Totenkopf

Above, a little sketchbook thing — very small, two & a half inches in height — roughly of the offhand kind that these days I post from time to time on Cara. This is one I won’t post there. If I really disliked it I wouldn’t introduce it here, either. I don’t hate it, and it’ll serve to get some thoughts going.

This character, should it need saying, Punisher, is in origin relatively old, almost as old as I am, and took hold permanently with Marvel’s superhero readership in America’s Reagan White House years. Don’t know when I first encountered one of its appearances in a comic, but I was young. The character vocabulary, the imagery and styles and their evolution over the decades, are so to speak native for me, indeed, without my having ever been all that tuned in. (I’ve never much loved very bloody stories, page or screen — for whatever that’s worth.) That goes too for much else in vigilante- and hard-‘justice’ fictional material gaining then, characterizations media-iconic in the desiccated middle-aged-male figures of Bronson or Eastwood and soon enough, more florid, in those of Stallone and so on — movies I mostly wasn’t allowed to see as a kid and, mostly, still never have gotten around to seeing. One doesn’t need to; this stuff has (with some demographic contingency) the working value of a common currency.

Anyway, I do not need to think to draw Punisher, and I was barely thinking in this case. I had the passing mental picture of a fragment of comic-book dramatic scene it seemed worth a second to try to capture — this character tossing aside one emptied firearm as he approaches, coldly, to finish at close range. What passed in my head was dull with menace, uncomplicatedly ominous, a straightforward Frank Castle, methodical killer. What went onto the paper with a couple minutes’ sketching is sort of interesting, I will say, but as impression of straight-ahead cool Punisher brutality, it’s certainly defective. It misses its mark. (And yes, when you’re drawing, missing your mark might well be the fun. It was here.)

Let’s set my quickie Frank aside. Is this character so definite a quantity, in fact, to begin with? What would the distilled dramatic-moment-Punisher be? The character’s endured a long time, been put to a great many uses main-feature and side, gotten handed around from team to team to team, bent to or resisted all sorts of cultural pressures — as any more fully-matured comic-book property must. What lasts with all that consumer-responsive churn and demonstration of potential is never very tight, never a highly unified, cohesive conceptual product.

If I try to say much more, I’ll be out of my depth fast. I’m no serious long-time follower of anything in comics; Punisher stories in their various manifestations are no exception. What I know about the character is what any casual comics follower knows. The deep-cut lore and the significant re-narrating turns and episodic nuancing undergone will alike largely escape me.

One thing any casual comics follower today knows about Punisher, I guess, is that the character has found firm footing in Marvel Studios’ ‘cinematic universe,’ the many-faceted, alternate-telling translation of Marvel Comics’ superhero stories from page to screen. The current screen Punisher was a season-2 interjection in the for-TV Daredevil launched eleven years ago on Netflix. This Punisher proved popular, got its own two-season spinoff, and with some evolution at last transcends its small-screen status with this year’s big-budget Spider-Man film installment, releasing in just a few weeks.

For a variety of reasons, this is an outcome you wouldn’t necessarily have predicted, observing the ‘MCU’ from its emergence as entertainment-industry powerhouse two decades ago. Not minor among these is that Punisher and the Punisher death’s-head insignia are widely adopted as symbolic, over about this same period of years of Marvel’s movie & TV ascent, by police and military elements, particularly though not exclusively in the U.S. and Israel. That’s come, inevitably, attended by ‘culture’ conflict in forms big studios can be averse to contact with. Lisette Voytko, writing for Forbes in 2020, concludes that her reader can anticipate ‘Punisher [getting] phased out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Disney, which owns the character.’ She quotes Punisher creator Gerry Conway: ‘“My expectation is we will never see another Punisher movie or TV series,” Conway said. “Disney knows this is radioactive. They are going to let it fade away.”’ Well, on this point Conway was evidently mistaken.

Conway (who passed away just this spring, incidentally) might have had more confidence in the potency of what he helped to bring into the world. Maybe he never entirely understood it, though; and maybe in his shoes one would just as soon not quite see. What is it that that class of fans (not to say definitely readers) bearing arms for the state who’ve variously made the Punisher death’s-head their emblem take it as symbolic of? I’ll suggest that answers worth pursuing lie with such popular source material as we’ve noted above, on which Conway and his ’70s bullpen collaborators were undoubtedly more than lightly conscious of drawing, that for this post’s purposes we might frame loosely as the meeting of Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) but that can be traced, certainly, further back in popular-culture terms. We’re not talking about something that hits suddenly in the media wake of 9 / 11 / 2001. To operate at once as ‘the Law’ and as unbound by law, to overstep in the position of the state’s armed agent lines dividing justices’ offices and executioner’s, to make any subject’s mere terror at finding themselves on the state’s wrong side the practical meaning of all regard for law, these are longstanding images of the liberal-order police-justice ideal, held among the propertied, first, and then especially among the state-employed and those most dependent on or self-identified with them — in America, a very considerable swath of total society (my own family representative of the type).

Themes of tension between agency and power realized in an individual and the value of law’s universal ‘force’ have been stock-in-trade in superhero-stories publishing from the first, of course. On one level, Punisher just arises as a character of the Batman type who advances the logic of action from nearly-killing to killing outright — and not the first or last. It’s wise not to make too much of the one character.

edit (jul 17)This post should have included, as published a week and a half ago, recognition of and a link to a 2020 Truthout piece (originally a student thesis) by photographer / videographer Gregorio León, which indeed in some degree it could be read as response to or riff on. As I say just above, I’m cautious for my part about singling out for censure one superhero character (or type) with its motifs. I don’t, however, fundamentally disagree with León in his conclusion: ‘There is nothing left to reclaim in Frank Castle.’ (The other thing this post can be read as sort of responding to, in case anyone should come to it a good while hence or lack awareness of its politics news context, is the drawn-out collapse of Graham Platner’s candidacy for U.S. senate, beginning as that does with revelation months ago of Platner’s chest tattoo, the same Nazi military symbol León and other writers have been forthright about understanding the Punisher skull as derived from).

A dimension of this situation of conflict and doubt around the Punisher property to which we could (were there time) fruitfully give attention at length is in Israeli forces’ embrace or imitation of U.S. forces’ practices with character iconography, the death’s-head emblem. This has been written about a bit (see e.g. an Israeli-reported article published in The Forward in 2021), but it seems to have been several years since the concerns were much reflected in headlines. (The IDF has subsequently restricted units’ use of the symbol, possibly. I don’t know.) In that few-years’ span, a great deal has shifted for Israel and the U.S. both, with real repercussions for their relationship of long standing — a relationship in which Israel in many respects stands in the role of the police unit, dominating and terrorizing in a neighborhood the state disfavors and wants controlled, so long as the state’s calculus of control in the given neighborhood holds and cop immunity isn’t selectively rescinded. This shift in international conditions is of course ongoing, full of uncertainty.

There’s a lot to say about this, owing not to the unique connection between U.S. military forces and police agencies and Israeli counterparts only, but also to Jon Bernthal’s casting in the screen part. It’s a solid casting by all accounts. (I’ve only seen a little of this portrayal; am trying now to get in some viewing of the 2017 series to better appreciate.) Chances are, Punisher appearing in a Spider-Man in theaters in 2026 owes fundamentally to what Bernthal brought to Daredevil in 2016. What has to be observed together with this achievement is that the character was not Jewish before this casting, and that this has now in some basic sense changed, the standing character backstory aside. (As written, Frank Castle is Italian-American. The part has never been played by anyone remotely Italian-American.) The departure Bernthal’s casting makes from the previous three screen Punishers is striking. I’ve learned caution, and advised it, going back some years, about supposing that anyone ‘looks Jewish.’ This caution grows stronger for me with time. It doesn’t, however, lead me to mistake the choices made in taking what’s now the definitive screen Punisher where Marvel Studios has, with Bernthal in the role, for the sort of choice through which questions of national and ethnic identities and their conflicts in American society as bound up with the menace of American violence in the world get pulled from the narrative foreground. I don’t think it can be accidental that with this actor, Punisher on the screen presents as nothing so much as a sort of grotesque Israeli special forces caricature, at once one of us, thoroughly American in (inter alia) bloodshed-without-accountability, and also not us, in the end other, in the end deniable by us. What all might have been intended in those choices, I find it hard to conceive. But I can’t overlook them.

Americans are moving, popularly first and eventually in determinations of policy, toward opting for some disavowal of Israel, a next phase in ever-renewing U.S. refusal of our responsibility in originary genocide and in state terror and oppressions past and present, at home and across the globe. That’s my sense. Possibly Conway’s prediction about Punisher portrayals, ‘Disney knows this is radioactive. They are going to let it fade away,’ wasn’t so much wrong as miscontextualized, a few years out of sync. Bernthal’s definitive Punisher may turn out to be the Punisher we decline abruptly to recognize further, the Punisher we banish: too dreadfully accurate the image of ourselves, of our pathological national character — and, suddenly, all too conveniently Jewish.