The Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank - Part 5

[history79]

Comments

[norj]

Wait is Frank supposed to fight these guys? Because they seem like his kind of people.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Yeah, no kidding.

[leoboiko]

Frank is a Lone Wolf. He Works Alone. Because he has taken upon himself the Great Duty of doing The Hard Things, he can't allow other monsters like him, particularly not amateur copycats.

It's canon that Frank is the kind of guy that Frank hunts; he knows full well that he has developed a taste for violence, that it isn't even about revenge anymore; his continued existence is rationalized as a sort of lesser-evil deal, any in any "end of days" sort of story, it's clear that Frank's final bullet is reserved for himself.

To completely ruin things...

[glprime]

They eventually come together (there's a third guy) and try to get him to join them. He basically scoffs at them and their pathetic bigotries/motivations as beneath him* and...well, it's a Punisher comic, you can imagine where it goes from there.

*Kinda pot calling the kettle, that.

[lonewolf23k]

Elite is basically a fascist who thinks a hotdog cart in "his" neighborhood is as deserving of violent punishment as those gangbangers.

Payback apparently has no concern for civilian collateral damage from his "Crusade".

And The Holy is basically a crazed axe murderer who kills the gangbanger thugs who happen to walk into his confessional to talk about what they did.

Even Frank at his worse is more restrained.

[dcbanacek]

Frank at his worst shot at jaywalkers.

[beardedjellybean]

Admittdly one of the stupider parts of his history.

[starwolf_oakley]

IIRC, Frank takes a minute to explain to Payback, Vice and a third character how they are "doing it wrong" before killing them.

[glprime]

I just looked 'em up again: Payback, Elite and The Holy.

[mrwalker]

Payback accidentally kills at least one civilian, and IIRC is all "collateral damage" when Frank calls him on it.

And Elite goes from killing drug dealers to killing a woman's leashed dog for using the bathroom on the sidewalk to dropping a hand grenade in a freakin' hot dog stand because he says it lowers the class of the neighborhood....

The Holy, I can't recall...I know a murderer was the first person he chopped up, but I think he went on to a guy who cheated on his wife.

[silverhammerman]

Y'know, I actually really like what Ennis does with the three copycat vigilantes: confronting the deeply fucked up politics at the heart of the Punisher concept and making explicit the fact that the Punisher is just a ludicrous revenge fantasy, not a role model. To me that's the kind of core storyline that I wouldn't mind seeing rehashed every once in a while.

That said, I've always been a little irritated by how Payback goes out. It felt to me like Ennis couldn't actually come up with a proper counter to that point of view and so just had the Punisher kill him for collateral damage that the readers never even actually saw. Like, the Elite and the Holy are both nutcases, but Payback actually has some of the same sort of ludicrous but cathartic appeal that the Punisher has, and Ennis didn't know how to deconstruct it.

[halloweenjack]

The problem is that Ennis wants to have his cake and eat it, too; he sets up the Vigilante Squad as crossing some line that Frank (ostensibly) hasn't, so that he can make the point, in typically heavy-handed fashion, that Frank is righteous in the way that these guys aren't. In much the same manner, Daredevil gets jobbed (and, in the ongoing series, Spider-Man and Wolverine); this happens because Ennis wants you to believe that even Marvel's street-level superheroes can't take care of these guys in the way that Frank can.