Last things first. In the conclusion to comics scholar Kent Worcester’s recent A Cultural History of the Punisher (Intellect Ltd., 2023), the author encapsulates the argument at the core of his treatise on Marvel’s skull-clad antihero. Worcester writes:
Frank Castle may be compulsive, unregulated and reactionary, but his wrath can be aimed at virtually anyone. From bank robbers to bankers, as it were. An anger rooted in a profound and overwhelming sense of betrayal, humiliation, and shame is the through line. The political implications are the responsibility of writers and creative teams. They in turn work within hard and soft boundaries set by Marvel, fans, the wider culture, and ultimately the legal system.
The Punisher concept has come to be semiotically loaded. Stripped of cultural connotations, though, the character is ultimately another intellectual property: a component to be used by creative teams to ends deemed suitable by the character’s owners. Fans misunderstand this, but so do creators - some of whom would claim authority over which qualities and values the character is meant to espouse on the basis of their own contributions to the canon. For example, Worcester cites Punisher co-creator Gerry Conway’s oft-quoted effort to reclaim the iconic skull logo, which has come to be embraced in pro-police circles. In June 2020, Conway launched a website offering apparel that featured the iconic skull paired with Black Lives Matter verbiage. “This character and symbol was never intended as a symbol of oppression,” he wrote on the Skulls for Justice homepage. “This is a symbol of a systematic failure of equal justice.”
As a counterpoint, Worcester points to the editorial advice Mike Baron offered in 2022, three decades after his lengthy run on the eponymous title and the coterie of spin-offs, graphic novels and one-shots that followed. “We all know where the Punisher would be right now. On the southern border dealing with coyotes, snake heads, terrorists, and child molesters pouring across the giant invitation mat laid out by the present administration,” Baron remarked in a statement to Bounding Into Comics, a pop culture website that tends toward coverage of conservative cultural grievances. Baron added that crooked politicians would make the hit list as well. Not coincidentally, Baron was speaking in promotion of his new border security-themed vigilante, costumed in a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the snake iconography of the Gadsden flag favored by libertarians.
Both reactions are understandable, albeit misguided. After all, both Conway's and Baron's creative legacies will be forever tied to work they did under contract, for which they did not have final say. Whatever sense of responsibility or pride of ownership either may feel regarding the character’s trajectory, they have no more say in the final product than a worker on the Tesla assembly line. In every case, the Punisher character and its associated iconography only sees the light of day with the permission of its owners, whether expressed through publication in an official capacity or permitted through absence of intervention. The Punisher is a product, within a product line. That product line is maintained by Marvel Entertainment, which itself is a line item within the portfolio of a larger conglomerate: Disney.
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Worcester began writing A Cultural History of the Punisher in 2016 as an investigation into the cultural cachet of the character and associated iconography amid the ascendancy and election of Donald Trump. While Worcester hones in on the conservative (with a small c) qualities intrinsic to the character, his study does not read like political invective. It is instead a sober and illuminating analysis of the character as an intellectual property. Worcester discusses the many formulations and interpretations of Frank Castle at a critical remove. Importantly, he locates every iteration as a reaction, a mirror that refracts or reflects societal concerns, not a driver of those concerns.
As an alienated everyman, the maskless Frank Castle offers more relatability than most of his cowled contemporaries. Readers can see his face, which is typically depicted as handsome, but unremarkable and blank enough to credibly hold the projections of any writer who is given the gig. Genre storytelling requires conflict, but the mainstream and commercial nature of Marvel’s enterprise poses limitations to what can be portrayed. As a concept, the Punisher must be rigid enough to meet reader expectations, but malleable enough to be slotted into the ever-shifting demands of the Marvel product line, all while driving the narrative in a way readers will reliably find interesting. What emerges as story comes down to the give and take between management and the creative teams. Obviously, this is true of every property. It must be emphasized here, though, because the Punisher iconography is so ubiquitous to pop culture.
Worcester finds Frank Castle in a state of perennial dislocation. He is displaced in every sense and has been from the start. As such, the Punisher is defined by his context to a greater degree than other superheroes. Conceptually, Castle’s roots are in serial fiction, namely the hard-boiled paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s that chronicle the exploits of tough guys cutting trails of violence and revenge against an urban, largely domestic backdrop. In particular, Worcester cites Mack Bolan, the protagonist of author Don Pendleton’s The Executioner series, as the blueprint for Frank Castle.
“Rage is the animating principle of the hardboiled vigilante meta narrative,” Worcester writes. Mack Bolan, like Frank Castle, returns from Vietnam to the death of his family. Unlike Castle, over the course of the dozens of novels in The Executioner series, Bolan becomes “prone to moments of reflection and regret.” Whether due to the commercial requirements of mainstream comic book production or editorial mandate, Castle’s growth as a character has not been as dramatic, especially during the decade-long period from the mid '80s to mid '90s in which Punisher comics were at their hottest. In recent years, efforts have been made to re-invigorate the character, bringing him back into the fantasy-driven fold of the MU, but those efforts ring hollow and fall short. Imbuing Frank Castle with cosmic powers may serve the purposes of some ostensible redemption arc, but it strains credulity even by the standards of superhero comic books, especially given the character’s history. The Punisher, as a concept, bears little scrutiny. Castle is the embodiment of anti-social tendencies. As a character, his core trait is his brokenness, which burdens him with an inflexibility that is both believable and desirable. In Castle’s unremarkable symmetry, readers can see themselves.
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Worcester’s ambition for A Cultural History of the Punisher is to organize and stratify the publishing history of the character in order to elucidate its significance in the annals of pop culture. To the this end, Worcester classifies the many exploits of Frank Castle as either "grim and gritty" or "trigger happy." I would argue this dichotomy is more useful in qualifying the earlier stories, when the character concept was at its most novel; as the character accrued a canon and a reputation among readers, this classification shifted from a binary to a spectrum. Earlier appearances favored the trigger happy approach, which “builds on the strong-willed but dim-witted character who first surfaces in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #129.” The trigger happy approach, Worcester argues, was mainly fodder for guest appearances. In this incarnation, dominant from the character's 1974 debut through the early '80s, the Punisher meted out violence reflexively, often as a methodological counterpoint or parodic foil to thoughtful superheroes who ostensibly gave greater consideration to the moral or ethical ramifications of their actions.
On the other hand, grim and gritty stories aimed to sate the pulpy desires of older readers. Worcester locates this tonal inflection point in Steven Grant’s and Mike Zeck’s "Circle of Blood" story, initially serialized in a 1986 limited series titled simply The Punisher. “Circle of Blood” marked the character’s first solo outing and finds Castle freed from prison by a shadowy organization, which expresses admiration for the Punisher’s violent methods. As the direct market overshadowed the newsstand, the grim and gritty version of Castle began to supersede prior iterations. In Worcester’s archaeology of the Punisher output, he thus pinpoints cracks in a cultural signifier that is too often presented as monolithic and seamless. “Even today, despite the coarsening of superhero discourse, Castle remains a dyspeptic outlier within the context of the serial comic book marketplace,” he writes. “While the Punisher is the product and symbol of a specific historical conjuncture, he has become emblematic of the cause of anger more generally.”
In a refreshing acknowledgement of the marketing factors that inform a publisher’s output, Worcester also delineates the character's publication history via two major production cycles. The first production cycle includes the character’s inception in the 1970s, but focuses mainly on the aforementioned period from the mid '80s through the mid '90s when Punisher comics were flying off the racks. In this period, Worcester identifies many of the canon’s foundational texts, such as the aforementioned "Circle of Blood," Mike Baron’s run on the initial ongoing title, and spin-off titles like The Punisher War Journal and The Punisher Magazine, a turn-of-the-'90s overture to an adult, more mainstream audience.
In the course of his survey, Worcester also touches upon seldom-discussed (but nonetheless revealing) titles like The Punisher Armory, in which writer/artist Eliot R. Brown, narrating from the first-person perspective of Castle, ponders the weaponry, gadgetry and tactics employed in the character's war on crime. Armory’s story, if you could call it that, is comprised of dry anecdotes set against still-life imagery of equipment in warehouses, garages and nondescript break rooms. The result is sterile and chilling. Brown’s work on The Punisher Armory is more disquieting than just about anything else in the canon. Stripped of cartoonish action, the violent potential of the character's otherwise inert tools is emphasized on the strength of language alone, as is the loneliness and hopelessness of Castle’s mission. For Worcester, it encapsulates the philosophical conflict inherent to the Punisher. Armory “celebrates a character who nominally leans in a communitarian direction,” he argues. “Yet, as The Punisher Armory makes plain, the character’s everyday routine is bitterly antisocial.”
Crucially, Worcester also investigates the failures, the rip-offs and the parodies alongside the hits. This is helpful for triangulating the character’s cultural impact. He counts DC’s 1980s urban reboot of the Wild West character Vigilante—introduced by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez in The New Teen Titans and briefly written by Alan Moore—as a similar conceit, but notes that while the DC character employed similarly violent measures, he stopped short of killing and expressed conflict when considering the merit of his methods. Parodies, of which there were quite a few, leaned toward the trigger happy, one-dimensional characterization. These appeared in goofball titles published amid the '80s indie boom such as Pummeler from Parody Press, but also in the pages of Marvel books like Damage Control, Dwayne McDuffie’s and Ernie Colón's increasingly prescient and insightful sendup of the MU, which examines superheroes through the lens of the working and managerial classes that must negotiate the logistics of the destruction wrought by super-heroic antics. Worcester concedes that while the Punisher is uniquely extreme, the character’s popularity was carried by cultural currents that naturally flowed toward the grim and gritty, alongside era-defining works like Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, tonally similar '70s-born film series like Dirty Harry and Death Wish, and news headlines featuring the likes of subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz and Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels.
The second production cycle, in Worcester's estimation, is marked in large part by writer Garth Ennis’ hard-bitten, street-bound take on the character from 2000 onward. Tonally, this would come to dovetail with the pedal-to-the-metal political currents of the War on Terror and ratcheted the edginess to previously unseen levels, stating outright all that was once merely implied. For example, bolstered by the analysis of critic David Brothers, Worcester argues that where other writers—whether out of fear, misunderstanding, or editorial mandate—created false dichotomies in their portrayal of the character's encounters with other races, Ennis confronted it more directly and perhaps more insightfully. “This helps explain why images of white punks with mohawks ‘balance’ equally offensive but far more loaded portraits of non-white gang members,” Worcester argues.
Equally notable of the second production cycle are Rick Remender’s and Matt Fraction’s efforts to fold the character into an increasingly synergistic MU - a burdensome assignment as Marvel became synonymous with blockbuster movies. Castle taking up the mantle of Captain America in the wake of the Civil War crossover event or the much-maligned "Franken-Castle" arc felt a little goofy 10 or 15 years ago, but those stories seem positively restrained compared to Castle’s turns in recent years as “Cosmic Ghost Rider” or the divinely ordained leader of ninja army the Hand.
Yet while Worcester acknowledges that every iteration of the Punisher is informed by its creators, he generally declines to analyze the content of Punisher stories as components in the writers' and artists' own bodies of work. Mostly, this is to the book’s benefit. To get into how the Punisher functions in the oeuvres of Mike Baron or Garth Ennis would invite sprawl and dilute the potency of Worcester's arguments. There are some instances, though, where shedding light on a story’s background would yield a fuller picture of the superhero landscape. For instance, Punisher: P.O.V., a 1991 prestige format limited series from writer Jim Starlin, artist Bernie Wrightson and colorist Bill Wray, was initial conceived as a sequel to a similarly structured 1988 DC miniseries, Batman: The Cult, by the same creative team.
The Cult explored the role of social structures like religion in relation to super-heroics to make the point that neither are enough to combat the systemic problems—such as homelessness—that mark a dysfunctional society. P.O.V. extended that examination to encompass the news media, industrial pollution and the military-industrial complex, as Castle trails a pair of recently paroled (and freshly mutated) ex-Weather Underground types through the sewers of New York after a botched bombing. Both The Cult and P.O.V. found their heroes in uniquely disadvantaged states for the majority of the story, despite their purported strengths. That P.O.V. was so easily repurposed from a Batman story is indicative that the Punisher concept was not wholly unique in its themes, nor did it hold a monopoly on social issues. While Worcester does not argue this, A Cultural History of the Punisher sometimes reads as myopic in its narrow focus.
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In all, A Cultural History of the Punisher illustrates that the Punisher canon is as tonally incoherent as any storied IP, and as philosophically incoherent as the conservative ideology some would claim it represents. Yet absence of a grand design doesn’t diminish the potency of any given story. Frank Castle was traumatized by war, then traumatized further by grief. Basic enough. Whether Castle is an irredeemable agent of empire or a nobly wounded warrior comes down to who is telling the story. Starting from the top, Marvel/Disney has the biggest say in how the Punisher is portrayed. But whatever Mike Baron, Gerry Conway or Kevin Feige have to say about the character, the stories can be read however the reader chooses to read them. They can be taken as satirical commentary, aspirational example or simple diversion. Worcester does not frame this as a problem to be solved; his book is a case study on how it happened.
Increasingly, Culture War is the tail that wags the dog. From the standpoint of power, waging Culture War is easy and more cost-effective than offering material benefits or improvements. It drives clicks. It drives fundraising. It drives elections. It even drives swatting and doxxing. In the rush of dopamine that accompanies a burst of righteous anger online, it’s all too easy to conflate talking and doing. But the signifier is rarely equal in portent to what it signifies.
Author William Gibson’s frequently cited observation that the street finds its own use for things may be a cliché at this point, but it maps perfectly to the controversies that surround the Punisher. Worcester’s appraisal comes over a decade after U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle invoked the Punisher as an inspiration in his bestselling memoir American Sniper. And Worcester was in the midst of writing A Cultural History of the Punisher in 2017, when white supremacists—garbed in variations of the Punisher skull, Confederate battle flags and swastikas—brandished weapons and tiki torches and battled anti-fascists in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia at the deadly Unite the Right rally. Even today, the iconic logo can be found festooned upon the vehicles, challenge coins, patches and badges of law enforcement officers and on the pseudo-tactical apparel, vehicles and accessories of their vocal supporters.
The concerns of A Cultural History of the Punisher slot neatly into a bibliography that includes titles like The Superhero Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2013), Peter Bagge: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), and C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (State University of New York Press, 1995). Worcester’s examination is welcome, but long overdue. Though it’s worthwhile to analyze the Punisher’s cultural and political impact, only intervention by the property’s owners could staunch the appropriation of the skull icon. But Marvel never addresses the controversy surrounding the skull directly. It may tacitly approve of connections to police power, to the extent its business is not disadvantaged. In the past, the company had partnered with military tech manufacturer Northrop Grumman, but withdrew in 2017 when backlash ensued. Recent stories in the pages of Punisher comics have seen Castle abandon the well-known skull motif and replace it with a new logo, to no shortage of controversy. Whatever the reasoning, every action (or inaction) is calculated in relation to the bottom line. At this point, even if Marvel was so inclined to take action in order to mitigate the appropriation of its IP by agents of repression and their sympathizers, it wouldn’t matter. The skull’s fictional uses have been outstripped by the uses for which it has been seized and repurposed. Frank Castle may still reside in the Marvel Universe, but the skull he wears exists independent of him, alongside meme fodder like Pepe the Frog, cartoonist Matt Furie’s similarly appropriated creation - another tool put to the task of distilling (or distorting) an ideology.
