Marvel's The Punisher: 10 Reasons To Be Excited

10. Taking Inspiration From Punisher Max

Punisher Max Cover
Marvel Comics

Ask any Punisher fan and they'll tell you that the best (modern) run on the character came with the involvement of Garth Ennis and the late Steve Dillon, who combined to create Punisher: Max in the early 2000s.

The series, although temperamentally linked to mainstream Marvel continuity, went to great lengths to fundamentally dissect the psychology behind the character. It was twisted - certainly - but beneath the grim veneer lies a really interesting character study of Marvel's most misunderstood vigilante. The stuff Ennis did during the 'Born' storyline in particular made for tragic reading, as it uncovers an uncomfortable truth regarding the character's violent nature.

In Born, we really get to see Castle's military service during the Vietnam War. His platoon is overrun by the Viet Cong and, miraculously, he emerges as the sole survivor. The event is billed as being wholly transformative for the character, as he makes an ethereal deal with the devil to emerge from the massacre with his life intact.

The brief teaser we saw last week (dissected by yours truly), showed a great deal of Frank's army days, with Vietnam having been substituted for Afghanistan. One particular sequence showed Castle with his back literally against the wall, taking on an equally literal OPFOR with nothing but a shotgun to his name.

Could we be getting Born on the small screen? Only time will tell.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.