agree about the affectiveness of yorkie's passing - his war-weariness made him probably the most approachable character in the book. his death, when he'd already had his exit speech really, was not strictly necessary, but i guess inevitable given the 'always consequences' ethos of the series as a whole. having him die was too good a gut punch to not throw really, for lots of reasons.
i suspect it's not the case about barracuda being dredged up purely for the sake of a fistfight with frank in this arc. it wouldn't be difficult for ennis to come up with another hardman character if one was required for a punchup. the whole series is marked by being careful about what the supporting and background characters are doing (like yorkie), with very little in the way of excessive cast-filling or loose plotting. lots of examples of this, from the appearance of pittsy's vengeful sister, to rawls or the man of stone, and the women in the widowmaker arc - part of what makes the book so gripping is the way it keeps a very tight leash on the ramifications of its own events, and doesn't allow characters to fall in or out of the series too easily. if ennis sticks around for many more arcs (i suspect the current one is his last*), i imagine the cop from widowmaker will reappear, for instance. and hey, we were very carefully NOT shown barracuda's corpse in the enron arc, which is basically comicstripese for 'i'll be back' - i think his reappearance here, and an attempt to make him a 'classic' recurrent archvillain, was always part of the plan. (i doubt he'll be recurrent beyond this arc though - ennis rarely leaves his characters behind for others to play with. and the story is building to a crescendo at this point, the climax of which will surely be his, hopefully very grisly, death.)
i think the point of the character is that, rather than being an antithesis (what would the opposite anyway? the facilitator? the congratulator?) , he's actually frank's superior on every level - younger, faster, meaner, probably smarter. but he doesn't have the devil or the legend in him, doesn't have the skull on his chest. i feel the familiar, light hearted clipse/wire/'hood movie-derived dialogue is used well as a counterpoint to his actual effectiveness as a threat - the way he talks isn't front or bluster, as expectation says it ought to be - he's as good as he says he is, which takes him out of the realms that you might otherwise expect the character to inhabit, if he was simply a stereotype.
i like the point about the necessity to prove his masculinity - i think this adds an interesting and original dimension in this context, because it's only since he met the punisher that there's been even the merest suggestion that he's not teh supreem manhard, the attempted reassertion of which is the real explanation behind his current vendetta. again, whether this makes him a stereotype, or if that itself is a negative here, i'm just not sure about. as for charming... well yes charming: the bit where he meets derot for the first time in the enron arc, and plays upon dermot's expectation that a big black guy wo's been in prison will only be after his precious white arse? that's funny, it certainly charmed me, although yes the people he meets in his fiction world are of course not charmed but intimidated, downright terrified. the lengths people will go to to hide how scared they are of him is one of the frequent points of 'humour' in his miniseries, if i recall correctly. 'Charismatic', with its dangerous implications, is probably a better word than charming.
as to the points about humour and comedy in ennis' work (and let me put down my pom-poms for a moment and say here that i have basically no time for his deliberately 'funny' pieces - never read the boys or his authority stuff, for instance) - one of the things i like about his style is that it reflects the fact that the real world, or at least my experience of it, is full of crap jokes, ironically amusing situations and low-rent pisstaking. the po-faced expression that mainstream US genre comics tend to walk around with is something he doesn't have a lot of time for, and that can be refreshing, and when ennis gets the mix right, like say in the recent hitman/jla, it works very well. i think it's worth remembering that his first extended comics work was writing judge dredd in 2000ad, which amongst its many facets is at its core a very skillful balancing of low comedy, high satire and cop show/action movie drama. the wagnerian tone of the strip was not something that the young, awed ennis always handled entirely successfully, but has left its traces over nearly all of his subsequent work. as i think this thread has established by now, the max punisher is clearly by some margin the best long work he's ever done, and the humour is very much backgrounded here. i don't think the introduction of barracuda, a nasty man in a nasty land who happens to have a sense of humour, is some kind of slip into rifle brigade territory at all. that he can smile while throwing an od'ing snakebitten woman off his boat, is not really comedic in the least, but a further ugly colour to add to the palette marked 'bloody grim'.
* when the quitting date is confirmed, i'll be turning the house upside down to find the trades and embarking on a good old-fashioned barbelith re-read of the entire series, including born and the one-offs and maybe even the fury series, with commentary in this here thread book-by-book. i hope some of youse will join me. i might even find duncan's metabarons books while i'm doing the search, won't that be amazing? |
