Books like The Punisher MAX, Vol. 10: Valley Forge, Valley Forge

Score: 3.08 out of 5Grade: 62% (C-) | OkayNote to self, don’t always trust the Goodreads rating! Although this book isn’t terrible, it was just okay. There are many memoir pages that just feel out of place, a story that’s average at best, and it lacks the Punisher "punch" that I was looking for. Maybe I just missed something, but here’s my review of The Punisher MAX Vol 10: Valley Forge, Valley Forge:The Good:What initially caught my attention was the premise of this story. Ennis is excellent at identifying new and unique stories for characters we know and love. In this one, a team of military men take on the Punisher – a force he can’t morally punish. So it’s really interesting to see how Frank alludes the military men while refraining from using any lethal force. It’s like new school versus the old school and I liked that.It was cool to see how pieces from other storylines came back and reappeared in this one, but the story as a whole wasn’t overly exciting (despite a solid ending). It closes off pretty much every thread established at the beginning of this story and does so in an interesting way. I thought it was a fitting end and I was satisfied with it. The Bad:Let’s just rip the Band-Aid off and get right to it – the pages from the memoir, “Valley Forge, Valley Forge”, were annoying, boring and disrupted the story’s momentum. They were such a hassle to read that I started skipping them and leaving them for the end. Maybe if they were shorter, less frequent, and placed at the beginning and at the end of each issue, they wouldn’t have been SO bad. But remember, this is a comic book, not a memoir! I’m sure there are others who didn’t mind it as much as I did, but I had no love for them. (I read comics because I like visuals people!!)I’m not sure if it was the pages from the memoir, but the pacing of this story seemed rather slow. Even the action sequences, although entertaining, felt like there were no real stakes at play. The story focuses its narrative more on the military men than the Punisher, which is fine, but I just found it boring. As the final volume of this awesome Punisher run, my expectations may have been too high.Conclusion:I’m still slightly shocked at the rating that this book has on Goodreads! Maybe I’m just missing something, but I found the story to be just about average, and it’s really the memoirs that drag this story down. Maybe I set my expectations too high, but if you’re a war-buff and you like this sort of thing, then I’m sure you will enjoy this a lot more than I did.