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I recall that the excuse given for not taking out the Kingpin was that removing him would collapse the New York underworld into a massive gang war that would be worse for the city than keeping the Kingpin in place. I can see the thinking (better the devil you know and all that), but it never struck me as an argument that would be all that convincing to the Punisher, and as you note it’s also pretty transparent in serving the needs of the writers.

Y’know, I think that storyline might have been when I stopped reading The Punisher, for just that reason. I simply couldn’t buy the notion that Frank would spare the Kingpin for some notion of “the greater good.” His mind just don’t work that way.

On his site (dixonverse.net), Chuck Dixon has remarked that reading Ennis’ take brought an insight he wished he’d had when writing the Punisher himself: Frank Castle is the “villain” of his own book! He said if he got a chance to write Frank again, he’d create some sort of Inspector Javert-type police officer, one who’s obsessed with catching the Punisher. It’d make a good storytelling engine without straining credulity too much, as Frank won’t kill cops (and this character would be a totally incorruptible type, not crooked.)

Why, of course Punisher is a villain. He was created as such and never actually changed much.

That his usual opponents are also villains doesn’t change anything.

Ennis’s Punisher MAX series works really well using the model of “bad guys don’t often last once, let alone twice against Frank.” The story doesn’t become about whether or not Castle is going to kill them, but rather HOW it’s all going to come about. And if you’ve got a sick mind, then the series works perfectly, hell, I’m still chuckling over the end of Kitchen Irish.

The same thing that you said about the Punisher applies more or less to Wolverine, who also kills his enemies most of the time (or at least tries to). He only has a couple of good recurring villains (Sabretooth, who’s now dead, and the less used Lady Deathstrike- and this one was more of an X-men villain).

Writers have to try to create new villains, and often end up with things like the Lupine non-sense, create or use either faceless/cannon-fodder villains like the Hand or have villains with healing factors too (really, probably 95% of Wolverine’s villains have healing factors too).

Ennis’ Punisher works because Ennis is seems to have an endless well of inspiration when it comes to thinking up disturbingly interesting villains. (Anyone remember Moe and Joe Dubelz from ‘Hitman’?)

I have fond memories of the ripped-from-the-headlines Baron era. There’s plenty of room in the MU for another one of those Punisher books.

I’d love to see a Punisher story where Punisher isn’t sure to kill someone. Shoto down a murderous thug? Sure. Kill his boss, who orders the thug? Yes, too, Frank Frank’s POV. But at what point, when he tracks the crime up to its roots, would he stop killing? A local politician who took a bribe? A police offier who simply didn’t look into the matter? A millionare developer who may not even relaize the consequences of his actions? Frank is a binary charatcer, and it’d be interesting to see what it takes to go from Protected to Scum.

The other hard part in writing the Punisher is that, on the balance, he can’t really develop a supporting cast in the way other characters do. He can take on technical support like Micro, and have comedy neighbors and assistants as in the Marvel Knights series, but he can’t really be given a love life or a social life…that is, he can’t be given a supporting cast that he interacts with outside the context of the mission.

The better writers — and Ennis has been perhaps the character’s best — make this into a way of showing just how far gone and how focused the anti-hero is. But you inevitably hit diminishing returns with this approach; and the other way of working it, by permitting the Punisher a little glimpse of human connection as with Joan the Mouse or Kate O’Brien, has to be used sparingly to keep the character’s story engine going and tends to end in tragedy.

A Punisher writer ends up hitting a point of diminishing returns at the point where the limits of the character’s story engine — his one-man war on crime — also turns out to limit the number of reactions and emotions the character can credibly display.

The other reason Ennis’s Punisher works, aside from his imaginative bad guys, is that it’s almost all 6 issue arcs. I’m not bringing that up as a way to dismiss Garth’s work. I bloody love it, but instead of having a bad guy show up for 1 or 2 issues he has them for much longer.

Though Garth also makes up a lot of subordinate bad guys, too. But they are organic parts of the story arc.

Mr Seavey, what you said about the Ennis Punisher really applies to him in general.

Remember all those graphic novels where he’d go to another country and just shoot someone in the head like always?

“What?” “Punisher and Black Widow!”
“How, when, why?” “Shut up”

The most interesting thing about Punisher to me was never the conflict or irony or whatever, but how he could go anywhere and do anything to almost anyone. Even though he always does the exact same thing, and we know it before opening the book.

But yeah, the Kingpin was a big problem for him.

If a “hero” is not going to be heroic, and his entire premise revolves around him killing his antagonist in every story arc, then he’d better be a pretty darned interesting character to read about; and the Punisher usually is not very interesting. Every issue of The Punisher basically tells the same story as every other issue of The Punisher, over and over again, with very little variation. How much can you really do with a character whose entire schtick is that he’s a loner who kills criminals. I can’t imagine how this bland, limited character keeps earning his own series.

I mean, there has been some good writing involved with the Punisher over the years, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I think its a very narrow concept for an ongoing series. It’s sort of how like the first “Death Wish” made for a pretty good movie, but “Death Wish” 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. all sucked because there wasn’t a whole lot more to do with the concept other than to repeat it ad naseum. It’s just a pretty limited idea to try to hold an ongoing series around without a lot of repitition. To make it worse, as others have noted, the Punisher doesn’t really have any kind of decent ongoing supporting cast to add any variation.

The Punisher to me is the epitome of the bland, limited, boring and non-heroic “grim and gritty” characters we have been deluged with since the mid-80’s or so. In fact, he’s basically the great-grand-daddy of those types of characters, continually inspiring tons of other similarly-bland, inferior “grim and gritty” characters. And in the end, these types of characters are really all about…nothing.

Blah. Can you tell I’m not a huge fan of the Punisher?

As silly as it was, he was a lot more interesting back when he used rubber bullets in his guns while guest starring with Spider-Man and wasn’t a “grim and gritty” sociopath.

Just got around to reading this, as part of my end-of-the-Garth-Ennis-run festivities.

Most of the comments above about how every Punisher story is the same, seem to me to apply equally well to TV stories. Every Law & Order Criminal Intent story is the same: someone is murdered at the beginning, Goren & Eames or Logan & Wheeler have to unravel the complex plot that caused the murder, at the end they trick the bad guy into confessing, bad guy goes to jail. (I don’t mean to pick on Criminal Intent here, the notion applies to all police procedurals.) The hook of these stories is not “what’s going to happen?” but how and why; and also how compelling the bad guy is, and the interesting responses the bad guy draws out of the good guys.

This one-note-ness doesn’t completely stifle the storytelling engine, it just means you have to look at the crime and the criminals to create stories.

You see this in the Garth Ennis MAX run. One storyline featured a gang who brought Irish bombings to New York, another focused on human trafficking, another on corporate negligence & fraud turned deadly. In all of these, Frank’s essential task was to unravel the conspiracy and find the perps, so that he could do what he does. You could keep this kind of story going for quite a while, with different schemes and conspirators. With some changes in viewpoint, Frank could function either as a main driver of the story (like in The Slavers where he is actively trying to figure out how to get to these guys and take them down) or as a sort of Greek chorus who walks thru the final act of the play gunning everyone down (like in the first Barracuda story: Frank’s role in this reminds me of HBO’s old The Hitchiker series). Frank is the perfect finale to just about any crime story.
(Another example of this is the 3-part crooked cops story from the Marvel Knights series. I think this second effect might another aspect of what Chuck Dixon was referring to when talking about the Punisher as the villain of his own book. The “story” can be elsewhere: Frank is the ending.)

One interesting aspect of a couple of those stories is how Frank got pulled into them. In both The Slavers and Barracuda, Frank’s first involvement is with a victim of a complex crime. This is a great hook, and could get Frank going in different directions. Frank’s interactions with victims is pretty interesting in its own right.

These stories also can throw off supporting characters, who can help generate later stories: Yorkie Mitchell the British soldier, Jen Cooke the social worker, Barracuda himself. If you keep generating them at a rate not too much slower than the Punisher’s world kills them off, these can help you for a long time.

Garth Ennis added some interesting new possibilities to the Punisher’s “storytelling engine”, by focusing on Frank’s experiences & skills prior to becoming the Punisher. The first MAX story In The Beginning, and the Mother Russia storyline, both have Frank being approached to use his highly developed spec ops skills in international arenas, basically in the service of his country. Frank is not motivated to accept these assignments — he’s busy — but it is an avenue for new stories. In the Mother Russia story, Nick Fury does come up with a MacGuffin that Frank will go for; the “something” that would get Frank interested could create a story itself. Fury was going to give Frank access to high-level intel: suppose that had materialized, and Frank started using it. Intelligence people might become aware that he was using it, and try to shut him out of it. And of course Mother Russia also illustrates how one story can provide supporting characters / villains for future stories, in the form of the 8 generals.
(Frank has been very interesting when Ennis has him operating outside the US, whether it’s Russia or Afghanistan or that island of mercenaries that he blew up, or that South American locale where he escorted the drug guy to “safety”.)

There’s also a scene somewhere in the middle of the MAX run, where Frank receives some info over the phone from an Army colonel/general. I barely remember the quote, something like “Drag a wounded man to a huey and 30 years later he won’t care what they call you in the media.” So Frank has “friends” in the miliatry; or let’s say people who feel they owe him. This could be a further source for stories, either buried as one element of an arc, or even as an obvious driver — imagine that general needs some help today, the kind of help that only Frank Castle can provide.

“True crime” and special ops stories are enough to keep a writer going for a long while, so long as he’s diligent about planting possible seeds for future stories (as Ennis was). But there’s also the area of “logistics”. Somewhere, sometime Frank must periodically replenish all those claymores and bullets he uses up. I remember in the Marvel Knights series he took down a gun-running militia: their stash would presumably keep him operating for a while. But his needs are specialized. Plus he owns land (according to the beginning of the 2nd Barracuda story), and maybe has more than one safe house in the city. How he keeps himself stocked up and “administers” his holdings, that could generate some stories.

The Punisher’s story engine is not the same as that of most superheroes, particularly from the standpoint of a “rogue’s gallery”. But it’s as open-ended as that of many long-running TV shows, so long as the writer works carefully. The other thing Ennis did, removing superheroes from the equation, that’s probably necessary too. Frank doesn’t really work so well mixed in with superheroes.