Overall, "The Slavers" embodies the central quandary it seems that Ennis faces with The Punisher. The stories are uniformly (maybe too uniformly) entertaining, fun and engaging. But what remains unclear after dozens of issues is whether the Punisher himself, the man named Frank Castle who lost his family to violence, is merely a McGuffin for Ennis, a protagonist who enables Ennis to tell the crime stories he wants to tell. If that's the case, so be it. But if Ennis wants us to engage with Castle as something more than a gun-toting Cryptkeeper, or a homicidal Greek chorus, then at some point he's going to need to start exploring the man behind the trigger.

You can find Jonathan Larsen's blog here

You can find Jonathan Larsen's blog here

You can find Jonathan Larsen's blog, Petty Larseny, here.