I don't usually read Maxim - I found this link through Warren Ellis's blog - but they've got an interview with Garth Ennis and Jimmy Palmiotti about The Punisher: the comic, the movie and the video game.

What was your involvement in the game?

PALMIOTTI: We pretty much wrote the whole story. We start out with his family getting killed. It's an overblown, epic revenge game. Most of it is set in New York, and we took a lot of the elements from Welcome Back, Frank. Then we threw in some winks to Marvel comics fans, like having Frank breaking into Stark Labs to get some new guns and fighting alongside Ironman.

What are some of the methods of punishment?

PALMIOTTI: The kills are extremely, excessively, excessively violent. I'm a big video game player, but Punisher is the most violent game I've ever seen. Guys get their faces peeled off, and you actually see skull flying at some point. As far as the kills, we have piranhas, wood chippers, boat engines, rats, and there's so many guns. Even if Frank's running with a gun and it's out of bullets, he'll throw it at the bad guy, and as the guy goes to catch it, he'll pull out knife and stab him in the head. Thomas Jane [star of the Punisher movie] actually recorded the dialogue.

ENNIS: Sometimes you are stunned by what you can get away with in comics and video games. Usually, if you do run into trouble, it's from an angle you couldn't have imagined in a million years. You see the carnage and the slaughter and the filth and the pornography make it through, then someone says, "I don't like red boots on that guy."

It certainly seems this is going to be a very violent game. I don't know of any other games that allow you to torture enemies (Wild 9 doesn't count).

Over the top violence is pretty easy to do (sadly): I wonder if the involvement of professional writers is going to make this emotionally involving. We'll have to see.

Here's another interview with Palmiotti over at Gamespy.

Ennis also worked on Preacher, a comic that friends of mine like, but I've never really gotten into.