Born Vol. 2

Born is a four-issue limited series written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Darick Robertson, published in 2003 under Marvel's mature-readers MAX imprint and regarded as a "prehistory" of Frank Castle, the Punisher: it tells how, on the battlefields of Vietnam, he came to terms with his own violent nature before becoming the Punisher. The series is structured around four days, with each issue corresponding to one day. This volume is issue #2, "The Second Day" (cover date July/September 2003, 22 pages of story), and the narrative continues through the eyes of the young marine Stevie Goodwin: he longs to finish his tour and go home, while increasingly recognizing that in this firebase near the Cambodian border, Captain Castle is a war machine with almost no limits, driven both to survive and to relish the killing. This issue includes a patrol that encounters a Viet Cong sniper: the platoon suffers its first major casualties, and Castle fights back with a heavy machine gun; a soldier then assaults the wounded female sniper, and Castle ends the scene with a firing-squad execution, drowns the soldier in a stream, and warns Goodwin, who witnessed it. The series' tone is grim and bloody; Ennis himself has said Castle "fell in love with war," and the cost of that would later return to him in the form of the Central Park massacre. This is volume 2 of the series; the story must be read together with volumes 1, 3, and 4 to be complete.