Review by Frank Plowright
Mark Millar surely knows how to open a graphic novel with a compelling hook. Here it’s the Punisher doing what the Punisher does, except ramped up to excess over ten brutal, bone-crunching pages with the corpses piling high, the guns lovingly detailed by Leinil Francis Yu and Millar supplying dark quips. On the face of it the Punisher dealing with child traffickers has little to do with the Avengers, but Millar has that sorted, as Nick Fury wants an Avengers black-ops team. Who else should be on it? Well how about the guy who was the Hulk before Bruce Banner? Why do the Avengers need a black-ops team? That’s because Fury has received orders to take out the Ghost Rider, who’s on a spree of murdering some rich businessmen.
However, the set-up skirmish is going through the motions, and for a long while this doesn’t seem much of an Avengers story of any sort, but a title referencing the 19th century disguises Millar being ahead of the game in Crime and Punishment. His action comics show him as Mr Zeitgeist, attuned to the times, soaking in the trends, injecting a high concept idea and spewing the trends back out again, but this was a long time before Jason Aaron reformatted The Avengers to incorporate horror in a big way. It’s not just Ghost Rider, but the different horror of the creepy Spider-Man who probably didn’t turn up in Spider-Verse, and Satan himself definitely didn’t, although this isn’t the 1970s, so the latter isn’t identified as such.
Ghost Rider is a visual gift for any halfway competent artist, and Yu places several rungs of the ladder above that. He relishes the chrome, turning the cycle into something that could be based on a Kevin O’Neill design, spiky and disjointed, liable to slash at you for standing nearby, and Yu delivers some amazing action shots featuring it. He’s pretty good on the remainder also with the final chapter showdown something all aspiring superhero artists should memorise.
Halfway through there’s something of a switch of tone. Millar gets to throw in his best Guy Ritchie gangster lines, the pot boils over and there’s an effective clearing of the decks in time for Blade vs. the Avengers. There’s a little too much build, but once Crime and Punishment gets going the pedal is to the metal all the way to the end.
Ultimate Avengers by Mark Millar collects his entire run.
