The Punisher vs Gotham City

[alisonrussell]

[pendell]

I'm going to go off the classic Punisher I'm familiar with from the 1980s -- the one who was backed by Microchip and had a certain amount of investment.

I would describe Frank Castle as a 'low budget Batman'. He has a degree of ruthlessness that Bruce Wayne does not have , but he's also not a billionaire. So that means no bat-planes, no bat-mobile, no universal utility belt, no batarangs. But he should be able to acquire any off-the-shelf military technology for his uses.

So if there is an enemy in the DC universe that could, plausibly, be taken out by a human being who does not have superpowers, then Frank Castle has a path to victory to overcome that foe.

Which means, any foe Batman could take out Frank Castle could also take out.

Would he, though? That comes down to author fiat. There's an alternate history story where Castle Killed every superhero and supervillain in the marvel universe, including himself.

I think a key thing most writers are missing is that neither Castle nor his adversaries nor the Gotham PD are going to be static in all of this; Frank is going to be consciously studying his opponents and adapting to them. The Frank who just arrived in Gotham would be easy meat for some villains. If he survives a year or two, though, he'll be much tougher.

Equally, the DC villains will adapt to him. I think the Joker would, frankly, find him boring. There aren't any twisted psychological games to play to make Frank "no better than I am". Frank is already as dark as you can be, a willful murderer. He's less a hero than a villain who happens to target other villains. An anti-villain, perhaps? Or some variant on anti-hero?

At any rate, I don't think the Joker would play or toy with Frank Castle. He'd just kill him, probably as ruthlessly and efficiently as possible.

Also, while Frank is violent and kills his targets, I'm not sure in the long run this would actually make Gotham safer. While the supervillain population of Gotham city is fairly stable, I suspect this is due more to lazy writing than any true lack of superpower potential; killing one supervillain simply makes room for more budding supervillains to step into the gap, and possibly to fight each other for the now-dead villain's spot in the pecking order.

Frank Castle's killing of supervillains might, instead, trigger off a supervillain civil war on the streets of Gotham, making everyone's life just that bit more nasty than it already is.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Jeivar]

Would he, though? That comes down to author fiat. There's an alternate history story where Castle Killed every superhero and supervillain in the marvel universe, including himself.

I agree with almost everything in your post, but I want to point out that that particular story was written by Garth Ennis, who is a massive baby about anything he dislikes, and completely disregards anything about long-established characters that gets in the way of him getting them killed/beat up/sodomised.

(I have really, really gone off that guy since my teens)