It seems that The Punisher is a hard character to write. There have been some rocky points in his fifty-year history, and there have been questionable moments even in the best of times.
I suspect that the biggest challenge is that he cannot, by his very nature, change, evolve, or emotionally develop. To do any of these things means that he would lose his singular purpose, his whole deal. Any small amount of self-reflection might illuminate that a guy whose goal in life is to murder bad guys might himself be (by definition) a bad guy.
Sure, over the course of any given story, Frank Castle might learn some lessons and shift gears, but in the long scheme of things, it is his single-minded nature to punish bad guys. He kills dudes; that’s his job, and that’s his role in the larger Marvel Universe.
Marvel Comics
This, in turn, means that creators are confronted with a handful of barricades in any given story, chief among them being: who does Frank Castle kill this month? The general fodder of small-time mobsters has lost a lot of meaning in a world where Spidey and Daredevil web them up or beat them unconscious on their way to some major (sometimes super) villain like Wilson Fisk or Tombstone.
Crime is bigger than it was when Frank Castle started punishing. It, like, glows with eldritch energy, is bulletproof, or can turn invisible.
The simplest – and most compelling – solution is presented early in The Punisher’s first ongoing series: make the bad guys really, really bad. The book began under writer Mike Baron in 1987 and featured the incomparable pencils of Klaus Janson and pre-superstar Whilce Portacio. The first ten issues are featured in The Punisher Epic Collection: Circle of Blood, which starts with the reasonably well-put-together miniseries of the same name.
It isn’t until the ongoing, however, that things start getting diverse. Over the course of the first ten issues, Frank finds himself up against people and organizations who feel somehow worse than the usual Punisher targets – no generic mob boss, no meaningless bank robber. After winging down to Bolivia to take out a drug kingpin, he immediately stumbles across a crew of white nationalists. With quick succession, he engages domestic terrorists, violent cult leaders, and uranium dealers.
Some of these stories were ‘ripped from the headlines’ of the time, or around it – there really was a rash of medication poisonings, for instance, and the violent cult had clear Jonestown and Sullivan Institute vibes. The cultural consciousness wanted to see these people brought to justice, even if by a violent comic book character. Readers might see that the villains here were truly deserving of punishment (if not by Frank Castle’s bloody definition, then by modern morality’s justice); these stories might provide the smallest bit of balm to a worried – and increasingly violent – United States of America.
Marvel Comics
By the time Frank starts properly interacting with the Marvel Universe again – with a Daredevil crossover that starts in issue #10, and continuing the Punisher’s best ongoing relationship – he has developed something more like a personality, a shakily defined sense of honor. His single-mindedness has been refined in such a way that he can fully support an ongoing series.
Marvel Comics
Perhaps Punisher seems perennially hard to write because his type of retribution only seems culturally palatable by turns. Readers have never fully outgrown Frank Castle’s sense of extreme prejudice, but as the character (and his readers) grew older, more holes could be shot through his legitimacy, right up to and including the horrible co-opting of his iconography by violent police factions in this last decade. The 1980s might have been his perfect decade, a decade in which Hollywood action heroes mirrored his sense of violent justice in Cobra (though the book never reaches the social commentary of Robocop).
The Punisher Epic Collection: Circle of Blood collects the character’s first starring moments, and it illustrates why the 1980s were the perfect decade for him.
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