Punisher discovers a white collar conspiracy to shut off electricity in Florida in order to drive up utility rates. Seriously. That’s the plot that leads to the single best rogue in Punisher’s gallery: Barracuda.

Turns out that some of the Generals involved in the Mother Russia story are behind this conspiracy as well. Thus, we begin to see with this arc that Ennis has a world vision.  These aren’t just isolated Punisher stories, they do—and will—all fit together, eventually.

Anyway, back to Barracuda: He’s a giant black man trained by special forces to be a killing machine.

And he wears dress shoes with his camo.

He’s as tough as Punisher. Maybe even tougher.

After a multi-issue knock-down, drag-out, Punisher blasts Barracuda with a shotgun and leaves him in shark-infested waters.

Punisher leaves him for dead, but he’ll be back.

I know he’s not an Earth 616 character but I tagged him anyway.

For many, the story of Barracuda—a psychotic ex-con whose ability to give and take a beating exceeds even that of Frank Castle—is the pinnacle of this series.  One thing it has more of than any other PunisherMax tale is humor.  Tons of it.  It’s dark, of course, and miserably violent, but it’s also hilarious.  The plot and story are good, but they’re almost incidental: Barracuda was such a great character that he got his own spin-off miniseries, which was even more horrifyingly sadistic than this story arc.