Punisher MAX: Widowmaker - Part 2

[history79]

Trigger Warning for Rape and Child Abuse



7.5 pages of 23

Comments

[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.