I have an odd relationship with fictional vigilantes. Call them superheroes, and I’ll read what they get up to. But a character who’s out to right wrongs at the visceral level and does so without powers, I find creepy. It makes no sense, unless it’s that unpowered vigilantes steer perilously close to the real world, in which taking physical action to right wrongs is fraught with moral issues. And, at the same time, some of my favourite prose in recent years has been provided by Lee Childs, whose Jack Reacher books are about a former military cop who gets involved in all kinds of righteous causes and resolves complex problems with firearms and fisticuffs.

Thing being, that Reacher is pretty cultured underneath it all. And has leftish sympathies unusual in the genre. Which makes him the poster child for frustrated liberals everywhere, an appealing fantasy in a world where Sarah Palin is taken seriously and assholes online argue that it’s pointless supporting plans to restore Haiti because the people there ‘won’t stand against the ragheads with us’.

But I draw the line at Marvel’s Punisher comic. Its protagonist, Frank Castle, is a grizzled Vietnam vet who goes out and kills heaps of people on a regular basis. Not much fun to be had there, though there was a legendary run by writer Garth Ennis that I have yet to check out. Anyway, the series has been reinvented under editor Axel Alonso, who has attracted interesting new talent to chronicle Frank’s mayhem — not least my friend, artist Laurence Campbell. And the thing is, Laurence is such a talent that seeing him apply his skills to The Punisher is like Steven Spielberg turning his hand to tv movies and ending up with the tremendous truck yarn Duel. His sophisticated visual sensibilities ensure that even when you’re reading a run of the mill tale about a psycho gunman taking down some drug dealers, it looks like a Michael Mann film, when The Punisher is more usually on a par with Michael Winner’s dismal Death Wish.

Laurence told me about a new Punisher comic he’s illustrated, written by fellow Brit Rob Williams. And it’s a doozie. The title, Get Castle!, correctly indicates that this is a homage to the superb Get Carter. Storywise, it follows Frank from New York to the valleys of Wales as he tracks down the killers of a friend’s son and takes them on. Oh, and those killers are SAS members, so you know there’s going to be some serious mayhem later. Excellent, and a fitting complement to The Hard Way, the Jack Reacher book I’d recently read, in which Reacher comes to Britain. Cathartic violence ensues.

Much the same comes about in Rob and Laurence’s comic. Of course Frank takes down the SAS guys, after getting to know the local territory and community, and the lowlife who live there. He checks out the local drugs scene, and the dialogue and behaviour come across naturalistically rather than as if portrayed by people who only know what they’re depicting through copying films and comics. Laurence’s art is grounded in reality too: no insane muscles here, or London buses travelling through Brecon: things are as they should be, and Lee Loughridge’s colour work gives the whole a suitably dark feel, acting on the page like a good colour grade does for the screen.

What elevates the story beyond its effectiveness as a routine thriller is the subtleties that artist and writer bring to their work. Laurence’s contributions you can get a sense of here in an interview with both him and the writer, but Rob’s take a while to sink in. It’s in the repetition of the phrase ‘I paused’ that the writer conjures something that strays potently beyond the boundaries of how these scripts are typically written. Each repetition presents a choice point for Frank Castle, a moment when he could go one way or the other. And it’s the insight into those moments that gives the story its power — and a very effective open ending, which you can see as light or dark, depending. Personally, I saw it as offering hope. But the next creative team taking The Punisher will take it all back to square one, as these things pretty much always work out in serial fiction.