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The Improbable Return of the Punisher

At one time, I would have celebrated the death of the Punisher in comics, even as I warily noted that some future writer might overturn this decision. I didn't like the character - I'm still not especially fond of the killer antihero in general - and I also, unfairly, dismissed the work of Frank Miller in the late seventies until a more attentive reading of his pieces forced me to recognize his vision.

Even with the changes in my own tastes, though, I have to observe with some discomfort the resurrection of the Punisher. No dislike of the character, nor of his new book (a generally excellent piece of work) motivates me here; but with his return from the dead, Marvel Comics seems to have dumbed down its standards about the wall between life and death even further, perhaps to the very bottom possible.

Resurrection as Casual Trivia

If the evidence of Punisher, issues #2, #4, #5, and #6 serves, the return of the Punisher demonstrates a new (and possibly disturbing) trend in the resurrected superhero: His return from death represents something so common, and so frequent, that it doesn't really merit discussion, so no such exposition occurs in the typical issue of this disturbing book.

Reading this latest Punisher book - perhaps his fourth series - one could overlook altogether that the character had died. Death, it seems, means little...but why, then, should the character so eagerly administer a sanction that has no lasting effects for so many characters?

Business as Usual

The Punisher seems to defy the normal pattern for resurrected superheroes. If Wonder Man emotes about his rebirth traumata, if Hellcat loses herself in morbid self-absorption, if Adam Warlock complains about a universe that will not allow him to die in peace, Frank Castle just reloads his weapons and finds new (and darkly amusing) ways to go about the business of homicide, ignorant of or indifferent to his return from the world of the unliving.

However, given that, according to pre-publication press releases, Punisher came back as some kind of avenging angel - like the seventies version of the Spectre in Weird Adventure Comics, but without the powers - the Punisher's undead status plays an important role in his definition in the same way that his obsession with the death of his family played importantly in previous incarnations.

However, the comic still manages to do what it tries to do (and very well, given the talent attached to the current incarnation) without dredging the point up every issue. One sees the clever ways in which Punisher disposes of thugs, hoodlums, crime bosses, and miscellaneous muggers. For instance, a classic Punisher episode occurred with the Punisher (strangely) in the polar bear pit of a zoo, followed by assassins. Unarmed, he turned the situation around by punching a bear to antagonize it, then leading it in a chase to his targets, whom the bears quickly treated as dinner.

Does Death Even Mean Anything Anymore?

From a fairly early point, critics of the easy way superhero comics had with death - by the forties they had established a tradition of villains who "died" off panel and reappeared months later - observed the sanction to lack meaning or impact. However, it did have some consequence - dead characters did not rapidly reappear, and not without elaborate explanations to rationalize away their deaths.

The deaths at the end of the seventies, especially those of Adam Warlock and Jean Grey, established a short-lived standard saying superheroes that died would stay dead. By the mid-eighties, Jean Grey had returned, and by the turn of the nineties, Warlock had returned, and others, who had less elegant send-offs in the first place, started flooding back in from wherever dead superheroes go.

The Punisher, by coming back from the dead and then giving it no more attention than having gone to the podiatrist for the removal of an ingrown toenail, argues much towards the complete trivialization of death and resurrection. Unless the creators of his title intend to say something that they haven't set up yet, his history reflects a great loss of meaning of something that other forms of heroic literature took more seriously.

Perhaps, though, we should mourn the opportunities lost by the trivialization of death. Scenes like the death of Roland, blowing his horn to warn Charlemagne of the onset of the Saracen armies until his brains came out his ears, don't mean much when readers could expect Roland back in a year or two, based on popular demand for the character.