Winterworld, the Punisher and MORE… By PETER STONE Jorge Zaffino was a brilliant, visceral kind of artist. His work was stylistic, but well drawn. It was masculine and intense, but there was also a real attraction to the way he handled the storytelling. He didn’t play around with foreshortening or angled panels. He put the camera down, showing the action as clearly as he possibly could. When the Argentinian met Chuck Dixon on a trip to the U.S., it was a match made in heaven. Dixon gave Zaffino the hardcore stories that he obviously loved. Guns, explosions and criminals everywhere. Together, they made Winterworld for Eclipse, a post-apocalyptic series about a man and his badger (that’s right, his badger) surviving in the cold, harsh climate of the future. One of the wonderful things about Zaffino was his basic understanding and drawings of handguns. They had this obvious power and heft to them. Many American artists don’t understand the true, deadly power of a handgun, but Zaffino definitely got it. When a character pulls out a .357 Magnum, it looked like something that could kill someone. It was black and heavy, dark and almost evil. That was one of the wonderful things about Zaffino’s art. The lethal power of a gun. As a fan, I loved it. Winterworld was first printed during the independent comics boom of the 1980s, when there was an explosion of talent in the United States. Yet Zaffino was a special artist who was so vastly different than anyone working in America. The action throughout the series is brutal and intense. The faces are full of emotion and feral anger. It’s a great series! After Winterworld, Zaffino moved on to the Punisher in a softcover called Assassin’s Guild, written by Jo Duffy. A ferocious graphic novel set in New York City, Frank Castle becomes more… human. He has a relationship with a young woman, fights corruption against Asian-Americans and kills the bad guys. Another great story about a character who kills criminals but seems to have a heart inside his cold morality. It was based on the original Punisher character, not the later “terminator of justice and war” that Garth Ennis created. We, as fans, loved the Punisher because he was like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry: “When a naked man is chasing a woman through a dark...