The Punisher was one of my favorite characters when ws younger. I didn’t clooect a lot of comocs featuring him, but he was a good character.
But with the new movie coming soon, I wondered…how would you feel if there really was a guy running around executing criminals?
I have to admit it would make me worry. Other crazy people might decide to do the same thing and innocent people would be hurt in the cross fire. But then a guy that kills drug dealers and other scum? I’d also be thinking “Those bastards deserved it.”
Just another psycho on the streets killing people. Although from the trailers I’ve seen, this flick could do the impossible. It could make Dolph Lungren look like he could act. It just reeks of suck.
Even if you think that every drug dealer deserves the death penalty (I don’t), how do you know he always gets the right guy? There’s a reason we have a court system where the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
I was always more of a Ghost Rider fan anyway. He doesn’t kill the criminals, just zaps them with his Penance Stare to make them feel all the pain they’ve caused. So if you’re innocent, you don’t have so much to worry about.
That said, knowing a guy with a flaming skull was riding around the city wouldn’t exactly help me sleep at night either . . . .
I also liked good ol’ Frank when I was a kid. Later, when I discovered the concept of moral ambiguity and was able to spell “crypto-fascist” he started sickening me.
The Punisher began life as an Spider-Man villain: a psychopath who believed himself a hero. but then there came the late seventies and eighties, with the success of Charles Bronson and Rambo movies, and he became a protagonist, a character whom we were supposed to admire.
Most writers then, clearly had not gone through the puerile stage of seeing things in black and white, of thinking about “good” and “bad” guys. And a lot of his stories have him killing “bad” people off frame, like they were pixels in a computer. We never see the criminal holding his guts will crying for his mother, or the widows and children of the drug dealers.
Now, sometimes Frank has had good writers. Ostrander made a decent couple of archs (Frank became head of a Mafia family, imagine that) and Ennis knows that he’s writing about one crazy over-the-top pulp mofo and runs with it, but most of the other stories are the worst the world of narrative had to offer.
I have an issue of Spider-man wherein the Punisher kills two people because they accidentally miss a trash can. It’s raining and in their dash for shelter, their newspaper lands short. Quoth the Punisher “Littering is a crime.”
A real life Punisher would be terrifying. Have you read The Dark Knight? Remember the Sons Of Batman? How they punished a convenience store clerk for ‘letting himself be robbed’?
OTOH
The Punisher meets Archie was all kinds of excellent. I expected bad or so bad it’s good. Instead, it was actually a great book. Archie’s innocence contrasted against Castle’s darkness.
Agreed. As I said if a real life punisher offed a known drug dealer I might say “Well, the asshole deserved it.” but I wouldn’t be entirely comfortable knowing there was guy out there willing to kill criminals in cold blood. But then as cool as it may seem, the idea that a guy dressed up as a bat was going around at night beating the crap out of criminals isn’t too comforting either in real life.
I’d be more disturbed that a guy with a flaming skull with magic powers was claiming to be "the spirit of vengeance from Hell". Geez, just think how would affect religion in society. A real demon on the loose? It’d be hard to be an athiest in the very least.
I’m only familiar with the Punisher from crossovers, but that sounds more like an example of character derailment by a writer who doesn’t know what he’s doing to me.
What exteme actions you ask? Certainly not the killing of gangsters (since the Punisher still does that routinely). Extreme actions like the killing of innocents.
For the record, that’s GR 4. GR 1 and 2 were western heroes who pretended to be ghosts and did the cowboy thing.
GR 3 Was Johnny Blaze. Screwed over in a deal with Mephisto, he’s possessed by Zarathos. Then, he lost Zarathos, got a metal plate in his face, and a shotgun that shoots hellfire. I understand he may have been repossessed since then.
GR 4 was Dan Ketch. After finding a mysterious motorcycle, Dan Ketch is transformed into the Spirit Of Vengeance. He punishes criminals with the Pennance Stare- a power that makes them feel all the pain and sorrow they’ve inflicted on others. I haven’t read a GR issue in a while but I gather they’ve given him a new look and thoroughly suckified him.
The GR in the movie was Blaze, though his Ghost Rider persona was the Ketch version. The Blaze Ghost Rider (Zarathos) was pretty evil, held only in check by some mumbo jumbo that made him go after other evil doers. But he routinely tried to totally possess Blaze’s body and go on rampages. He wasn’t above tormenting or just plain scaring the crap out of innocent people. (though he didn’t hurt any innocents that I recall.) In one issue Blaze allowed Zarathos to come out because he needed the Ghost Rider toi save a friend that was in a burning building with him. Zarathos was angry that Blaze wanted him to save the man claiming he didn’t give a rats ass about the mortal’s life. He did however save the man by accident. (He disgustedly tossed the man away and out of the building)
But that version of GR did not have a panance stare. He could hurl blasts of hellfire which burnt the soul, and he formed his bike out of hellfire. He didn’t use a chain either.
I swear to god that I thought that was Dolphs best movie. Maybe I’m looking back with rose colored glasses but I remember that movie not being terrible. The only part I didn’t like was the motorcycle in the sewer. Otherwise I thought it was a respectable movie.
I have the dvd somewhere. I’ll have to watch it again and re-assess.
I haven’t read much of the Punisher books, but it seems like it’d be a natural to adapt into a dark (preferably R-rated) action-packed morality tale movie.
I’ve read Punisher from way back. No version has ever shot or killed innocents. True, he started as a Spider-Man villain, but the only reason he targeted Spidey in the first place was because he was duped into believing that Spidey was a villain.
I also have this issue somewhere in my collection. As somebody else mentioned, in that storyline Punny was under the influence of mind-altering drugs that a villain had slipped him. If I recall correctly, when drugs were out of his system and he learned what he’d done, he turned himself in.
The Punisher was never a villain in the sense of being a comic book criminal (at least up to 1991, when I took a break from comic collecting). It was of course clearly acknowledged in the comics that he was certainly a criminal in the sense that homicidal vigilantism is criminal - and as such he was wanted by the police and most superheroes would attempt to capture and turn him over. Antagonist for Spider-Man, certainly. He made his first appearance during the stretch where the general public believed Spider-Man was a murderer - Capt. Stacy (Gwen’s dad) was murdered and Spider-Man found the body, and had the bad luck to be photographed hovering about the fresh corpse. J. Jonah Jameson put that photo on the front page of the Daily Bugle as proof that Spidey was a criminal, and was able to convince the general public. A known supervillain — I want to say The Jackal, but I could be wrong — took advantage of that situation to persuade The Punisher (who had the same info as the general public, i.e. the Daily Bugle stories) to kill Spider-Man. P & S-M fought, and S-M managed to convince P of his innocence. After that, the two of them teamed up on several occasions to take out criminals, though of course Spider-Man never allowed Punisher to kill anybody in his presence (and to tell the truth, Spidey did a bit of rationalizing in the sense of “I’ve never personally witnessed him killing anybody” to explain why he didn’t gift wrap Punisher for the cops).
The Punisher didn’t even kill/attempt to kill every criminal he encountered. In many stories, while taking out a hive of scum and villainy he would encounter somebody amongst the crooks who was clearly just some kid who had gotten in over his head, and Punisher would let that person go with a warning, “But the next time I see you …”. I love this line:
“Kid, have you considered making it as a regular citizen? I don’t think you’re cut out for this gangster stuff. Crawl out of the sewer, kid. Go back to school. Learn to read and write. Or I’ll kill you.” – The Punisher (The Punisher, Vol. 2, Issue 13)
As a general rule, he actually did a lot of research before going in, and knew exactly who he was going to kill when he went in. He took pains to avoid harming innocents.
But wasn’t that one of those “alternate possibility” stories (i.e. not canon), similar to the “What If …” title? I don’t have that particular issue, but I have Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe
