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Although I’ve heard of the Marvel comic book character The Punisher (Frank Castle) over the years (He first appeared in Spider-Man #129 in 1974), I’ve never been a fan. I don’t know why. I guess I prefer the more traditional costumed superhero. Some guy running around shooting people doesn’t appeal to me.

Sometime later, the character and his symbol (a stylized skull) came into controversy when said-symbol was adopted by a number of law enforcement units. Essentially these officers were aligning with an ultra-violent vigilante which understandably made a lot of people nervous.

Marvel went so far as to change the Punisher’s logo to dissociate the character from the officers and others who had adopted the older symbol and Castle’s vendetta against criminals.

As an aside, it should be noted that very briefly in the 1970s, Marvel changed the name of their landmark character Black Panther to Black Leopard because they didn’t want T’Challa associated with the black militant group The Black Panthers.

Recently, Marvel announced they were ending The Punisher, not only by not publishing comics featuring the character, but having him commit suicide.

What? Why?

According to Bounding Into Comics, it was largely because they disapproved of their character being associated with conservatives in general and the police in particular. In other words, political B.S.

It gets worse.

According to his origin, Frank began his campaign against crime when his wife and two children were killed in cold blood by mobsters in Central Park. Plenty of superheroes have been inspired to put on a mask because of personal tragedy. Batman and Spider-Man immediately come to mind, but there are scores of others.

The difference is that (typically) they don’t become homicidal maniacs. Depending on the version of Batman, he has killed before and he has gone off the rails emotionally, but the publishers also managed to bring him back. From what I can tell, Castle’s universal response to crime is to kill the criminals period.

However, what Marvel did to Castle was not only bringing his wife back magically (actual comic book magic like Dr. Strange) but to have her tell Frank that before she died, she wanted to divorce him. She can’t stand him and especially hates what he’s become, even though he became a vigilante because of her.

Jason Aaron (twitter) was the author of this story arc but it was Ron Marz (twitter) who brutally criticized Punisher fans as:

The Punisher isn’t problematic. He’s a bad guy we root for because he kills worse bad guys. The problem is the dummies in jacked pickups festooned with Punisher stickers who don’t grasp that the Punisher is a bad guy.

He blocked me on twitter when I said I didn’t like being told what I can and can’t read, that I don’t own a pickup, that I have three university degrees (challenging his level of education), and accusing him of doing the moral equivalent of book burning.

I guess some guys can dish it out but they can’t take it.

I also happened to mention I was going to start reading The Punisher because of what Marz said. I won’t pay Marvel for back issues or collections, but my public library system has tons of graphic novels. I don’t have to shell out one dime to these censors.

And so last night (relative to when I’m writing this), I read Marvel Knights: The Punisher, the Complete Collection Vol 1.

Holy cats. I’m beginning to see why Frank Castle needed to die.

Okay, there is a streak of goodness in him, but you have to dig deep, and it’s only for those who have sacrificed dearly for him first. Otherwise, he’s driven to kill and he’s very good at it.

The story starts out with Frank going after a particular New York crime family. It’s vicious, brutal, and graphic. This isn’t a comic book for kids. However, there’s no superhero aspect to it in the beginning, just Frank killing really bad people.

He lives in a cheap apartment house with an odd collection of misfits who all, on one level or another, admire “Mr. Smith.”

The NYPD are in the pocket of organized crime who wants Castle taken out in the worst way, but the cops really love him (in comic book lore as well as real life). So the single most incompetent cop on the force is assigned as a task force of one to stop the Punisher. It’s really embarrassing.

The bad guys are bad, the cops are either buffoons or jerks, Frank’s friends are all misfits, and there isn’t a single character in this graphic novel I really liked let alone cared if they lived or died (except Joan).

At various points, both Daredevil and Spider-Man show up, but Frank disposes of them with ease.

Well, he does let Daredevil beat him up, basically because one-on-one, he’s no match for DD. But he does know about the hero’s hyper senses (although still misses that Matt Murdock is Daredevil) and uses that to stop him.

Frank lets the villain (I’ll get to that) he’s facing use Spider-Man as a punching bag just so he can use the unconscious Peter’s web shooters to plug of the baddie’s mouth. Especially in this case, you wouldn’t know Spider-Man is supposed to be dozens of times stronger and more agile than Frank. While Frank is a trained Marine who served in Vietnam, he’s still an ordinary human being.

Besides the Mob and besides Ma Gnucci who runs the crime family, the main bad guy is “The Russian.” He’s a stupid person who is huge, almost invulnerable, and loves to kill as much as Frank, except he does it just for money or fun.

Having recovered from near fatal wounds, Frank is getting ready to leave for a different safehouse when the Russian attacks. Castle beats him in a bizarre sort of way and decapitates the guy.

This doesn’t stop the Russian who has covert U.S. military help to turn him into a sort of cyborg, one with major league boobs.

Another aside: I forgot to mention that at least four times in this collection, professional bad guys went calling for their Mommies. It was ridiculous.

Boobs…uh, the Russian survives a 96 floor fall and being hit by a subway train to be extracted and rebuilt. Superhero stuff aside, there’s no way.

If this story were written today instead of years back, I’d immediately think the whole breasts thing was a send up to the Russian being trans, but I think it was all for the bizarre humor factor.

The Russian even survives this.

But then Frank uses a nuke to kill two thousand really bad guys on an island. The Russian is attached to that nuke and he doesn’t come back.

This more or less resolves the story arc, but the collection had one more surprise.

Frank Castle’s family is killed in a cross fire between superheroes and supervillains. The heroes apologize but say it can’t be helped. Frank, in full tactical gear, kills some of the heroes, is tried (defended by Matt Murdock who, in this version, has a childhood history with Frank), convicted, and almost put in prison for life.

He’s rescued by yet another band of misfits, rich people who have been accidentally mutilated by superheroes over the years. Frank will be paid well if he kills off the entire Marvel superpowered universe. Long story short, he impossibly does so (yes, it would have been impossible).

It comes down to Castle and Daredevil. He ends up killing DD too, but not before learning his secret, that he killed a friend.

This more than anything else changed my mind about Frank. He only had one possible end and this was it, assuming the baddies didn’t get him first.

For every other hero on the vengeance road, there’s the sense of pursuing justice, not only for its own sake, but to honor their dead loved ones. Somehow, we all know Uncle Ben would have been proud of the man Peter had become, at his exploits as Spider-Man. Even Bruce’s Mom and Dad might understand why he dons the cowl and cape night after night.

If Frank’s wife did come back to life, if his children could see what their Dad became, what he was capable of, the sheer brutality of his life, they would be horrified. Yes, they were the catalysts, but it went far, far beyond that.

We’ve had our Dirty Harry and The Star Chamber movies. There’s always that part of society and the law that is corrupt or inept, unwilling or unable to stop the evil among us.

We have cheered the vigilante for doing what the supposedly legitimate law enforcement system didn’t do, take crime off the streets in the most violent way possible. In some sense, it satisfies our collective frustration at “legal loopholes” and the bad guy getting away so they can hurt more people another day.

In Batman Begins, the character Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson) tells Bruce (Christian Bale), “Criminals mock society’s laws. You know this better than most.”

We cheer for vigilantes because they do what…well, we probably wouldn’t do what they do, but we want someone else to go out and clean up our streets, get rid of the scum, make bad people pay for the lives they’ve taken or abused.

That’s why people have cheered Frank Castle for so long. But imagine being Frank.

In the movie The Dark Knight, the character Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) says of Batman, “Whoever the Batman is, he doesn’t wanna do this for the rest of his life. How could he? Batman is looking for someone to take up his mantle.”

Castle doesn’t get as far as wanting someone to take up his mantle. Of course, I’ve got only one graphic novel collection to go on, so I hardly know the character, but from what little I know, it’s too personal. He’s obsessed with, if not revenge, then with making his enemies feel his pain.

But it never ends and that’s the problem.

It’s the problem with Spider-Man and Batman too, and they’ve both thought long and hard about giving it up. In the end, they can’t because they are unique, both in their abilities and their sense of justice. Probably also in their internal “being messed up.”

As hard as their lives are, their main goal isn’t getting their body count as high as humanly possible and then exceeding that. That’s Frank’s only goal. There’s no way out. There’s no one to “take up the mantle.” There’s only killing until they kill you or until you’ve had enough and kill yourself.

In the end, you lose both ways.

I can see a sort of purpose in admiring the Punisher, but that’s for other people. I was planning on reading a whole bunch of his stories, but not now. I’ve had enough. I haven’t gotten so dark as to enjoy the unending bloodshed. Plus there were just too many silly plot points, and writer Garth Ennis skipped some of his research about how weapons work and methods of killing (you don’t call a magazine a “clip” which is a rookie mistake). My son is a Marine and I talk to him when I need to write a story about someone killing someone else.

I’m leaving the Punisher alone for the reasons I’ve stated above, but I still think Ron Marz is a jerk.