Pretty darn well done. ( )

I'd heard great things about this series, and yet I'd been holding off for a while, mainly because I wasn't sure if I would like the Punisher as a character. But once I had the opportunity to buy the five hardbacks at a great price, I decided to take the plunge, and I'm glad that I did.

This volume collects two trades from Ennis' MAX series: In the Beginning and Kitchen Irish. I thought that both arcs were really good, and each had a nice twist at the end (I can't say that I didn't expect either of them, but I still thought that they were good). Yes, this is a MAX series, and there is a ton of violence in these pages. You see people with half of their faces blown off, plenty of people getting killed in gruesome ways, and curse words liberally sprinkled throughout the page. But the Punisher lives in a very, very violent world, so it's not like I wasn't expecting this.

Ennis seems to take the notion that Frank is a killer who has found justification to kill because of his family's deaths. He likes what he does, and the deaths of his family allows him to see himself as different from those whom he hunts and kills. Micro, one of Frank's "friends," says as much. Having had little exposure to the character before (just a brief blip in Civil War, and a brief mention in Bullseye: Greatest Hits), I have no idea if this is different from the prevailing view, but I like this and think it fits the character well.

I preferred Fernandez's art over Larosa's. Larosa tends to make Frank look like he's ninety years old and horribly deformed in some panels, especially when he's playing with shadows.

Tim Bradstreet's covers are amazing. Some of them are so realistic that I wasn't sure if they were at least partially made from photographs. I would love to see more work from him. ( )