Editor's Note: Punisher #61 arrives in stores tomorrow, August 20.

"Girls in White Dresses, Part One: Quinceanera"

This is a tough book to review. Sort of. Let me explain. I love Garth Ennis' work with this character. I'd never really given a shit about Frank until Ennis took over, and initially, it was fun, but ultimately kind of pointless. But when Ennis moved the book from Marvel Knights to Marvel Max, everything changed. Suddenly we began getting stories that pulled no punches and didn't fall back on twisted humor to soften the blows. This was Frank Castle as he was always meant to be written. For sixty issues of the regular series plus the four issue Punisher: Born mini and the one-shots The Cell, The End, and The Tyger, Ennis never faltered. As my fellow reviewer Kevin Powers wrote last week, there was never a bad issue in the entire run. It was the most consistently good, and sometimes great, book on the stands.

And now Ennis is gone (from this particular title, anyway), but the series is continuing without him.

So, like I wrote, this is a tough book to review.

But the good news is Ennis created a format here that has become something of a Punisher Narrative Machine. And with the right combination of writers, artists, and attitudes, Frank Castle can still be a center for stories well worth your time. This was made clear in the couple of one-shots released over the past few months, Punisher: Force of Nature and Punisher: Little Black Book. Both were very good, and both were by different creative teams. So with some hands-on guidance, The Punisher Max still has life left in it.

Which brings us to this issue. The first Post-Ennis issue. You may have noticed my bullet score up at the top, there. Yup. Four bullets. This is pretty damn good.

What we have here is a story about a Mexican border town that is under siege by hood-wearing bastards who steal women and girls, first when no one's looking, but eventually with no regard for witnesses. The bodies are then dumped back in the town, dead, nude, and horribly damaged. We don't know what's going on, but it is bad. Very bad. So an old man has gathered money from everyone in town and traveled north to find Frank and petition for his help.

It's a simple set-up, but it works. Hurwitz does a good job capturing Frank's voice in the narration, maintaining the noir, first person storytelling that Ennis made essential to the character. Plus, being the first new writer out the gate (there are going to be a series of creative teams, each doing their own individual story arcs for the near future) he chooses a very effective emotional center for the story. It is the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Frank's family, and he is particularly haunted by their memories, which provides a nice cathartic motivation for Frank to take on a job that maybe he wouldn't normally of said yes to.

Laurence Cambell's art is gorgeous. He continues the wide-screen style of the previous artist, Goran Parlov, with each page being a series of panels that stretch the width of the page and allow for an extremely cinematic approach to the visual storytelling. Which means that each panel is orchestrated like a shot in a film and the narrative focus relies more on composition skills than flashy layouts. It helps to make the comic feel like a seventies noir film, to be honest, and it works very well.

The shadows are heavy, Frank is hulking, and when violence explodes into the story (and explode, it does) it is graphic, but stylized. Gut-wrenching and believable, but beautifully rendered on the page.

I couldn't hope for a better continuation of one the best books any company has published over the past five years. The Punisher continues to be a work of brutal brilliance.

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