Frank and Peter vs. The World

I've been thinking about The Punisher way too much lately. What makes him appealing, what motivates him, his place in a more fantastic superhero universe, the challenges and opportunities he presents to a writer.

This'll probably go on awhile. Sorry.

Anyhow, something interesting's occurred to me, and that's how similar The Punisher is to Spider-Man. And seeing as how he was introduced as a Spider-Man supporting character, I can't help but wonder if I've been missing a lot of intentional parallels.

What struck me is how direct the both of them are. One thing I love about Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man* is the character's directness. A line that sticks in my head comes from Ultimate Spider-Man #127. The context is that various billion-dollar corporations have been trying to espionage and murder their way into capturing Eddie Brock and using the symbiote to make more billions.

“Money. That's all this is ever about. One person wants another person's money. Makes me want to scream. Money.”

Ahh love that line. This private war all these brilliant, untouchable people are fighting, and he's just disgusted in the purest and most righteous sense.

Spidey gets a lot of lectures in Ultimate Spider-Man from villains such as the Kingpin, telling him that he really needs to grow up, that the world is an adult world full of lawyers and politics and gray, ambiguous complexities. He's treated as this alien presence throwing himself against it. May I quote Spidey's arch-nemesis Norman Osborn from Ellis' Thunderbolts #11? The context is Norman losing it a bit and monologuing to himself.

“'Are you a self-proclaimed super hero?' 'Why, shucks, sir, I sure am a regular guy in bad underpants who fights crime without understanding one damn thing about how the world works, yes.'”

“Without understanding one damn thing about how the world works.” That is utterly terrific. Norman was a billionaire CEO who was involved in shady, illegal dealings before he went nuts and started chucking bombs and snapping necks. Then he used money, political favors, media manipulation, and a whole bunch of blackmail, murder, and other illegal activities to beat the rap and regain his position of wealth and prominent social status. Then, when he was uncovered again and thrown into prison, he used the exact same tactics to get himself appointed as the head of the defacto Department of Homeland Security. This is a guy who says, “Good and evil are imperfect societal constructs that can only be enforced so well. They're just a balance of personal risk and reward, and the more money and power you have, the less the risk and the greater the reward. And I am going to get so much money and power.” In Norman's world, buying, lying, cheating, stealing, and killing your way to the top are the preferred methods because they are the most effective, and anybody who says otherwise needs to read their Machiavelli and stop their bitching.

And then Spider-Man swings up and double-kicks him right in the face, and we all cheer because goddammit that guy is a wrongdoer and deserves to be kicked in the face! Spider-Man says “Whatever.” In the name of right, he goes out and faces death, danger, imprisonment, public hatred, personal problems, and constant demoralization, and simply stops those doing wrong. He slams himself against these worlds they've built up over and over without hesitation and against great adversity until the clockwork mechanisms underpinning their status are shaken lose. And that is right.

Good God I love Spider-Man.

The Punisher... Well, he's the king of direct. Well-connected gangster? Corrupt cop? Untouchable CEO? He just goes and cuts through all that red tape. He has that same very simple-minded righteous assault mentality towards wrongdoers. But Frank... he understands that adult world, that “natural order.” He's a Vietnam vet, he intimately gets adults with power screwing things up. He's part of it, or at least has one foot in it. He's more in the position of betrayer than interloper. Nobody calls Frank's rampages “immature” or “confused.” In fact, they don't call it much of anything, they just try to batten down the hatches as he storms through. They respect him, as a highly-competent “grown-up” operator.

I think it's a matter of expectations. They're at opposite ends of the spectrum. Spidey is outside of that grown-up “natural order.” He's the everyman, the type who supposedly wants to go to his job and do the least work possible and get a big fat cookie at the end of the day, as the Kingpin would say. He's stepping out of line in challenging these powerful, corrupting systems. And that's very unusual. He has strong, unusual beliefs that these power brokers are not used to seeing. Frank, on the other hand, has been run through those systems. He knows them, intimately. Like Spider-Man, he knows that they're bullshit, but he knows from experience. It's a sense of “Oh shit, he knows what's up!” When the villains talk to him (rare as that is), they don't try to lie to him, the Kingpin doesn't try to tell him that his being powerful is natural and right. Because it isn't. And they both know it.

Peter, the idealistic outsider, and Frank, the cynical insider, both of them lead to the same conclusion. That's interesting.

The Sound of Silence

The Punisher #1
Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Marco Checchetto

The Punisher is a very simple character. He kills bad people. That's it. He's not trying to affect social change, he's not trying to win or gain anything, he's not even really trying to save lives. He wants bad people to die and he kills them, over and over again. He's like a shark, a single-minded killing machine. And there's nothing wrong with that. The best Punisher plots are almost like heist movies: an ingenious plan to kill a whole mess of bad people in the most badass way imaginable.

As such, he should be a man of few words. He denies any human luxuries that might get in the way of his mission, so he doesn't have any real supporting cast to talk to. When it comes to his fellow superheroes, he doesn't care what they think and likely has no strong opinion about what they do. What does he have to talk with Spider-Man about? He's going to leave that party as soon as he can. Though he hates violent criminals fiercely, any talking with them should be strictly utilitarian, such as sending a message or interrogation. Outside of that, I don't see him as having much to say. Even one-liners, fun as they are, ring false. It feels a bit too much like an ego thing, and Frank couldn't care less about his rep save for how it affects his ability to kill more people. He's mostly lost touch with his humanity on that front.

Barring that, you get a lot of internal monologuing. Not that that doesn't have value, but most of it can be divided into one of four categories:

• Explaining what he's doing
• War flashbacks
• Black comedy
• Righteous disgust

It can wear thin if not done well, it really can. I suppose it's because he's talking about the same thing over and over. He doesn't have anything going for him except fighting the mob, and that's all he thinks about, all the time. It makes sense, but we don't necessarily need to be subjected to it.

Anyhow, that's what's interesting about Greg Rucka and Marco Checchetto's The Punisher #1. The Punisher doesn't speak or think a word, he just does what he does. We see him through the eyes of the three important factions of Frank's life: victims, cops, and criminals.

The story begins with a shootout at a wedding, conveyed with no sound whatsoever. It's a really horrifying scene, with dozens of people getting riddled with bullets in a monstrously violent way. Stop me if you've heard this one, though: a combat veteran returns home only to have his family gunned down in a random act of violence. Besides the fact that the bride is the vet in this version (two tours in Afghanistan), this wedding massacre is a very deliberate call-back to The Punisher's own origin.

I think this is very cleverly done. We know The Punisher's origin. This comic isn't trying to get into his head, it's all external to him. He's the shark in the tank. This sequence sets up the issue (and the arc, I'm assuming), illustrates the horror of Frank's own tragedy without deliberately dredging it up, and demonstrates that Frank is still hunting monstrous people just like the ones that hurt him in the first place.

Then we have the cops, detectives Oscar Clemons and Walter Bolt. It's revealed in flashback that Bolt froze and generally fucked up during a previous shoot-out and the Punisher picked up the ball. Now Bolt's forwarding police information to Frank, though he seems pretty broken up about it. The Punisher's always had a strange relationship with the police; it's been implied that they like him and don't actually try too hard on the whole to track him. After all, in the wonderfully cut-and-dry fictional way, all the people he kills really deserve what they get and he always plans his massacres so that innocent people are never harmed. His partner, Clemons, seems to be more on the straight-and-narrow.

Finally, the thugs. The main story ends with The Punisher gunning down a whole bar full of them in a really beautiful splash page, again in total silence. His face is never shown and he never talks; he's just an angel of death, punishing the wicked swiftly, brutally, efficiently. That's all criminals know him as. And, after picking up the last surviving gang member and putting a gun to his head... he let's him go and walks away. Why's that? We'll find out, but as for now, his reasons are inscrutable.

So, this is cool. The Punisher does what we expect him to, we just don't hear him talking about it. It's all been said before. We instead see the effect he has on the people around him. It's a really interesting start, and I'll keep buying it to see where it goes.

And seriously, him gunning down those thugs from behind the bar is really, really fucking cool.