Spider-Man: Marked For Death!

 

Twenty years to the month from the first appearance of the vigilante criminal nemesis named the Punisher comes a tale which at first glance has history repeating itself. Except with one important difference:

This time, the Punisher would hit his mark.

In this 1994 What If story, writer Chuck Dixon provides a rather gruesome outcome for Peter Parker by the hand of the Punisher, cutting short the hero's life and accomplishing what a host of villains (and the Punisher himself, in our reality) failed to achieve--his attack instigated at the behest of the Jackal, a character who has his own agenda against the wall-crawler. Here, there will be no meeting of the minds between Spider-Man and Frank Castle as we witnessed in their original encounter--only a cold, and fatal, encounter with an assassin.

While the 1990s were a turbulent time for Marvel Comics, that decade did offer the opportunity for comics art aficionados to sample work from a variety of pencillers and inkers that weren't necessarily Marvel Bullpenners (a term which had by this point had had its day). Here, we're seeing the work of Gordon Purcell and Andrew Peopy, who craft a readable and engaging story that allows the Punisher to shine even under such circumstances while also presenting the chain of events slightly out of sequence, allowing the reader to take in a story that for all intents and purposes has already taken place.

As before, the Punisher agrees to act on the Jackal's obvious impetus while also keeping him at arm's length in terms of trust and even compliance. As we'd expect, the Punisher makes his own rules, and approaches his task with a good deal of forethought.

At the point where the two stories deviate, the Punisher this time successfully evades his powerful target who himself has evaded the Punisher's sniper fire--and in the process, he notes a vital defensive power that Spider-Man possesses which can possibly be used against him, a train of thought the Jackal is all too happy to encourage.

And so in a second attempt, the Punisher enacts a plan to fool Spider-Man's ability to detect danger by luring him into a situation that appears dangerous, but where the danger lies not in the apparent foe but in the deadly trap that waits to be triggered.

It's a scene made all the more chilling by the fact that Spider-Man isn't given one word of dialog in this entire story--a dead man walking (er, web-swinging), before falling victim to an attack carried out with remarkable efficiency, given the stark image of its aftermath and taking into account the Punisher's cool detachment and relative unsophisticated means by which he succeeded. Yet once he's learned about Peter Parker and his background, Castle realizes that he's been played by the Jackal, and reacts accordingly--for all the good it does him, given that the Jackal has taken steps to have law enforcement deal with his pawn.

And as if Castle didn't have enough problems with laying low, the associations which Spider-Man had formed with others in the fight for justice come to light, as the Punisher is forced to defend himself against a host of heroes who are conducting their own manhunts to avenge his victim--presented here in a montage by Purcell and Peopy, which I suppose one might call "The Legacy of Marvel Team-Up."

How the Punisher manages to evade each of these costumed pursuers (and likely more) is quite a pill to swallow--Daredevil, Cage, and Captain America, in particular, not exactly unskilled, rank amateurs. But on a positive note, which Castle himself acknowledges, the doors his deed has opened to criminal targets reaps benefits for this determined, driven man who with the deaths of his family resolved to fight a one-man war on crime that would likely never end.

As news media continue to assemble profiles of the life of Peter Parker, a slip on the part of the Jackal--who, in his civilian identity of Prof. Miles Warren, had direct interaction with Peter and as such was sought out and interviewed--has inadvertently led the Punisher directly to him. By this point, Castle is shouldering a level of guilt and regret for his actions toward Spider-Man--but unknown to Warren, or even to the police officers who arrive in force, it won't be just the Jackal who has a reckoning this day.

As opposed to the former volume of What If tales which often ended their alternate reality stories with worst-case scenarios that piled on tragic outcomes to the point of overkill, Dixon ends his tale with more complexity and subtlety as befitting his character's often difficult-to-read nature. As for ourselves, we can all probably agree that we have no difficulty imagining the expression of the shocked professor in his sights.