thread's first post: That was really good. I'm not sure I want to read that again anytime soon.
However much one might have considered that the case with 'In the Beginning', it is exponentially moreso with this post's topic. (I should've written about it when I'd just read it, but it's like so many things and I'm an intransigent piece of shit.) I'm not actually sure I ever want to read it again, but it is brilliant. So perhaps I'll just bore you with half-arsed recollections and, you know, feelings - the sort of thing that might better be known in Frank Castle's world as 'weaknesses'.
Anyway, yeah. It's a peculiarly transcendental thing this arc - the utterly grave subject of human slavery in a Punisher comic sounds like an absolute recipe for disaster, just ludicrous, but it manages - through being well-researched, immediate and some ultraviolence which is, frankly, assuaging after having read the narrativised research. Still doesn't seem quite enough to justify it.
For all that the Punisher has been set out since the beginning of Ennis' work on the character as emphatically not someone to be identified with: a psychopath, a serial killer - which he is, indubitably, I felt utterly complicit in the revolting treatments meted out to antagonists here. That's a line that's always been being blurred, progressively less cartoonishly to this point (and, arguably, with Zakharov in the 'Man of Stone' arc that followed) because, based on what I've read elsewhere, the slavers presented were no better or worse than real ones. Which is to say: they are utterly, irredeemably repugnant.
It's troubling to have one's committed anti-death penalty belief tried by a comic featuring a Marvel trademark, via that skull-chested icon's discussions with a social worker. I mean, she may be offering up straw men, I haven't read very deeply on the topic because I'd very likely end up crying all day but it's thrown into a fairly sharp relief, essentially concluding that these fucks really have to die, preferably awfully (and I honestly don't think that I can conceive any way that they don't,) as every Punisher MAX arc has done - it is formulaic, but it makes you, the reader, feel a tiny bit better when they do. It's not much, there's no pat or soothing ending for the victim who leads off the story, it is only a story, and they really ought to have suggested some charities at the very least in the trade to donate to, though that does run somewhat counter to the story's Heart of Vengeance but still. It's quite easily the most abysmally affecting and unique comic I've read this last or any year, without question, absolutely no fun at all, and pulled off an incredibly difficult balancing act. |
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