GUN LORE

The Punisher’s creator recalls his comic book origins

making his debut in 1974’s Amazing Spider-Man #129, the Punisher was initially introduced by Gerry Conway and John Romita as part of the supporting cast of the first Clone Saga. “I had this villain called the Jackal, who was operating behind the scenes,” recalls Conway. “In order to make it clear that he was this master manipulator, I brought in a subordinate character, who was just going to be a one-off character as he would just be our way of meeting the Jackal.”

A former Vietnam sniper who takes the law into their own hands, the Punisher is often compared to Don Pendleton’s the Executioner. However, the Brooklyn-born Conway also drew on real events to create the troubled character of Frank Castle.

“New York in the early 1970s was a very fearful place, as was America,” he tells SFX. “We had this sense of crime being out of control, and there was a move towards vigilantism in certain ways. You had movies like Dirty Harry in which regular police work was seen as not being good enough, and we had returning Vietnam vets who were unfairly perceived as being potentially dangerous. I thought it would be interesting to have a guy who was like a deranged Batman. Somebody who saw crime and criminals in blackand-white terms as opposed to Spider-Man, who had a sense of nuance and wouldn’t deliberately kill someone. This was a guy whose answer was to just take them out.”

Conway soon realised that Castle would be worth reprising for future storylines. “I did a rough sketch that John Romita enhanced into the cool costume that you see today, and Stan Lee suggested the name ‘the Punisher’,” he says. “As I was writing it, I felt like he had more potential than just one issue. In the end, he was enormously popular so we brought him back as often we could. I then left and he started appearing in his own titles. The rest as they say is history.”