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After two disappointing The Punisher movies in 2004 and 2008 (one the 1989 Dolph Lundgren version), the property is now firmly in the hands of Marvel Studios and the good news is they’re doing something with it. Kevin Feige and his cohorts have cast The Walking Dead’s John Bernthal as the man himself – the brutal vigilante Frank Castle – for Daredevil season 2 on Netflix.
But here’s the rub: The Punisher’s comic book stories are generally incredibly dark, even when compared to the narratives of Marvel’s previous Netflix output from Daredevil and Jessica Jones. It seems likely them, that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will need to smooth over Frank’s rough edges to make him work within their continuity. And Frank’s got a lot of rough edges.
With that in mind, here are ten Punisher stories that are probably too dark for consideration for The Punisher’s appearances in the MCU…
10. The Widows Of His Victims Band Together To Kill Him
The Widowmaker was the eighth volume of Preacher-creator Garth Ennis’s ultra-dark The Punisher Max collection. Instead of glamourising the gritty street level vigilantism that Frank Castle is known for, The Widowmaker zeroed in on an oft-overlooked side of his brutal war on crime – the collateral damage.
The crux of this story was the widows that The Punisher creates by killing pretty much every criminal he comes across. In The Widowmaker, a collection of these left-behind lovers banded together under a common goal – to kill the man that took their husbands away. Of course, Frank survived, but not before being forced to think about the families-torn-apart ramifications of his actions.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe would surely be scared to go anywhere near a story like this. Marvel heroes are likeable and charismatic and mostly squeaky-clean, but all of them could be seen to have blood on their hands if we start talking about collateral damage. Instead of running the risk of making all their heroes look less likeable, then, Marvel will surely just ignore the widows that The Punisher leaves behind.
9. The Kingpin Lets His Own Son Die
Garth Ennis’s aforementioned Punisher Max run later inspired Jason Aaron to write the similarly-tilted PunisherMAX. Within this series, The Punisher is compared and contrasted to Wilson Fisk’s Kingpin Of Crime. Aaron seeks to show us that they’re not so dissimilar after all – both are willing to kill in order to bend the city to their will, for instance. The only difference is that one wants justice while the other seeks criminal control.
The series eventually makes one important distinction, though – The Punisher is only willing to kill crooks, whereas Fisk will happily let anyone die. The prime example of this comes when another criminal threatens Fisk’s son at knifepoint. Rather than give in to his rival’s demands, Fisk nonchalantly states that he can just have another son. The boy dies.
The MCU wouldn’t touch this story with a bargepole. Although the idea of comparing Frank to Fisk is an interesting one, Feige would surely never allow a Marvel property to show an innocent child killed, just so his father can advance his criminal career. This is Hell’s Kitchen, yes, but it’s still the Marvel Cinematic Universe – it can’t go that dark, surely.
8. Frank’s Miscarried Brother And Childhood Traumas
In 2006, Punisher: The Tyger one-shot took readers back to the 1960s to tell a very dark story from Frank Castle’s childhood. The story picks up with Frank as a ten year old boy – before the military, before the death of his family, before the vigilantism.
A school classmate of Frank’s commits suicide, and that’s only the beginning of the story. Young Frank also finds out that his mother miscarried, and that he would have had a brother if she hadn’t. The story is framed in flashback, with the fully-grown Frank pondering how these tragedies affected his younger self.
He remembers hearing about the idea of the ‘Tyger’ a powerful creature from a William Blake poem that lives outside of society and wasn’t created by God, but is necessary in order for every other species to survive. It wasn’t until he was older that Frank would realise that he was the Tyger: that he wasn’t destined for happiness, but to rid the world of filth so that everyone else can sleep soundly at night.
This seems a little bit too dark for Marvel Studios to adapt directly. Children suicides and stillborn siblings might work as comic book backstory, but showing his on screen would make for a depressing viewing experience that would jar with the rest of the MCU. It seems far more likely that The Punisher will arrived fully formed, with only a few flashbacks to explain his origins.
7. The Punisher Vs. The Sex Slave Industry
The Slavers is another dark Garth Ennis comic from the Punisher Max range. In this one, Ennis took on a hugely taboo topic that Marvel Studios may never have the guts to film a story about: the sex trade.
The story opens with The Punisher staking out the known location of an Eastern European drug lord he’s planning to take down. He’s surprised when he sees a woman – Viorica -opening fire on the dealer and his lackeys. Frank helps her kill the bad guys, and then learns her life story.
In her youth she was abducted, raped, beaten, and forced to become a prostitute. She later fell pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Eventually, the slavers that own her killed the baby and sent her photo evidence. This was the final straw that led to her gun-toting rampage.
The Punisher is shocked, and agrees to help her out by killing the entire mob. It’s a big, important story in comic book lore, but it would take some serious bravery for Marvel Studios to adapt it onto the screen. It seems more likely that they’ll stick to safer topics.
6. The Punisher Revenge-Kills Every Marvel Hero, And Himself
In 1995, Garth Ennis wrote The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe. Therein, Ennis imagined a ‘what if?’ world where Frank Castle’s family were killed due to getting caught in superhero crossfire rather than gangland mobster warfare. When Cyclops of the X-Men offered a half-arsed apology, Castle snapped and shot him in the head from point-blank range.
This sent Castle on a revenge spiral, as he committed himself to hunting down and killing every superhero in existence. Spider-Man is next to take a bullet, with The Punisher explaining that ‘someone had to go first’ just after blowing his brains out. He gathered a load of mutants on the moon before nuking them all. He kills all the supervillains, too.
Franks saves Daredevil for last. He peeks under the mask after the fact and realises that the red-suited superhero was none other than his good friend, Matt Murdock. Realising that there’s just one more person that deserves to die, Frank turns his gun on himself and commits suicide.
You don’t need me to tell you why the MCU won’t adapt this storyline. For starters, there wouldn’t be an MCU left afterwards.
5. All Frank’s Friends Die And He Has A Mental Breakdown
How Netflix will handle Frank Castle’s The Punisher origin story remains to be seen. He could just show up fully formed, and leave a few quick dialogue scenes and/or flashbacks to vaguely fill in the details of his history and motivations. A huge part of this, in the comics, was his traumatic and life-changing tour of Vietnam.
Woefully outnumbered the Vietcong, Frank’s troop were in dire straits. Frank watched as all his friends got gunned down, before breaking down mentally himself. He hears a voice in his head, telling him that he can survive this, but that it’ll come at a cost. Frank accepts the deal and manages to kill all the adversaries. He’s decorated with many awards by the military, but the cost he warned himself about comes later when mobsters kill his family.
I can’t see Daredevil season 2 going into a detailed depiction of Frank’s wartime traumas. Perhaps they’ll be hinted at, but showing so many men dying in battle and Frank suffering from a mental breakdown could be deemed too dark for the series to recover from. It’s Daredevil’s story of heroism, not The Punisher’s tragic biography, after all.
4. The Punisher Dies And Turns Ordinary People Into Killers
Jason Aaron’s aforementioned PunisherMAX series was separate from the main Marvel Comics continuity and therefore had free rein to do drastic things with Frank Castle. Chief of all these was the decision to kill off The Punisher in the final issues of the series.
After finally defeating and killing the Kingpin, Frank bled out from his injuries and died in the penultimate issue. In the final chapter, he was buried. The death of this ruthless protector sparked a public uprising, which saw ordinary folk turning against the criminals of New York.
This was meant to show that, although he hadn’t completed his mission to eradicate crime, The Punisher had left behind a legacy that would continue his work indefinitely. Many more crooks would die in his name, which is – in a twisted, comic book sort of way – a good thing.
Again, this is just too dark for the MCU. Major characters rarely die in Marvel Studios properties, and when they do they don’t inspire other people to go out and become killers. Even though he’s an antihero, it’s doubtful that the MCU’s Punisher will be so brutal as to encourage others to become heartless killers as well.
3. A Mobster Urinates On The Corpses Of His Deceased Family
If anyone at Marvel Studios brought up the idea of adapting Garth Ennis’ Up Is Down, Black Is White storyline from 2006 into live-action form, they’d quickly be laughed at. This is the story where deranged mobster Nicky Cavella dug up the corpses of Frank Castle’s dead family, pissed on them, and sent video evidence to the man himself. Cavella was really keen to wind him up.
The story that follows is simple, with The Punisher gunning his way through the entire mob to get to Cavella, in a similar way to The Raid (but with bullets instead of martial arts skills). This kind of revenge rampage might one day be adapted to the screen, but there’s no chance in hell that Marvel would have the guts to enable it with a man urinating on corpses.
Even for their grittier Netflix branch, this kind of lewd shock-inducing fare would be too much. Glamourising the gunning-down of bad guys is one thing, but showcasing the desecration of a grave as a fun opening scene is far, far worse. There’s no chance they’ll ever adapt that.
2. The Punisher Dooms The Human Race
Garth Ennis once again wowed readers with his incredibly dark arc The End, which placed an elderly Frank Castle in a world ravage by a nuclear apocalypse. The Punisher was imprisoned at the time, and survived in a bunker at New York’s Sing-Sing correctional facility.
After a year, he decided to brave the fallout and wandered into the wasteland. He finds the Coven, a collection of warmongers, senators and oil tycoons. They urge Frank not to kill them, stating that they’re the only survivors left in the world. Regardless, Frank shoots them dead because he knows that they’d just ruin the planet again if they did manage to repopulate.
Frank has doomed the human race. As the last man standing on the planet, he walks out into the wasteland once more. Fire burns his flesh. Hair falls from his head. The radiation is killing him, and the world is ending. Frank’s final thought is about the family he lost back in 1976.
Of course, there’s no way that Marvel Studios will ever adapt this story. They want the MCU to keep churning out movies and TV shows forever, so an endgame story like this would be totally illogical as well as massively miserable.
1. The Punisher Kills An Innocent Child
1986’s Circle Of Blood was the miniseries that convinced Marvel Comics to heavily invest in solo stories for The Punisher. It was gruesome, deadly, and is probably far too dark for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to adapt to the screen.
The story saw Frank sprung from prison by an organisation called the Trust. They encouraged him to kill any criminals he wanted, which sent The Punisher down a dark path (which included falling for and subsequently being betrayed by a film noir-esque femme fatale). The worst part came when Frank, opting to shoot everything in his path at this stage, accidentally gunned down and killed an innocent child.
This forced Frank to reconsider his crime-fighting techniques, as well as triggering dark flashbacks and prompting him to say things like ‘It has to stop… The poor children.’ Of course, this set back was only momentary and The Punisher soon returned to punishing.
You can bet that the MCU won’t adapt this. They’d be making a rod for their own backs if they showed one of their heroes screwing up as catastrophically as this. The Punisher will surely kill a lot of people in Daredevil season 2 and beyond, but probably not any innocent children.
Which The Punisher comics do you reckon Marvel will adapt for the MCU? Put your best guesses in the comments…
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