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Vengeance Is Redundant

For the comics medium, the Punisher served as a prototype for a genre of action heroes who toted big (and bigger, and bigger) guns and took no prisoners in the process of cleaning up the streets. The trail of gore left behind by such heroes proved surprisingly popular, eventually influencing the subsequent "New Comics" and also helping redefine the costumed hero away from the Silver Age concept of iconic protectors of life.

However, in the end, such characters seem very limited in the kind of stories they suggest; and, if they soon lost the originality of the tales told, perhaps they never enjoyed such originality to begin with.

An Original Character?

The Punisher seemed like a new and original figure in the Marvel comics which featured his first appearance in the 1970s. For superhero comics, perhaps he did represent a real first. But a previous character, with identical origins, motivation, history, and methods, had appeared in the latter-day pulp novels of the 1970s.

The seventies saw the growth of a market for depictions of firearm-wielding characters who dedicated themselves to the extermination of gangsters and muggers, as if such a project would survive the first encounter with a passing uniformed police officer. The "Death Wish" movies expressed one version of this urban fantasy; and Mack Bolan's "Executioner" books talked about a man who warred against crime after gangsters killed his family, killing off criminals one at a time or in tandem by means of handy firearms.

One can see in this character some certain similarities to Marvel's Punisher, who postdated the Executioner. The Punisher warred against crime after gangsters killed his family, killing off criminals one at a time or in tandem by means of handy firearms. Without a window to peer into the head of the Spider-Man writer who introduced the character, we can't really say whether someone achieved a one-in-a-million coincidence or just a crass and opportunistic failure to credit a concept's true source. Whether or not the result of parallel thought or serial thought, though, the Punisher did not enjoy either novelty or originality.

Even so, good writers doing good work can get excellent mileage from derivative characters, particularly when the creators of said characters lack the artistic freedom to experiment with cash cow characters. Marvel Comics managed, at one time, to do things with the Squadron Supreme that outdid anything DC would do with the Squadron's prototype, the Justice League, until Kingdom Come.

However, the Punisher seemed predestined to provide little more than a running body count of unpowered criminal goons. Since his solution to everything involved the death of the principal actors, it would seldom matter against who he pitted his resourcefulness. He might as well have launched strangers into the air and shot skeet.

A Short Cul-de-Sac

The Punisher succeeded best by only appearing rarely, so that the limitations of the concept would not bring it to the point of diminishing marginal returns too soon. This became impossible after a certain point, when the Punisher's appearances had gained him a popularity that temporarily rendered him one of the more popular Marvel "heroes".

Frank Miller used the Punisher within the pages of Daredevil in a way that increased the character's substance from one to slightly more than two dimensions, and readers wanted to see more. Subsequent talents would attempt to continue creating interesting tales of the Punisher's exploits.

The Punisher's mission to eliminate organized crime a bullet at a time only offered limited storytelling possibilities. The Punisher could succeed, if divine intervention allowed him to resist the inevitable bullet with his name on it also let him occupy thousands or tens of thousands of places on the earth at once. If this happened, the point of crime-fighting superheroes would no longer apply. More plausibly, he could target key crime families and either finish them off, fight to a standstill, or lose to them. He might take a bullet and die. He might not. The government might step in. The government might not. The same applies to superheroes and villains. Said entities might help or hinder him.

Without room for character development (and monomania will dispose of such room), all of the options available in Punisher stories boil down to the contents of the previous paragraph. Does this seem like enough to keep a comic book going for years?

Writers figured this out and began to toy with the character. At one point, through either mind control drugs or telepathic mind control, the Punisher lost key elements of his reality filter and roamed the cities shooting jaywalkers and litterbugs (if those sad stories had appeared in today's world, he would have added smokers to this list, and many people would buy the magazine again to see smokers get snuffed).

When that atrocious digression played out, writers may have killed him off temporarily; I've heard rumors but no details about this period, which, if it happened, ended with some resurrection that may have involved Dr. Strange and his ilk of characters.

Not much territory remains for him in stories until someone revises the concept. Perhaps the only thing to do for him at this point would require turning him into a vampire. That way, he could both sate his desire to kill the wicked and vie against something vile within himself for control: Would the desire for blood or revenge finally dominate the tattered black rags of his soul?

Recycling the Recycled

Presuming that nothing succeeds like success, DC comics followed Marvel's lead not long after the Punisher's temporary rise to the level of first-tier character.

In the mid-1980s, DC created its own killer vigilante, and, uninspiredly, named this character "Vigilante." Vigilante lacked the dark drivenness of the Punisher but did manage to maintain a fair body count; occasionally, too, amid spasms of sporatic characterisation, he sometimes failed to kill because he suffered from indecisiveness or doubts.

In general, second generation copies lack the character of the originals, and we must suspect that the Vigilante appeared at a point where toner had gotten low in the coyping machine. He lacked a strong personality; he lacked an interesting nemesis (the Punisher frequently acquired such enemies as the Kingpin); his costume resembled the sort of superhero outfits that appeared in low-budget made-for-television superhero movies in the seventies.

Talent like Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane could not save this washed-out copy with their efforts, and, hopefully, DC will not attempt to revive the character. After all, what could they do with the character? He could either go kill goons or sit and record his philosophical musings about his mission in his diary, as if such drivel would mean anything to some future historian.

We can hope that the current Silver Age back-to-basics movement will put off the return of his like for some time.