SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for The Punisher #225 by Matthew Rosenberg, Guiu Vilanova, Lee Loughridge and Cory Petit, on sale now.


Frank Castle has made it back home to the United States of America, still in possession of Jim Rhodes’ War Machine armor, and the heroes of the Marvel Universe have had enough. After killing a world leader and causing an international incident, Frank returned to New York and set his sights on the criminal underworld, which caught the attention of Rhodes’ former girlfriend Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel.

Now, Carol has assembled a motley crew of Avengers to take down The Punisher once and for all. But in doing so, they may have actually convinced him he should be aiming a lot higher than he has been since receviving his recent upgrade.

The Punisher vs The Marvel Universe

After a stalemate of a fight last issue between Captain Marvel and The Punisher, Carol arrives at Frank’s warehouse hideout with a significant amount of back-up; bringing Spider-Man, Tigra, Beast, Cannonball, The Thing, US Agent, Hercules, Spider-Woman, Quake, Luke Cage and The Falcon along to make sure Frank Castle faces justice for his international crimes. The Punisher puts up a good fight against the heroes, but the combined strength of Cannonball, The Thing, Hercules and Captain Marvel almost overwhelms him.

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Fortunately for Frank, as a former marine he knows victory is in the preparation, and he had already rigged his hideout to blow, allowing him to escape through an access hatch into the subway tunnels and continue his reign of terror against New York’s underworld.

Frank doesn’t just want to kill people, though; he needs someone smart enough to interface with his high-tech armor. Eventually, he solves his problem by tracking down a rogue AIM cell in Brooklyn. For the past few years, AIM was under the purview of Roberto da Costa aka Sunspot, who was able to repurpose the terrorist science cult into a force for good. However, the thing about terrorist science cults is that they don’t play by the rules, and enough rogue cells kept popping up that current Supreme Leader Toni Ho decided to rebrand as R.E.S.C.U.E., meaning that classic flavor AIM was once again back in full-force in the Marvel Universe.

Uncovering the rogue cell, Frank finds someone smart enough to make the modifications to his armor which disable the Avengers’ tracking of him and invert it, allowing him to instead track the man co-ordinating the strike force against The Punisher, Nick Fury. It was Fury that gave Castle the War Machine armor and sent him to Chernaya in the first place but Fury’s words to Frank hit harder than he might have expected. Even if The Punisher wasn’t going around murdering criminals by the dozens dressed in the armor of their recently deceased friend, he still willingly joined Hydra during their takeover of America and he needs to pay for that. In the words of Nick Fury, "You're the bad guy. They want to see you get punished."

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Nick Fury is, of course, referring to last year’s Secret Empire event, where a Hydra-indoctrinated Steve Rogers took control of the United States and attempted to use the Cosmic Cube to change all of reality to one where the Axis was triumphant at the end of World War II. Steve Rogers’ doppelgänger (Who wasn’t really a doppelgänger, until he was. It’s a bit too much to go into here...) used Frank’s idolization of Captain America to convince him to join Hydra’s cause, promising him that the altered reality would be one where his wife and children lived again.

Frank has yet to truly reckon with that decision, but Fury bringing it up here gives Frank an idea: To go after the top brass of the Hydra regime. The only one namechecked is Baron Zemo, but it’s likely that Frank Castle has his sights set on the entire inner circle including Doctor Faustus, Arnim Zola and, of course, the Hydra Supreme incarnation of Steve Rogers.

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Hydra Supreme was most recently seen in the pages of Deadpool, as Wade Wilson was similarly manipulated by his loyalty to Cap. In his case, he killed Agent Phil Coulson on Captain America’s orders. Imprisoned in the top secret detention center known as Shadow Pillar, Deadpool infiltrated in order to have his revenge on “Stevil Rogers,” but ultimately decided not to kill him. Frank Castle may not be so generous, and as the issue closes, he’s seen arriving in Langley, Virginia at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, presumably after the location of Zemo, Rogers and the rest of Hydra command.

What Is It Good For?

However, there’s one big wrench that could be thrown in Frank’s plans thanks to developments in Brian Michael Bendis’ final issue of Invincible Iron Man, which was released last week. Among many twists, turns and revelations throughout the milestone six-hundredth issue, one of the most significant was the return of Colonel James Rhodes whom Bendis killed off at the beginning of Civil War II. Tony Stark theorized that the same modifications which kept him comatose may be the key to bringing Rhodey back, and was able to successfully revive the fallen Avenger just in time to deal with a number of armor related crises at hand.

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Now that the original War Machine is back in the land of the living, he’s not going to be too happy about someone running around in his armor killing criminals left and right. And while Frank may have proven a quick study at handling the intricacies and nuances of the armor, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to compare to an experienced veteran like Rhodey.

We know that The Punisher is relaunching in a couple of months under Marvel’s “Fresh Start” initiative, Rosenberg will be staying on as writer and Frank will be sans-War Machine armor, so don’t be too surprised if he gets a visit from the first and best War Machine to put him in his place before the end of this volume.