Due to the shooting in Las Vegas, Marvel and Netflix have pulled a panel featuring the upcoming Punisher TV show from the NY Comic Con.
He started out as a Spider-Man antagonist and though he really wasn’t a villain, he wasn’t initially presented as good guy either. He gained popularity and eventually got his own limited series in 86 (which I thought was pretty good); that turned into an ongoing series which I thought seemed to be mostly “Punisher uncovers criminal, Punisher chases down criminal, Punisher shoots criminal.” I know there were different updates to the character which I am not as familiar with him 90s onward. There was a bit where he was an avenging angel doing God’s work but that seems like quite a weird departure for this character.
He can be an interesting and complicated character for someone dedicated to shooting all the bad guys but would it work to change the character a bit? Would moving him away from the More Dakka and more of a (lower tech) Bat-Man type with gear and gadgets work? Would moving Frank Castle away from the “Punisher” moniker work?
That character is such a product of his time that he provides a pretty big challenge in today’s world.
The skull logo has been co-opted by…well, people who should not be venerating a violent vigilante… you know… like soldiers… POLICE OFFICERS… it is a little disturbing.
I feel the same but to be fair when I ask soldiers and cops who wear the logo they are not venerating the character or are even comic book fans. Most just think the logo looks cool.
After comics started to gain an ounce of realism in the Marvel Era, the utter absolute insistence that superpowered heroes slamming bad guys through buildings, hitting them with deadly rays and lightning, and roasting them with fire never killed anyone started feeling idiotic. (So does the total lack of the death penalty for mass murderers, but that’s a different rant.) No amount of rhetoric about the good guys being better morally than the bad guys could overcome the basic physics of it all. A character who finally frankly admitted he killed people who every panel of the comic insisted deserving killing was bound to work. Was he a thug himself? Sure. That just meant he was ahead of his time. All comic heroes became thugs, because the comic villains became unspeakable, in the name of “realism.”
Glamorizing a vigilante - that is, making such a character appealing in any significant way to an audience (and especially one composed of impressionable youths) - is anathema and an obscenity to those who believe in and value Due Process.
In his earliest and best known incarnation, Punishy was also guilty of costume plagairrism, having appropriated his logo from the '40s superhero Black Terror. More can be found at…
First off, there have been many versions of Batman. When he first appeared, he was indeed a gun-carrying vigilante. Fuck him. Very soon thereafter, he made a deal with the Gotham PD to give up his gun and work secretly with them to bust criminals. That still made him a vigilante, but at least (in theory) the threat of denying others their Due Process rights through murder was diminished. That made him less objectionable, IMO.
After WWII, DC’s editorial policy mandated that their comics have little or no relation to reality. This lead to the character’s nadir - badly written and atrociously illustrated stories in which he took on monsters, extra-dimensional creatures and other weird stuff that Batman had no business being involved in. Despite a change of writer, artist and tone in the early-mid '60s - resulting in some of the best issues, IMO - DC was on the verge of canceling all of their Batman titles by 1964. What saved them was the success of the TV show (which true Batman fans loathed). I have always liked the TV show, or at least selected episodes, though for reasons having nothing to do with the character (i.e., I was into the car, the art direction and various '60s-era thespians). I suppose this alone IDs me as a non-fan.
I have read very few Batman comics over the last decades - though most were published in the last 10 years or so - and they pretty much all sucked to the point where I stopped reading them despite the opportunity to continue to do so for free (thanks to a friend’s generosity). Actually, I recall liking the first issue of Batman: Year 100.
As a kid, I liked Batman. As an adult, I have little for patience for him. If someone I trusted told me that a new Batman comic was really good, I would certainly be willing to read it. That has yet to happen.
I like(d) the Punisher, I think he works best when he’s killing mobsters and violent street criminals. Seeing bad guys get their comeuppance is very satisfying. He doesn’t work as well in the higher echelons of the Marvel Universe.
My problem with the Punisher, Super Heroes and movies of that ilk, is that they put a picture in the public’s head that the good guys were always right and the only thing standing in the way of justice was technicalities. We always knew that Dirty Harry got the right criminal because we saw them committing the crime, now people have this fantasy that the police are infallible.
It was particularly silly in Season 2 of “Daredevil” where they contrasted the Punisher’s deadly attacks with Daredevil’s “non-lethal” fighting style of hitting people in the head with steel pipes or throwing people down a set of metal stairs head-first.
I am very interested in the show and enjoyed what we saw of the Punisher in Daredevil but The Punisher is no hero. Heroes don’t decide who lives and who dies. That’s what villains do. I will be curious to see how the show handles him.
Recently I saw a trailer for an upcoming remake of Death Wish. It seems from the trailer the movie is all in on the main character. Fully on his side. That kind of made me sick a little.
I like the Punisher, and I thought Jon Bernthal did a hell of a job in the Daredevil series. It isn’t as though they sugar coat his violence and paint it as being a great thing; his entire appearance in Daredevil was a catalyst for conversation about the immorality of his take-no-prisoners/kill-them-all approach to “justice”. I hope there will be more to the upcoming series than just mindless violence.
Batman used a gun once, maybe twice, in the first year before they figured the character out. He was never a gun-toting vigilante. The awful monster stories didn’t start until the late 50s. You’re missing what is possibly the best decade, from 1945-1955, when Batman was the World’s Greatest Detective and solved interesting and inventive whodunit mysteries. They did that to contrast with the crime and horror comics that got the censors so upset. He was the daylight Batman who worked openly with the police. The newspaper strips of the 1940s are also first rate. It was after the Comics Code in 1954 that DC infantilized and ruined all its comics.
In the 90s and 00s Batman went insane (litaerally so, admitted some of its writers) and was as much a pain-inducing villain as his villains used to be; they were jacked up to be super insane horrors. DC had to reboot Batman more than once to get the stench off. You didn’t miss anything by not reading it then but IMO you’re not giving a good account of the history.
You mean he was never a gun-toting vigilante…like Punishy. I concur (and note as well that I had used the phrase “gun-carrying”). I would point out, however, that in Detective Comics#27, the character’s first appearance, he is already established as a vigilante before the actual story begins.
There is no telling how many times he used his gun before this story takes place. Nor how many people he killed. Nor how many of those people might have been innocent. Realistically, it is just as logical to assume Punishy’s vigilante antics have similarly claimed “collateral damage” victims.
As I never collected Batman titles, I will respect your judgment on 1945-55 issues for now. Weren’t most of those drawn by Dick Sprang? Not in the pantheon of great comic book artists, IMO.
Lastly, I would like to correct a misstatement I made in the post you quoted. “Resulting in some of the best issues ever, IMO” should have referred to the late '60s issues written by Denny O’Neil and illustrated by Neal Adams, wherein a more dramatic tone was adopted in reaction against the camp approach of the TV show.
I agree with this but from the aspect his backstory doesn’t make much sense now.
Being an ex-Vietnam Vet who did counter-insurgency and guerilla warfare coming to a country that was falling apart to both criminal violence and political unrest while also being hated by a lot of his fellow countrymen for being in a very unpopular war, that all made sense to make the Punisher who he became, a man totally unforgiving and to him everything was stark black and white.
Making him a generic Iraq War vet or whatever completely doesn’t work and doesn’t the explain his character or give him nuance.
This is part of the right-wing lie about the ‘70s. The country was nowhere near “falling apart.” That was just a reactionary fantasy.
The Punisher was just another version of Charles Bronson or Bernard Goetz, the fantasy of a (usually white) guy who wanted to just start killing people he looked down on. In the fantasy, he was never wrong about who deserved to die.
