C2E2 unveiled the new Punisher creative team of Gotham Central’s Greg Rucka and newer artist March Checchetto. Rucka was inticed to the book by his old 52 editor Steve Wacker who edits for Marvel.
Rucka has an interesting take on the book’s feel and tone:
Rucka: …I think [Punisher is] more a throwback to Gotham Central-era writing for me. It’s very street-level, and it’s very human. The emotions involved are very restrained in a lot of aspects, and very real in a lot of aspects, and I always find it more comfortable for my own purposes to write “on the ground,” for lack of a better phrase.
What can we expect from the new Punisher book?
Especially after Fear Itself and …[a] Mafia problem….., there are different criminal groups. And there is a sort of new-approach group in New York that he’s going to go up against. We start with a pretty horrific event — there’s a wedding reception that gets caught in the crossover, and the body count by the end of it is so high, that it’s a political problem, it’s a problem for the police, and it certainly gets Frank’s attention.
One of the things that I’m interested in doing is showing the procedure leading up to Frank cutting loose, and the way he approaches each mission. I think that, for him, it’s very military. There’s a war that he’s fighting, and in that war, there are mission objectives. If there’s a new objective, he’s got to gather intel on the objective, he’s got to isolate the objective, and then he’s got to make a plan to go after it. In the broader Marvel Universe, that gives him all sorts of tools he can use. I was talking to a friend about this, and he threw out a particular item that exists in the Marvel Universe, that one wonders why Frank has never tried to acquire, because the things he could do with it are devastating. And he doesn’t need much — here’s a guy who rarely misses anyway.
He’s not surrounded by people. This is not a guy who talks. I wanted to get away, just stylistically, from the War Journal. I’m not really interested in giving you a long, first-person narration with Punisher. He doesn’t have a lot to say, to anybody. We’re kind of playing a game in these first few issues to see how long he can go without having to speak. Ever. [Laughs.] People talk around him, you see what he’s doing, you hear what he’s hearing, but what’s he going to say? He doesn’t have a lot to say.
At the end of our first issue, he does something that I think ostensibly people are going to look at and go, “Well, that’s out of character.” But in the second issue you see it’s very deliberate. It’s entirely in character, because it’s objective-driven. Frank works his way up the ladder. That is the way it works. You’ve got to start with a rung, and climb to the next. We’re looking at different ways he does that.
