If you asked me who my favourite superhero is, I probably wouldn’t say The Punisher, even though he is. That’s partly because he doesn’t actually have superpowers, technically making him not a superhero. But mostly it’s because the character sort of represents everything I hate. He's a murdering, gun-loving, reactionist right-wing psychopath fantasy. But why do I love Punisher comics so much despite this?
The Punisher has been in three failed (but all still kind of dope) movies, but he’s about make his live-action TV debut in the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil, played by The Walking Dead's John Berthnal. For the Marvel neophyte, The Punisher is Frank Castle, a New York war veteran who returns home, only to see his young family killed in the crossfire of a mob hit. Dealing with both the grief and latent PTSD from his time in combat, he takes on the identity of The Punisher, a vigilante with a skull on his chest who just basically goes around murdering criminals.
View this video on YouTube
And there in lies his USP. Spider-man and the X-Men don’t kill bad guys. Neither does Superman (despite what Zack Snyder says). Batman actively hates guns. Even comic heroes who kill like Wolverine feel bad about it. Superheroes are people to look up to. Symbols of hope and goodness. Not The Punisher though. The Punisher thinks the only way of dealing with bad guys is killing them. The typical Punisher story runs like this: A) Find bad guys. B) Shoot the fuck out of them. C) Repeat.
This is, well, not cool. I am very in favour of gun control. I am very against the death penalty. A fair trial is a vital part of the legal system. It’s hard to look at the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan, people killed instantly with guns unproven of anything, and not find a story where The Punisher is the hero a tiny bit distasteful. Whenever someone makes the point of someone killed by police (or in self defence by a citizen) that they 'probably deserved it', they are missing the point — they deserve a fair trial and investigation to prove or disprove their guilt before punishment is carried out. The Punisher is the opposite of all this. He just wants to kill 'em all, there and then. And he's meant to be the hero of most of his stories.
