Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #521: Joe “The Punisher” Garrison

I think, for Marvel, Frank Castle has become something of a problematic figure.  His logo is used, quite frequently, by people to show how tough they are when even Frank’s original creator Gerry Conway has insisted that Frank is not one of the good guys.

So, Marvel kinda replaced him recently with a new character, one Joe Garrison.

A note on what happened to Frank to start.  He got an extended limited series written by Jason Aaron that effectively took a good, hard look at his origins to show that Frank didn’t become a killer when his family was wiped out by the mob during a picnic at the park.  Frank, overseen in secret by the Hand, had been a hardened killer since he took down a local criminal as a child.  As an adult during the series’s present-day, Frank was recruited by the Hand to be their perfect killer, and he saw fit to join if he could use them to take out criminals around the world until he realized that the Hand was a bunch of fanatics who just liked killing, not just killing the guilty.  Granted, they also resurrected Frank’s dead wife Maria, and that helped.  They just couldn’t resurrect the kids because of their ages and relative innocence.  But it all came out that Maria was pretty dissatisfied by Frank before she was killed and was planning to ask for a divorce before she died.  Once alive again and with her memories eventually recovered, she did so.  This came after Frank, empowered by the Hand’s dark magic, had already beaten a bunch of superheroes, but Maria’s leaving him was it.  He somehow ended up in the alternate reality of Weirdworld where he made it his job to protect orphaned children over there.  And all that comes after they changed the Punisher’s skull logo too.

So, look, Frank’s not dead.  He’ll probably be back eventually if he isn’t already.  But the story there did seem like it was Marvel trying to remove its character from the sort of fans who put Punisher skulls on their cars and such.  Said fans often do so for political reasons, and I suspect Marvel doesn’t want any of its characters to become too associated with any political movement, no matter what it is, beyond the basic idea that maybe we shouldn’t treat people who are different as monsters or inferiors like the X-Men have been trying to teach for something like 60 years.  But I argued once the X-Men kinda suck at their jobs, so I will move on.

But Marvel would still need a Punisher, so enter Joe Garrison.  Created by writer David Pepose and artist Dave Wachter, he first appeared in The Punisher #1 in November of 2023.

Joe’s backstory was he was a deep-cover SHIELD agent called the “Gravedigger” whose job was to, you know, assassinate baddies around the globe.  Living in something like retirement with his wife Stephanie and his two kids, it sure seemed like things were going well until his family was killed in a bombing that Joe miraculously lived through.  Figuring he was the target, he dug out his old SHIELD armor and went to work, tracking down the person responsible with help from his old handler Triple-A, he went to work with the best ordinance SHIELD had.

Now, here’s the thing:  Joe didn’t set out to be the Punisher.  He didn’t even intend to kill every criminal he ever found.  It’s just that his SHIELD armor looked like the old Punisher suit, so whoever he was after just called him the Punisher.

Over time, Joe gradually moved on to not only taking on supervillains, but also killing them.  It even turned out Joe wasn’t the assassination target:  his wife Stephanie, a secretary, reported some suspicious financial activity, causing this terrorist organization called Jigsaw (yes, like Frank’s most noteworthy reoccurring enemy) to take her out so they could use some of Mister Fear’s chemicals to ruin a peace conference to stop a war between two of Marvel’s fictional Eastern European countries that aren’t Latveria.  Joe managed to save the lives of the diplomats while taking out a whole lot of Jigsaw goons, and from there, with Triple-A and a homicide cop’s help, he made it his mission to be the new Punisher at least until he took down all the Jigsaw goons.

And…you know what, I don’t know if he’s done much of anything since then.

I’m sure Frank will probably kill him at some point.