And now, every night, I go out and make the world sane.
-Garth Ennis, Punisher MAX #1
There should be no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Those two words should never go together when discussing any sort of entertainment media. You like what you like, and you should never qualify your appreciation with self-deprecating, cringing expressions like “guilty pleasure.” Whether you’re into table-top miniatures or extreme knitting, competitive Magic the Gathering or even TV talent shows, nothing that’s essentially harmless, which releases soothing warm goo from your brain’s pleasure centres (I don’t really understand how the brain works) is worth feeling ashamed about. On the flip-side, anything you consume that’s genuinely terrible and without merit shouldn’t be rationalised; sometimes you need to take a long, hard look at yourself and wonder if it was really necessary to watch that slasher remake from start to finish. Still, everyone has different standards of what they consider acceptable entertainment, and you can find value in even the most unlikely places.
That said, it’s easy to see why massively over-the-top, bloodthirsty wish-fulfilment comic-book anti-heroes might be considered pushing it.
The essentials of the character are simple to the point of tedium. He’s a military man whose native talent for mass murder found a limitless outlet in the form of his endless, bloody campaign against organised crime, inspired by the senseless killings of his family in the crossfire of a sloppy gangland feud.
Mr. Castle certainly inspires a lot of instinctive revulsion. The implication that single-mindedly murdering gang-members in a variety of ways is some sort of sane response to the problem of organised crime is on the face of it the sort of pig-headed vigilante vengeance-dream that probably dances through most people’s heads sooner or later, but becomes in a problem if it parks itself in your skull and settles down to become respectable. The Punisher started out as an antagonist to more idealistic Marvel heroes; his ruthlessly casual attitude to the use of lethal force could act as an object lesson in How Not To Battle Evil. His bleak skull motif is almost stereotypically villainous; if Stan Lee ever popped up in the Punisher’s stomping grounds to talk him up for the kiddies, he would be some sort of soul-destroying mirror universe version of Stan Lee, maybe a cadaverous junkie with his trademark avuncular, beaming expression contorted into a hateful sneer.
But the real issue with Frank Castle is his simplicity. It’s incredibly, understandably easy to see him as a characterless automaton, a vessel for the most tedious power fantasies. The man is a dead-eyed murderer whose strict code allows him to rationalise the most absurd body-counts by making sure that all his victims are (conveniently) irredeemably evil. Garth Ennis’s run on the Punisher for Marvel’s adults-only MAX imprint stressed that Frank really is a living weapon, occasionally fuelling himself with burgers and steaks before returning to an inhumanly lonely and brutal existence of gun-battles, interrogations and other demented action-movie set-pieces. He’s like some sort of gruesome caricature of all-American masculinity, ideals of hardness and self-reliance taken to an unimaginable extreme. It would be so easy to dismiss the character as fundamentally uninteresting.
And yet, somehow, there is still lingering potential. It takes a bit of work, but in the right hands Castle can be an awesome flat character, rather than a one-dimensional one. This is the root of his appeal; to paraphrase Alien, you admire his purity. He’s a perfect killer, top of the urban jungle’s food chain, a core of frozen hate that the mayhem and bloodshed of his twilight underworld can revolve around. Make him run a gauntlet, put him through his paces. With some creativity, lots of atmosphere building and scene-setting (hushed conversations between sweaty criminals, worn-out, frustrated police, mundane cityscapes given a hellish aura by the awful violence breeding behind their dreary facades) and a bit of subversion to mix up the formula, and you have a story worth reading.
Not exactly controversial, but Garth Ennis is the best at this. There are many reasons to take issue with him as a creator; when your signature is cheerful depravity that pushes the envelope of comic-book violence, you’re forever walking a tightrope between the effectively shocking and the merely adolescent, and he frequently falls on the adolescent side. His Punisher stories are mercifully free (for the most part) of “comedy” ultra-violence or parody nastiness. Violations are graphic, life is cheap, but at least Frank never looks over the grisly mess and chuckles at the wackiness of it all, or ever pretends to be some sort of rough yet decent heroic avenger who just needs to kill a few more people before he can shrug off the past and get back in the dating game. His moments of humanity are carefully rationed out, and it’s very clearly established that he enjoys death for its own sake and is ultimately trying to fill a bottomless hole inside him with the blood of the wicked. He’s presented as more of a force of nature than a full-on monster, steered this way and that by the demands of his steely code, but forces of nature and monsters alike can wind up in some interesting, if horrifying places, one street over from the pale of humanity.
Of course, there’s plenty of revenge fantasy and jangling shell-casings as well. It’s really not for everyone. But at the same time it’s nowhere near as monotonous and uninspired as you’d expect such a derivative and simplistic set-up to be.
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