I find this issue interesting because it’s happened several times with entertainment that I enjoy.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to put the season 3 finale on hold because of Columbine. What do they do in the last episode of S3 of BTVS? They blow up the school. Well, since some real life dirtbags actually tried to do that, the episode had to be held back.
The Boondock Saints would have had a major theatrical release except it’s about a couple of wisecracking dudes in black trenchcoats who happily gun people down. Thanks again Columbine killers, if not for Blockbuster no one would even know this movie existed.
The video game Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 was pulled from shelves and replaced with a new box cover because the original one depicted the Soviets blowing up New York City, with imagery of a flaming plane plunging towards the World Trade Center.
Now we’ve got the Punisher being held back because there’s gun violence in it following a particularly nasty but not al all uncommon incident of gun violence in the US. So it will be held back until the Vegas shooting is a little less raw and then after some time has passed people can watch Frank Castle gunning people down en masse like he has always done.
When I was a youth, and Mike Baron was writing the Punisher, it wasn’t my favorite book, but I guess he seemed tolerable as an revenge-fantasy action protagonist. I am now really creeped out by police using his skull as a symbol, though. The fact that the character is now associated with Garth Ennis doesn’t help. Ennis annoys me.
Yeah, don’t get me started on mass murderers. But more relevant - how often has a criminal been a repeat offender? Hint: so often we have sentencing policies for them.
I guess that depends on your definition of “works pretty damn well.” The justice and criminal system is hugely biased racially, has outsized arbitrary sentences to promote political agendas, eliminates most hope of rehabilitation by exposing prisoners to abuse, and is temporary.
Remember, we are comparing life imprisonment as an alternative to killing someone, and we’re talking about a repeat offender on the scale of the Joker. Your post makes no sense in that context.
Ah, a lively yet completely polite discussion. I like these! Okay, then…
Chronos - I don’t need “evidence”. Never killing the wrong person is as integral to his character as absolute courage is to Captain America or womanizing is to the Human Torch. IIRC there was a brief stretch where he was mind-controlled into shooting at jaywalkers and other petty offenders (and every comic book character who hangs around long enough is going to have these weird moments), but otherwise his ethos and his adherence to it has been ironclad. Of course, you could argue that he went a bit too far with some people…but that’s always been part of the whole debate in the first place, isn’t it?
WilyQuixote - A Punisher movie that’s true to the character will not work for the same reason Battle Royale is going to be an impossible sell in America: just too uncomfortable for a large majority of mainstream movie audiences. Battle Royale is about high school students forced to kill each other by a tyrannical government. The Punisher is an utterly unstoppable, remorseless slaughtering machine who’s, depending on interpretation 1. a formerly good man forever broken due the failure of law enforcement to keep a violent gang in check, 2. a total psychopath who literally sacrificed his family so he could fight a neverending war, or 3. a crappy husband and father partially responsible for the death of his family and now wallowing in a lifetime of horror and misery as a twisted penance. I can’t imagine this happening without a lot of viewers getting really, really mad.
Acsenray - Yeah, I get that. That’s exactly why I don’t consider Frank Castle a role model or even an ideal, because the kind of stuff he pulls off is just plain impossible. In the foreword to his first Max compilation, the author stressed that all he was shooting for was entertainment…not advancing an ideology, not a commentary on the mentally ill. A good precaution, but I don’t think it’d fly in today’s environment.
bucketybuck - This actually happened! (See response to Chronos. :D) He had to lay low for a while (IIRC he was presumed dead and didn’t want a certain target to discover otherwise), so he underwent a procedure to darken his skin, which lasted for several issues.
Regardless, battling racial injustice isn’t really his thing, and he’d certainly be a bad choice for such an ideology. Luke Cage, Black Panther et al have that angle well covered.
No, what’s integral to his character is that he, personally, is convinced that he’s never killed the wrong person. And he’s almost certainly mistaken about that. You say you don’t need evidence, but if there’s no evidence, why believe it to begin with? I believe that Captain America is courageous because I’ve seen him jump on grenades, lead charges across No-Man’s Land, and so on: Those are evidence. You believe that Punisher is infallible because it’s part of his character? What makes you think it’s part of his character?
Genre conventions. There are exceptions, but superhero comics generally don’t use unreliable narration. When Superman says he used his x-ray vision to make sure that building was empty before he throws Darkseid through it, that’s expected to be taken at face value. The Punisher operates under the same genre conventions, and while he often pushes them to their extremes, he rarely outright subverts them. When the Punisher says he doesn’t hurt innocent people, that’s also expected to be taken at face value.
IIRC, it’s also been said by other heroes when talking about him. It’s something that’s believed to be generally true about him within the setting. Certainly, if he had any body count of innocents, one of the other heroes would bring it up during their regular “moralize while punching each other” encounters.
This analogy is invalid. Superman is not human; his x-ray vision may well be infallible (except where lead is concerned). Punishy is human and therefore, he makes mistakes. It defies credibility to assume he or his judgment are infallible. Nor would I take the word of a dipshit vigilante that he has never harmed anyone he did not intend to harm.
And the character doesn’t make any sense if he’s infallible. If he were, then he wouldn’t even need all the guns and such: Just turn over his wonderful evidence to the police, or to any of the many government-sanctioned superheroes, and let them handle everything. Unless he doesn’t actually have evidence, in which case it’s even less plausible, and means that he’s just another metahuman.
It is, admittedly, entirely unrealistic that the Punisher could kill all the people he’s killed, and never accidentally take an innocent life. None the less, that’s what happens in the comics he shows up in. And, again, it’s not just his word on it: it’s a generally accepted fact by every other character in the Marvel universe, including other superheroes who routinely try to stop him. Hell, it might even be literal word of God - there was a run on the character where he died and was sent back to Earth as “heaven’s hitman.” It was a pretty lousy run, but I’m pretty sure part of the reason he was picked for the position was because he’d never killed an innocent.
Except that part of the Punisher’s motivation for killing criminals is that the criminal justice system is too corrupt or easily manipulated to be effective, so that going to the police doesn’t actually work. And the other part of his motivation is that he wants these people dead, not in prison. So, no, he probably wouldn’t do that.
Also, if you want plausibility, you’re in the wrong genre. The Punisher never killing the wrong person is impossible, true. But then, so is literally every single thing about Superman.
Yup. And because Superman does things that are impossible for mere humans, he’s considered a metahuman. But Frank Castle is supposed to be a “normal”, a guy without superpowers.
According to Wikipedia, “The Punisher is a vigilante who employs murder, kidnapping, extortion, coercion, threats of violence, and torture in his war on crime.” Given this obvious lack of moral and legal scruples, I would have serious doubts about his integrity (i.e., “his word”). And do you really think he would admit his fatal “mistakes” to others?
Punishy is clearly skilled enough to avoid implicating himself in his crimes. Indeed, I would not put it past him to have clipped at least some of those investigating deaths he caused if they were coming too close to connecting him to them – as well as making such deaths look like accidents wholly unrelated to the investigations – and then justifying such actions because for him, the killing must always go on. A strong capacity for self-righteous self-delusion is inherent in the vigilante concept.
I have not read the “heaven’s hitman” series, but in the real world, killing others on behalf of a metaphysical construct suggests one’s grip on reality has been lost. That would effectively put Punishy in the same league as Son of Sam.
I do not buy into the concept that comic book stories tell us everything that is really going on in them. In the same way that audiences watching films from the Silent Era to the 1960s had to interpret some actions and motives that evoked potentially censorable content, I think comics provide an equally fertile field of speculation, especially when one applies a reality-based perspective. Although superheroes may exist in a make-believe world, they are cultural artifacts reflecting - and reflected by - the real world.
Batman also routinely does things that would be impossible for a mere human. Hell, Comissioner Gordon regularly does things that would be impossible for a mere human. Superhero comics are not a realistic genre.
Again, it’s not just his word. It’s an independently verified fact in the Marvel universe, established both through how other characters react to him, and various “word of God” tropes common to the medium, such as omniscient narration. If you have a comic frame of the Punisher, and there’s a word bubble coming out of his mouth saying, “I don’t kill innocents,” then there’s some room to doubt that. If you have a comic frame of the Punisher with a narration caption saying, “This is the Punisher. He doesn’t kill innocent people,” then that’s very different.
That’s great, but it’s basically fan-fiction. That’s not a reading of the character that’s supportable by any of the text in which the character appears.
Yeah… again, this isn’t the real world. This is a comic book superhero world where there’s literal Norse gods wandering around.
I’m a big fan of reader-response theory, but it still needs to have some connection to the actual text. Otherwise you disappear down the rabbit hole of, “Everything in this story is being hallucinated by one of the characters in the story,” which is seldom a fruitful interpretation, particularly when applied to works where that’s not the clear original intent.
Okay, then…