Punisher MAX: Widowmaker - Part 2

[history79]

Trigger Warning for Rape and Child Abuse



7.5 pages of 23

Comments

[locuatico]

I have to admit, I never expect The Punisher to have a crossover with Overwatch of all things.........

Seriosuly though. This reminds me of the scene in the Netflix Daredevil series in which Punisher kills the guy who offers him child pornography.

[cyberghostface]

So Punisher sees a kid is traumatized after being molested and his response is “Whelp, looks like I’m going to have to kill him later.”

[bestiasono]

I mean, it makes sense. All he knows how to do is kill bad things. And he sees this as an infection that spreads from one to the next. He doesn't want to do it... but he believes this kid will turn into another monster in the future.

Of course, that's not exactly how it works, but the Punisher is not known for his nuanced ability to understand long term human psychology and healing.

[goattoucher]

"I'm no expert..."

He is also a first rate nihilist. He's not the CrimeStopper, he's the Punisher. He kills those who have done wrong, not because he thinks it will end or even reduce suffering in the world, but because he thinks that those who do wrong need to be killed.

One of the most unsettling things about the Punisher (it might be designed to make him a badass, but to me it is just chilling) is that he takes no satisfaction in his actions. He is utterly cold and joyless. Killing bad guys suits his sense of propriety and his obsession with punishment, but he never seems to be happy at the end of a job, no matter how awful the people he kills are.

His near-sociopathology makes him an interesting character to me. that's why I disliked Ennis' initial run (The Russian, Spacker Dave, Mr. Bumpo, etc...): It made him into a cartoon.

[ericadawn16]

Do you think that has anything to do with his religious schooling or has that been retconned?

[goattoucher]

I don't think there's enough evidence to say one way or another. He certainly never mentions any religious motivations for what he does, but our formative environment is important. It might be something interesting to explore.

[reveen]

I feel like this story is pretty cowardly for just spelling out that the widows are bad people who deserve what they get blah blah blah. It could make for a very interesting story having the otherwise innocent loved ones of criminals Punisher has killed forming up to try to take him out.

For all Garth Ennis did to darken the character and make him morally ambiguous his work with Punisher still tends to take for granted that his actions leave things better than they were before. It rarely grapples with the idea that his killings may wreck the lives of uninvolved people in the same way that was done to him.

I also feel like the scene in the first couple of pages misses it's own point. It can be easily spun into highlighting the futility of his crusade, because after all, that was easily a situation where he could have just called the cops and let the legal process do it's job and that would be far less traumatic to those kids. When you take away the idea that his actions are necessary because he does things the system won't and get rid of the danger to Frank it just makes his vigilantism look like a selfish indulgence for his own satisfaction.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

I honestly can't recall any sympathetic victim of Castle's. Kinda annoying

[reveen]

There's one Punisher X-Mas special where the plot is driven by a mob husband and wife running from other criminals out to kill them and the wife's unborn child. Frank defends them from the other bad guys up to the point where the wife gives birth at which both he shoots both of them in the head. The husband dies looking at his son, the woman begs Frank to see her child but he rattles off some incident of her being evil that wasn't at all hinted at or set up earlier in the narrative and blows her away. It ends with Frank dropping the baby off at a church in a rifle round box stuffed with money.

This is such an easy scenario where you can make Frank into a complete monster with even the slightest amount off ambiguity. Maybe the couple are only mid level mobsters and don't exactly deserve to be shot. Maybe the anecdote Frank heard about the woman was ambiguous as to whether its true or not. Maybe he doesn't have money to pull out of his ass to give to the church and just dumps the kid after killing his parents. Instead it just goes for the old comfortable standby of "karma".

For the record, this was written by Jason Aaron. Not Ennis.

[locuatico]

Has there ever been a story in which Frank accidentally shoots an undercover cop or something? (and said cop was an honest one, as well?)

[beardedjellybean]

I'd imagine there would be a comics example if you looked hard enough, although nothing prominent springs to mind.

In the film Punisher War Zone, Frank does actually end up killing an FBI (I think) undercover agent and part of the story involves him dealing with that although it's not particularly well done story-wise.

[cyberghostface]

I think the closest thing was there was a storyline where Punisher thought he had killed a little girl and his response was to kill himself until he found out that a cartel had killed her instead and made it look like Frank was responsible. And when he inadvertently shot Spider-Man over in Ultimate he went berserk and wanted to be 'punished' himself.

[mrwalker]

Reading your post gave me an epiphany about how Arrow Season 5 fell short. The big bad was the son of one of the corrupt businessmen Ollie took out in season one. Oliver gave him one chance to turn himself in, he refused. His son becomes Prometheus, an evil (and apparently nigh-omnipotent) foil that nearly destroyed Oliver utterly.

But unless I missed something big...we never see this guy BEFORE he becomes Prometheus. WAS he an innocent man driven mad from grief, or did he already have some of his fathers cold ruthlessness inside? If they were trying to sell the idea that Oliver did the wrong thing killing the father (who would likely have bought his way out of legal trouble), they didn't do a great job IMO.

[stolisomancer]

...it just makes his vigilantism look like a selfish indulgence for his own satisfaction.

That is literally one of the points of Punisher MAX as a run, and is one of the reasons why it's been so influential on the character. It's not Frank as a vigilante or independent operator, like he tends to be in 616; it's Frank Castle as serial killer, continually knocking down relatively soft targets because it's part of his particular hunting ritual. He uses recon as what true-crime writers call "trolling phase."

One of the common misreadings of MAX in particular is that you're supposed to like or empathize with Frank, but it is a consistent theme of the story that Frank's life is a vicious, pointless cycle. He got his revenge a long time ago and now he's just doing what he does on autopilot, intending to keep going until somebody manages to kill him. The only laudable thing about him is that he's a killer who pursues other killers; he's the monster of his own story.

It's actually why MAX works, when a lot of writers spent a lot of time trying and failing to get Punisher comics off the ground. Frank is an antagonist by nature. If you even want to empathize with him at all--if he's not the villain, even in his own story--it loses a lot of the darkness that's supposed to be at his core. You can really see that if you go back and read runs like Mike Baron's in the '90s, which is a comparatively light-hearted buddy action-comedy with Micro as Frank's long-suffering sidekick. That's also a big reason why Becky Cloonan's run worked and why Nathan Edmundson's didn't; Frank has to be a monster, or he's not the Punisher. He's just a spree killer in a funky suit.