Broken Frontier

Out in stores now, Punisher War Journal #19 sees Frank Castle's arch-nemesis Jigsaw exacting his ultimate revenge on the Marvel Universe's bloodiest vigilante. The book is co-written by Matt Fraction and Rick Remender with art from Howard Chaykin. Matt and Rick gave Broken Frontier this exclusive look behind the scenes on this pivotal storyline...

The solicitation for the issue reads:

All the players are assembled...the stage is set...the lights are lowered...and a conspiracy 18 issues in the making begins. This is it: the ultimate revenge saga as designed and engineered by Punisher's arch-rival, Jigsaw! He's killed off the loose ends from Frank Castle's life before The Punisher; he's replacing him on the streets with a leaner, meaner psychotic; and now Jiggy's taking out everyone and everything that Castle holds dear and framing him for it. And this is just the bloody beginning...

PAGE ONE

MATT FRACTION: This is the storyline I’ve been heading to since day one on the book. I knew, from the very start, that everything was building to JIGSAW. So, y’know: don’t blow it, right?

When Rick agreed to come on the book, he pretty much immediately hopped on a plane and came out to my house for a few days so we could break story and figure out what we were doing. I had all the pieces on the board and knew the big beats but rather than just break it out alone and then, like, inflict that on Rick and reduce him to... what, I dunno, a typist, I wanted, and Rick wanted, to really co-write, to really make a collaboration out of it. So I was really thankful he came out and wanted to play. We put everything out there on the table-- literally, on index cards-- everything I knew, every beat I thought we HAD to hit, where I'd been building to throughout the course of the coming year (always helps to know where you're gonna end up before you get in the car and drive) and every piece we had in play and basically started to look at them together and reexamine them.

We started with the characters. We started with Frank. Who can be something of a black hole-- his moral absolutes, his commitment to the mission above all-- it can make him really black and white and hard to find a way in to, as a writer. So I think it was Rick that literally just sat back and said-- So what's an average day like for him? What happens when Frank wakes up? As we started to build Frank's morning, we found our way in to Frank as a character and into the book itself as a writing team, I think. It wasn't my thing anymore, it was ours.

MAN that sounds serious. It wasn't all work. There was a lot of sexual innuendo the whole time, too.

RICK REMENDER: I’d just read Matt’s entire run on the book and my head was swimming with all the potentials for what had been set up. Before I came out to KC, Matt hadn’t told me what his ideas were for the Jigsaw arc, which was great because it let my mind roam to places I thought he was going to take things. Turns out we both went to different places that just happened to work perfectly together as one story. We had to cut a few things to make it all fit but that’s always the case. Better to have too many ideas than not enough. As we rolled out the things the setup had inspired it became a volley match, just throwing the story back and forth and moving with it from wherever the other guy left off. It was clear from the start that we were in love and that secret tension would lead to great comics where we’d work it all out. So be on the lookout for all the homoerotic undertone Easter eggs-- they aren’t hard to find.

Any-hoo, we began to mix up the beats on note cards, and yeah, we spent three days working out structure. It gave us both a tremendous feeling of confidence in the work to have the entire arc entirely locked down by the time I left. To have nearly every beat in its perfect place with only the fun stuff left, sort of front loading the real brain work, is the absolute best was to collaborate. So all there is to do now is split the issues up and have a blast filling in the blanks. We’re both really proud of the results.

PAGE TWO

RR: Matt and I share a similar scene of humor, running towards the absurd and perverse. So as we began working out the beats for this we were making each other laugh like drunken idjuts. It occurred to us after a few golden jokes were thrown out that it would be a crime to waste them. A book like The Punisher, its tone can be-- it can be a bit much. I like an angsty story; I enjoy a lot of tension and over the top foreboding in a crime character, however, it’s mandatory to give comic relief in a book like this or it reads as self-serious and juvenile. So as we got into Frank’s head and walked through his day we joked about what a guy like Frank, a habitual and ridged hardcore who has had his body broken countless times, what does he do on a Tuesday morning? He goes out to get a rub down and swings by the secret grocer in Chinatown to get himself some tiger ball powder. It loads you up with natural tiger testosterone and jungle machismo so you can go through your entire day murdering scumbags with out the crash that comes from caffeine. We laughed for a long time about that. We’re stupid. Howard really nailed this sequence.

MF: But it was here, building up the tics of Frank’s humanity, that the man inside the killer really started to introduce himself to us... after a run of three issues of stories that were ABOUT Frank but didn’t star Frank, a fresh and declarative look into the man was totally essential. It was the same idea when little bits of pop culture would float into the book... little ties between Frank the machine, Frank the unholy killer, Frank the relentless, and the real world, the normal world, the human world, somehow make him just a little more terrifying...

PAGE THREE

RR: I wanted to use Turk from the old Miller Daredevil stuff as Frank’s militant magazine dealer but Matt had a much better idea. After a quick call to Brubaker he got approval to use Chico and Merv, a couple of new street guys who serve as informants etc. over in Daredevil. They’re based on Brian Posehn and Patton Oswalt so we had some good ideas on how to humiliate those two jerks (Parental warning, Frank makes them rape one another next issue, just like real life). I like the idea that they would go to all this trouble to get Frank all these hard to find magazines and to show his appreciation Frank refuses payment and the more they stammer about the subject the more stuff he takes. I like funny humor-jokes. We wrote a ton more but had to cut it but I hope we can come back to them in the next arc.

MF: I love the idea of Frank writing angry letters to the editor of EDGE WEAPON ENTHUSIAST.

Punisher War Journal #19 Pages 4 and 5

PAGE FOUR

MF: I don’t remember where I heard this joke-- anybody with that many people following him around has to be up to SOMETHING-- but it cracked me up, so in it went. Again, all of this little detail stuff, the blind manager of the hobo flop Frank beds down in, the Asian grocery, the hooker-with-the-hands-of-steel-- all of it just Rick and I building up Frank’s routine.

Because, y’know, Jigsaw’s about to take it all away.

ALSO: I’m not sure who stetted in "Known Spider-Man Associate" but I kinda want to give them a high-five.

RR: Totally, such a nice touch.

PAGE FIVE

RR: This page is why Matt Fraction is the current scientist of Rockville. His take on Jigsaw here is character defining to me. It reads as if the guy is a classic street hood but with these stutter steps that add a subtle insanity to him. It’s not overt, not another "look how crazy and evil I am". Instead it’s just enough to leave you creeped out by the dude while getting the impression he’s on a bit of a hair trigger. Love it.

MF: Thanks, yo. There’s a bit in Bendis’ Daredevil run where Jigsaw comes to Matt Murdock, who he thinks is Daredevil, who he thinks is the new Kingpin, and tries to negotiate his way into safety, basically... something about that struck me as the key to the character. Like, he is firmly middle management. He’s not the guy behind the guy, he’s the guy under the guy. He’s like the Michael Scott of the Marvel U... if Michael Scott went psychotically furious whenever he had to think about the Punisher.

Also, we gave Howard "Francis Bacon" as a cue for what the meat locker office should look like... man, ask and ye shall receive...!

PAGE EIGHT

MF: This weird faux-family psychosexual relationship-- this insane, ridiculous Punisher Family, sort of provides us with our emotional core in a lot of ways... like, they all have these weirdly clear objectives, they’re just all completely insane.

Hardcore Punisher fans know that "Lady Punisher" is in fact Lynn Michaels, who appeared during the original Punisher heyday. My pal Ian Brill told me about her shortly after I got the book, and I immediately wanted to pull her into Jigsaw’s schemes for Frank.

RR: I’m really eager to reveal the big twists we have in store for this band of psychopaths. I don’t think the resolution is anything people will be expecting.

Punisher War Journal #19 Pages 10-12

PAGES TEN-TWELVE

MF: I get a kick out of these pages because Howard-the-designer starts to come through. He’s got this insane verisimilitude for textures and patterns, and no matter how many years he spends in the cartooning saltmines, you can’t take his designer’s eye away from him. I love the raw physicality of the drawing, and the collisions of patterns at play. Add to it the atmospheric, near-cinematographic colors of Edgar Delgado and this book transforms into some entire other planet.

I bet Edgar and Howard bicker like an old married couple.

If I had my way, we’d release a black and white version of JIGSAW, too, so that pure blast of Chaykin could be inflicted upon the world...

RR: It really is a bold mixture of pattern. Really unlike anything else being done. While the stuff is very graphic it also has a sense of abstract realism as well. The outfit he chose to put ol’ Ian in is utterly inspired and totally unique. What I imagined this would look like was much more pedestrian, it’s been a treat to see Howard bring the scripts to life. With so many artists focusing on making pretty illustrations it’s a breath of fresh air to work with a guy who, as a writer himself, always services the story and flow first.

PAGE FOURTEEN

RR: Writing moment-by-moment action stuff is my favorite past of writing comics. The challenge to me is to cut any fat-- to boil it down to the essential moments. As the writer you know the story you’re telling, you’ve seen it all play out in your head, so in a fast moving action sequence considering what a reader can comfortably mentally fill-in between panels, in the gutters, needs to be considered as well. How far ahead can I jump? Do I need to show the character get up, walk outside, lift up his gun and then fire it? Obviously not all those moments are necessary to convey the idea, you pick the core moments and kill the rest.

MF: Chaykin’s a master of controlling your eye and how it flows over the page-- and somehow even THAT adopts a kind of geometric sharpness. From Frank, to Ian, to the wheel, down the fire escape, over to Frank’s face, and then the dual effect of looking up along the geometry of the fire escape as Frank goes rushing up it... you could tear the page from flipping it so fast...

PAGE FIFTEEN

MF: This was a great note from Axel-- at first we had a very sort-of Bourne-ian chase scene going, and we got the note that, well, a Bourne-style chase is great for MAX... but this is the Marvel U. Why not up the scope, the scale, the insanity? Why not crazy rocketboots? Where’s the Marvel U twist to it all? That’s always the core of the book, the heart and soul of Punisher War Journal... Frank is the eternal fish out of water in this world. Anyway, getting a reminder to re-root the book in the fantastical, even for a second, really helped keep us on track. It’s a little note, but a sharp one and the story is better for it. This is why Axel has the corner office.

RR: Yeah, this really helped me define the tone of the series. It’s not just street level crime-- it’s street level crime in the world where Galactus occasional shows up looking for a meal and millionaires rocket around in metal suits of armor. Playing up the fantastical while telling a grim crime story is what makes Punisher War Journal unique from the MAX version and just unique in comics.

Punisher War Journal #19 Pages 16-18

PAGE SIXTEEN

RR: From the moment on the story just bolts. Frank won’t have a moment to breath or recover for three more issues. We pile it on, layer after layer, wound after wound till the show down. Jigsaw has sent Ian to kill the last two people he knows Frank has had any contact with, Chow and now Di his masseuse. Other than Clarke these are the only people Frank allows himself any regular contact with and so anything that happens to them is on Frank’s shoulders. It’s Jigsaw twisting the knife and reminding Frank he can never have anything in anyway resembling a normal life or anyone he has contact with is at risk.

PAGE SEVENTEEN

RR: Dear Christmas, I love this page. This is one of those moments where a great letterer adds a metric ton of life to a page. Panel 3 is happening in real time whenever I look at, I see the muzzle flashing and hear the gun. Nice big medium close shot by Howard focuses us in on the gun and the face of the shooter, nothing else to distract the eye.

PAGE EIGHTEEN

MF: The top panel, look at how Howard makes you a co-conspirator. He demands you take the time to look not just at the action but the detail... Take the time, slow your eye down, and take the whole thing in, just for a second...

Punisher War Journal #19 Pages 20 and 22

PAGE TWENTY

MF: Panel 3. This should be a sitcom.

RR: Yes.

PAGE TWENTY-TWO

RR: Comics are good. I like ice cream.

MF: I love the way Chaykin draws the good guys, Bridge especially. Just wait until you see his shirts...

Okay, we’re clearly out of steam. Thanks for reading.

Punisher War Journal #19 is out now from Marvel Comics priced $2.99