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Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Punisher - River Of Blood [2005] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

The Punisher - River Of Blood [2005]

Joe Kubert was one of the most important and influential artists of mainstream American comics, but mostly at DC. He did very little work in the Marvel Universe proper. He did a handful of stories in various genres for Marvel in the 1950s and then not again until the early 1990s, when his sons Andy and Adam started working there and he inked over them a few times on some Ghost Rider and Punisher stuff (and did solo artwork on a few Ghost Rider backups). Marvel's creator-owned Epic line also saw a few Kubert projects in the 1990s, and he did a handful of covers over the years as well.

But the big Marvel Universe Joe Kubert work was a 1994 run of PUNISHER WAR ZONE #31-#36, where he drew and did covers for the "River Of Blood" story written by Chuck Dixon. This collection of the story followed just over a decade later.

This is the big "Punisher vs. The Russian Mob" storyline, starting of course in New York, where Punisher's war against the heroin trade brings him up against the Russians, and he finds an ally in a giant Russian named Dragunov who shares his love of guns, revenge and shirts with their logos on them (a dragon, in the case of Dragunov). Their pursuit of a particular Russian who Dragunov has a personal grudge with eventually leads to Europe and escalates to the nuclear, as such things do. If you know Kubert's career it won't surprise you that it reaches a climax in Sarajevo (Kubert would do FAX FROM SARAJEVO a few years later, based on an on-going correspondence with a friend in the city during the conflict there).

Obviously the Punisher isn't really my thing, and when it is it probably won't be from a writer like Dixon, so I'm mainly here for the art, a nice solid example of a legendary artist working in slightly less familiar territory (although as we go into the actual war zone in later issues there are unmistakable comparisons to Kubert's decades of work on DC's war books). For that it's worth getting  

And, just for fun, here are a few other cover examples of Joe Kubert in the Marvel Universe:



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