Comicbook Your typical Garth Ennis crap
Garth Ennis hates superheroes, this is well known. Garth Ennis apparently really likes guys with guns, this also seems rather well known.
I found this is a hospital waiting room, and for a minute, I felt like I had gotten really lucky. Boy was I ever wrong.
The central conceit of the whole work is that somehow, someway, Frank Castle is going to punch mega leagues above his weight class, all because Garth Ennis hates superheroes.
He has absolutely ZERO respect for the characters under his charge, and doesn't even bother to portray them correctly. To say nothing about how he flat out ignores their abilities all so the Punisher can look like Mr. Super-Awesome-Badass-Killer.
This is some of the worst crap I've ever read, and I certainly don't recommend it to anyone.
Comicbook Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Generally, superheroes do go out of their way not to kill innocent people in the crossfire. Outside of badly-written event comics or better written adaptations of them, it's generally understood that the reason Superman doesn't just punch Lex Luthor's exosuit into space is that there are lines they do not cross and things they do not do.
So, the central conceit of this book, that superheroes kill innocent people left and right as collateral damage and don't give a damn, is completely wrong from square one.
Lots of critics of this story focus on its implausibility. That it's a fanboy exercise in "my favorite hero could beat up yours" on the part of Garth Ennis, and that their heroes should win in a fight with him. But to fight that dragon is to become it. Others are unhappy with its dark subject matter, with its seemingly self-righteous stance towards Castle slaughtering all the superheroes. But that ignores that there is a hint of ambiguity towards the end, when the Punisher realizes that he's killed people like Daredevil along with the people he hates, and puts a gun to his own head.
That's not to say there's not a lot of that. Ennis is blunt in the extreme with treating characters he hates with contempt, turning them into asshole strawmen for his chosen mouthpiece to berate and butcher. But there's at least a hint of artistry in there with them, a bit of thought put into the situation.
Still, that doesn't justify the protagonist here. I am not a Punisher fan, but good God, the nihilistic contempt Frank has for his own mission makes his fiendish determination to see it through all-but incomprehensible to me.
In the end, like much of Ennis's work, it's hamstrung by the writer's personal complexes and more-vile opinions. It barely works as a story, its hero barely works as a character, and its statements about the genre are either lacking, built on shaky foundations, or both. And the art's a bit too busy for its own good, always putting being disgusting and shocking over being visually appealing or, frankly, coherent and readable.
Dislike it for those reasons, though. You can't fight fire with fire.
Comicbook An affront to the entire superhero genre.
From day one, I never really cared for Garth Ennis and had very little interest in reading any of his work because of his tendency to devote his work to tedious rambles on why superheroes and religion suck. I found my assumptions to be verified in regards to the former when I one day decided to read The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe.
Don't get me wrong. I don't care that he's an atheist, and it's his opinion if he doesn't like superheroes, but that doesn't change how pretentious, petty, and spiteful it is when he makes stories that primarily run on attacking what he doesn't like.
The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe is an absolute trainwreck where Frank Castle's origin is altered so that his family was killed in the crossfire of the Avengers and the X-Men battling the Skrulls and the Brood. He kills several of the heroes and ends up in jail, but is busted out by a committee of people injured in superhero battles who hire him to kill all superhumans.
It sounds on paper like an interesting story, but the potential is irrevocably ruined by Ennis' blatant disregard for the superhumans' powers and having Punisher easily mow them all down.
Wolverline has a healing factor, so being reduced to a skeleton shouldn't be enough to do away with him. Shooting Bruce Banner before he has a chance to turn into the Hulk again sounds like a sensible tactic, but it can't really be done if he's capable of reflexively transforming the instant he's in danger.
And this isn't even getting into how the story gives the biased assumption that heroes don't care about hurting innocents while fighting villains. The whole point of superheroes is that they fight for the greater good. Not giving a damn if they hurt innocent people in the fight against crime would go against everything they stand for.
I'd go on, but I don't want to exceed my character limit.