Hey folks, it is FRIDAY FOLLOW-UP here at The Unspoken Decade! For the second week in a row, we have brought you Punisher! Now, don’t fret over the overexposure, Angel, will be in next week with some decidedly non-vigilante stuff, and when I come back the week after that, I will be bringing you the great Justice Society of America series from 1992 by Len Strazewski and the late Mike Parobeck! So good!
But for now, we are looking at the end of the storyarc I have been covering in Punisher: War Zone. Punisher’s cover gets blown because he gets too greedy and keeps hitting too many Carbone establishments. The Carbones hit Punisher hard, and they leave him for dead, only for Shotgun, the guy from #1 who killed 103 people, to show up and save him. They then attack the Carbone family at Rosa’s wedding, where Punisher kills her Dad and her fiancé. Then because her day was already going so well, he informs her that he never really cared about her, and he sort of calls her spoiled and naïve.
She reacts to this very well.
She hires several assassins who are named after what they do because sometimes life is an awesome exploitation film. (Silence is a ninja, Garrote uses a Garrote. I Love it!) They all attack Punisher, forming and disbanding a variety of alliances. Punisher, believe it or not, kills them. For real, dude, dead. Of course, he kidnaps Rosa Carbone and uses her as bait to basically draw the killers into a trap! He gets some help from Lynne Michaels and old pal along the way! I won’t spoil anything else for you but the covers!!!!!
The Unspoken Decade: 90's Comic Book Blog Extraordinaire 
These were really good issues, especially the introduction of Lynn Michaels and the Punisher’s brutal fights with the various members of the “Magnificent Seven” hit squad. Y’know, it does say something about the character of the Punisher that even though Rosalie Carbone goes off the deep end, taking over the family “business” and attempting to have the Punisher killed, you do sort of feel sorry for her. After all, as you’ve observed, the Punisher casually used & discarded her (and Mickey and Microchip and lots of other people) in order to achieve his goal of wiping out the Carbone Family. From a certain point of view, you could argue that the Punisher sort of put Rosa onto the path of becoming a ruthless criminal (although given her background, that might have happened anyway).
That said, if this was real life instead of a comic book, rather than trying to kill the Punisher, I imagine that Rosalie Carbone would have become a cast member on VH1’s Mob Wives. Reality TV has got to pay better than vengeance!
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Indeed Rosalie would have fit in nicely in the VH-1 world.
I agree that Punisher is what turned Rosa from a flighty Mob Daughter into a ruthless killer, and I think he does feel a little bad about that…but only a little. At the end of the day to him, that’s just how war works. There are causalities.
I love Lynne Michaels and wish more was done with her after the 90’s Punisher Heyday.
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