The things that make the Punisher so unique and polarizing go beyond the way he deals with
criminals. From the influences that led to his creation to the strange evolution on the page,
here's the in-depth, untold truth behind the Punisher.
There are very few comic book characters whose creation hasn't been influenced by something else.
The Punisher was no exception. Before Frank Castle hit the comics page in 1974,
there was Mack Bolan: The Executioner. Created by Don Pendleton in 1969,
The Executioner was a series of pulpy adventure novels that were incredibly successful.
As for what they were about, well, see if any of this sounds familiar. Mack Bolan was
a highly decorated Green Beret whose service in the Vietnam War earned him an evocative
nickname. Unfortunately, his action as a soldier couldn't keep him from experiencing tragedy on the
home front. His family was killed in a gruesome crime that turned out to be tied to the Mafia,
prompting Bolan to go AWOL and launch a one-man war against organized crime.
A few years after Pendleton created The Executioner, The Punisher appeared in 1974's
Amazing Spider-Man #129. The version who appears there is a bit different from how he'd evolve over
the next decade, but you can see the groundwork in the original story. Despite being a hired
assassin working for the supervillain the Jackal, he claimed to only kill those who "deserved" it,
and was only targeting Spider-Man because he'd been tricked into believing that Spidey was
a killer. He also mentions that he's a former Marine, but now fights, quote, "a lonely war."
Originally, the Punisher was conceived as a straight-up villain. In the course of writing
the issue, however, Conway realized that, quote, "he had a moral code I could use to
resolve story points." As a result, the Punisher simply walked away at the end of the story,
with Spider-Man getting out of the whole "attempted murder" thing pretty quickly.
While he wouldn't get his own comic for another ten years after his initial appearance,
it wasn't long before the Punisher started headlining stories of his own. Mostly,
this happened in the pages of magazines like Marvel Preview, which were printed without the
approval of the Comics Code Authority, and lent themselves to more violent, adult-oriented tales.
All of that changed in January of 1986 and the release of The Punisher #1. Titled "Circle of
Blood," it picked up with Frank being sent to prison at Ryker's Island, which, as you may know,
is a very large building containing nothing but people who hate the Punisher. It followed
Frank as he was broken out by the Trust, a clandestine organization that wanted to fund
him in his war against crime and spark a gang war that would take out most of Manhattan's criminals.
The five-issue miniseries was a success, and 1987 saw the launch of a Punisher series that
would run for over a hundred issues and cement Frank Castle as one of Marvel's top characters.
The Punisher ongoing series was still definitely a Marvel title,
but the focus was rarely on supervillains. Instead, much like it had in the beginning,
the Punisher's solo adventures drew their influences from outside comics.
That's a nice way of saying that writer Mike Baron spent a few years basically rewriting the action
movie aisle of a Blockbuster as 22-page comics. The most egregious example comes pretty early on.
In Punisher #14, Frank goes undercover as a substitute teacher to root out a drug dealing
operation at a high school, an adventure that bears some striking similarities to Class of 1984,
a film that's basically just "what if the guy from Death Wish was a high school teacher?"
To Baron's credit, though, the story where Frank goes undercover with a biker gang to
topple their meth empire actually predates the release of Stone Cold,
a cinematic flop starring ex-football player Brian Bosworth with the exact same plot, by over a year.
Frank Castle kills his enemies. It's the thing that sets him apart from the other characters
in the Marvel Universe, and to a larger extent, superheroes as a whole. There is,
however, a problem with that, at least from a storytelling standpoint: if you kill your enemies,
they can never be developed into compelling nemeses. If you get right down to it, that's
the real world reason that Batman doesn't kill the Joker. He's just too popular to go away forever.
"I think you and I are destined to do this forever."
That extends into another problem, in that it limits the scope of Frank's enemies to
characters he can actually kill. The Punisher's arch-enemy for the first year of his solo
title was the Kingpin, and that story never resolves for the simple reason that it can't.
The Kingpin is too big a character to be killed off by a guy who primarily fights regular human
criminals. Put those traits together and the end result is that the Punisher, by his very nature,
doesn't have many villains who survive their first appearances.
There are a few exceptions to the Punisher's tendency to kill off the bad guys,
and the biggest is Jigsaw. After originally appearing in Amazing Spider-Man #162, with a
shadowy cameo in the previous issue, Jigsaw would return as a bullet in Frank's side for years.
Jigsaw was built around a pretty simple concept: in his early days as a vigilante,
Frank chucked a guy named Billy Russo headfirst through a plate glass window.
Billy's formerly handsome face was shredded by the shards of glass, and after it was stitched
up into a form that closely resembled a jigsaw puzzle, he was out for revenge.
The thing is, none of that really happens in his first appearance — possibly because it
was a little too violent for 1976. Instead, when Jigsaw first appears, all that stuff is backstory,
with the understanding that Frank has been around for a while doing terrible things to criminals.
As for Jigsaw, there's something of a recurring gag about how he'll get his face fixed,
only to have it messed up again by the end of the story. The strangest example of this
might be the time that his face was healed by a mystically powerful villain named Lucifer,
who claimed to be the actual Devil himself. That lasted about 15
pages before Frank repeatedly rammed Jigsaw's face into a cactus.
As the closest thing Frank has to a long-term arch-nemesis in the comics, it's not surprising
that Jigsaw has made it into most adaptations of the Punisher, including the Netflix show. This
version of the character had a very different origin. Rather than just being some two-bit
mobster, Billy Russo was an old friend of Frank's that he'd served alongside in the Marines — which
also made him one of the soldiers who'd killed an innocent man who was framed for being a terrorist.
To keep his secret, Russo tried to kill Frank, but you already know how well that works out
for the bad guys. At the end of season 1, Frank repeatedly smashed Billy's face into a mirror.
Considering how violent the Netflix shows can get, it's a bit surprising
that Billy's scars aren't quite as grotesque as his comic book counterpart's. Instead,
Netflix's Jigsaw developed a fascination with the masks he wore while recovering from his injuries,
decorating them to be creepy, disfigured skulls due to his nightmares about Frank.
He did share the original's desire for revenge, though, and his success rate.
By the end of the '80s, the Punisher was well on his way to becoming one
of the most popular characters in Marvel's catalogue of heroes.
He also had one advantage that Spider-Man and the X-Men didn't: he didn't have the kind of
superpowers that would require a massive special effects budget to bring to film.
As a result, the 1989 Punisher movie, in which Dolph Lundgren starred as Frank Castle,
probably seemed like a safe bet for low-budget success. It was not. The film
was never theatrically released in America and wouldn't hit home video until 1991.
Looking back from 30 years later, however, The Punisher '89 has its share of flaws, but it's also
a pretty faithful adaptation. The plot is lifted from the first year of Punisher solo comics,
where Frank's war against the mob has caused them to seek an uneasy alliance with the Yakuza.
The origin was changed to make Frank a cop rather than a soldier, distancing him from Vietnam,
but that's also a tactic that different comic book versions of the character have used.
It's no exaggeration to say that by the early '90s,
the Punisher was one of Marvel's most popular characters. If you need proof,
look no further than the sheer amount of comics about the character that were being published.
While the Punisher was starring in three titles every month, characters like Captain America, Iron
Man, and Thor all had... one apiece. The Avengers had their regular title and Avengers West Coast.
The only other characters on or above Frank's level at the time were Spider-Man, with four,
and the all-consuming, unstoppable steamroller that was the X-Men, which topped out somewhere
around nine or ten, if you count everything that had a reasonable chance of Wolverine showing up.
On top of that, there were dozens of miniseries, one-shots, and specials. All told,
there were around 26 different Punisher series or one-shots published between 1990 and 1995,
clocking in with a total of 343 issues and three book-length original graphic novels. For
comparison, that's how many issues of Amazing Spider-Man were published from 1963 to 1991.
The strangest one by far, however, was Punisher Armory,
a ten-issue series written and drawn by Eliot R. Brown in 1990. Punisher Armory's first
issue promised to reveal "His thoughts! His feelings! His weapons!", and did exactly that.
There was no plot, just full-page drawings of guns and other assorted weapons,
captioned with highly detailed reviews written from Frank Castle's point of view.
Please note that almost all of these were real guns,
and said reviews often contained Frank's endorsements for real-life gun manufacturers.
The weirdest thing about Punisher Armory comes when you try to figure out why it exists
in the world of the comics themselves. If these are Frank's thoughts about his weapons,
then who is he writing them down for?
"WHY… would you do this?"
Only slightly less bizarre than Punisher Armory was the franchise's fourth ongoing series,
and the only one that didn't star Frank Castle: Punisher 2099.
Launched in 1992, the first wave of 2099 books was focused on cyberpunk versions of Spider-Man,
Doctor Doom, and the Punisher, along with a new book called Ravage 2099.
While the rest of the line was of varying quality, Punisher 2099 is worth your time
if you ever find it in a dollar bin somewhere. Jake Gallows essentially had the same origin as
Frank — family murdered by bad guys, big jacket with a skull on it, etcetera — but when he found
the original Punisher's old War Journal, he decided to take up his one-man war. If Frank
was an anti-hero you could understand, Jake was a full-on fascist with a secret prison under his
house where he kept bad guys until he executed them by disintegrating them one cell at a time.
He would later become the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. after Doctor Doom took over the world.
By 1995, the age of Frank holding down three monthly titles and flooding the market with
spinoffs were over, but to be fair, it wasn't just him. After the massive speculator-driven
boom in the early '90s that had seen comics like X-Men #1 selling in the millions, the comics
industry nearly collapsed, with a contraction that saw Marvel declaring bankruptcy in 1996.
This led the company to sell off the movie rights to popular characters like Spider-Man
and the X-Men, leaving them with the ones nobody was really interested in. You know.
Iron Man, Thor, the Avengers. Who would want to see a movie with those B-listers?
Anyway, after his titles got the axe, Frank was caught up in a crossover called Over the Edge,
which, among other things, saw him having a mental breakdown and killing Nick Fury. Fury got better,
but Frank also believed that he'd killed an innocent family in Central Park,
much like his own family had been killed. That led him to finally plead guilty for what we can
only assume were several thousand deaths. He was sentenced to die via electric chair,
only finding out seconds before they threw the switch that the family had
been killed by Bullseye, who framed Frank so convincingly that he bought it himself.
It will not surprise you to find that Frank's execution was a hoax. Instead,
he was broken out by a crime lord who wanted the Punisher to take over his empire. "Punisher
joins the mob" was an intriguing hook, but the relaunched Punisher only lasted ten issues.
In the late '90s, Marvel was clawing its way back from bankruptcy with the time-honored
strategy of throwing whatever they could against the wall and seeing what stuck.
In 1998, however, the tide began to turn.
That year saw the creation of the Marvel Knights imprint under artist and editor Joe Quesada,
who handpicked creative teams with longtime collaborator Jimmy Palmiotti.
The basic idea was to put the spotlight on "street-level" Marvel characters with a
grittier direction that would hopefully propel them to stardom, and it worked — so well,
in fact, that Quesada wound up becoming Marvel's Editor-in-Chief two years later and Chief Creative
Officer in 2010. Looking at the four titles that launched the line, it's easy to see why.
Christopher Priest's Black Panther redefined the character,
introducing lasting concepts like the Dora Milaje and blending the Panther's
cooler-than-Bond world-traveling royal Avenger status with street-level action. Paul Jenkins and
Jae Lee's Inhumans was the most well-regarded run on those characters since their creation,
and has kept that status in the decades since. The flagship book, Daredevil, paired Quesada
with writer and filmmaker Kevin Smith, sparking a trend of recruiting from Hollywood that continues.
And then there was Punisher by Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski, and the legendary Bernie Wrightson,
which is commonly regarded as the low point in the character's long history.
The concept they came up with was very strange, even by Punisher standards:
after killing himself, Frank was resurrected as a ghost and recruited by angels to hunt down demons,
using magic machine guns that he pulled out of his magic trenchcoat. The twist was that his
celestial recruitment officer had actually been his family's guardian angel, who had
been asleep on the job the day they were killed in Central Park. Unfortunately, the book was a flop,
and a second attempt at "Angel Punisher" that guest-starred Wolverine didn't improve things.
Two years after the failed experiment of Angel Punisher, the Marvel Knights line took another
shot at Frank, and this time, it worked so well that it would become the definitive take
on the character. Fresh from their massively successful Preacher at DC's Vertigo imprint,
writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon took a back-to-basics approach
of pitting Frank against an over-the-top caricature of the mob.
Dillon and Ennis brought Punisher the same blend of ultraviolence, grim humor, and surprisingly
deep character work that made Preacher a hit. It produced what was unquestionably the best
Punisher run of all time up to that point, influencing virtually every interpretation
of the character across all media for the next two decades. Ennis would wind up sticking around
as the character's primary writer for the next eight years, with a few scattered stories since.
In that time, he oversaw the Punisher's transition from the Marvel Knights line
to the flagship of Marvel MAX. While Marvel Knights had been more of a gray area, the Punisher
of the MAX years just did not coexist with characters like Spider-Man and Captain America.
Propelled by his renewed success in the comics, the Punisher would hit the screen once again in
2004, starring Thomas Jane as Frank Castle and John Travolta as the villainous mob boss Howard
Saint. This time, the film was influenced by the Ennis/Dillon run, bringing in characters
like the Russian, a nearly indestructible assassin played by wrestler Kevin Nash.
Unfortunately, in terms of quality, Punisher 2004 is roughly equal to Punisher '89.
While it has a little of the flavor of the comics, the movie gilded the lily with some weird choices
that dragged it down. A lot of things that didn't need explaining were given detailed origins,
like getting his skull logo from a t-shirt his son bought because it scared him. Frank was also
an undercover FBI agent, making his family's death a revenge killing rather than the random
violence of the original. Perhaps strangest, the setting was moved from New York to Tampa.
Despite the movie's flaws, Jane is a solid choice, and clearly developed
a connection to the character. He voiced the Punisher in a video game,
and pulled out of a sequel because he didn't believe in the script. In 2012,
he even made a well-received ten-minute "fan-film" called Dirty Laundry where he reprised the role.
Even Jon Bernthal, who would go on to play the Punisher on Netflix, was a big fan.
A third Punisher film, Punisher: War Zone, was released in 2008 from Academy Award-nominated
director and former world karate champion Lexi Alexander, starring Ray Stevenson as
Frank Castle. This time, the movie stuck a little more faithfully to the comics,
pitting the Punisher against Jigsaw, and bringing in Microchip
as Frank's sidekick. Unfortunately, there were also some pretty weird choices,
notably in giving Jigsaw a brother, a cannibal named Loony Bin Jim, adding what was essentially
just Jigsaw-Plus to the movie instead of just focusing on Frank's most enduring enemy.
The Punisher and Daredevil have been linked in comics for years.
They're frequently depicted as ideological opposites, and one of Ennis and Dillon's most
memorable issues involved Frank "explaining" his methods by chaining Daredevil up
and forcing him to choose between shooting Frank or letting him kill a murderer.
As a result, it wasn't surprising when Netflix's lineup of Marvel series expanded to include the
Punisher, who first appeared in Daredevil's second season before being spun off into his own show.
Despite a fairly positive reception, the show was canceled — along with all the
other Netflix Marvel shows — in 2019, in advance of the launch of Disney+.
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