Take a second and scroll down to the credits. That’s right. This is a horror Punisher comic by two comic book GOATs.
It’s also an action comic.
The story is fairly simple: A ’60s homegrown terrorist–styled after the real-life Weathermen–gets out of prison, starts working on returning to bombing businesses, but gets exposed to a mutating chemical that makes him very hard to kill…And fuses him with his partner in crime.
They live in the sewers and stalk the people who did it to them.
And they’ve got monster friends.
Except they don’t. The guy above was drugged by the antiheroes, and Punisher punishes him…
I love how it’s not clear what’s going on at first. It’s a great way to blend horror into (yet another) Punisher story about bad guys getting what they’ve got coming.
Of course eventually Punisher does have to meet up with the “villain” here, and learns that a baby was mutated.
Into a horrible monster.
So he has to kill the baby.
So the monsters were were actually noble warriors (of course they were–hippies with bombs are always good guys), who were trying to blow up a factory of mutants just like them.
And of course there’s a larger conspiracy involving SHIELD, who were responsible for the mutates, along with Kingpin.
It’s well done–multidimensional without being corny and it still has the violence we all need from a Punisher book.
Each issue of this book was printed on high-quality paper, and was oversized (50 pages).