Vigilante Stories

I lament the fact that there are so few of the outside-the-law heroes who act as vengeful retribution for things gone wrong in society. Statham did a movie recently The Beekeeper which pulled this off perfectly. Who isn’t familiar with people scamming the elderly? Who doesn’t want to see them all face righteous retribution with zeal? It’s cathartic and awesome. I’m not sure it’s the way we should deal with criminality in reality, but there’s something necessary to seeing that kind of thing on screen and in books.

It’s always been the thing that I couldn’t swallow with superhero stories, the catch and release nature of them, the bulk of a rogues gallery are mass murderers and constant menaces who can’t be contained. For some bizarre reason it seems the only violence allowed against evil in fiction must also be state sanctioned. It’s perfectly ok for Bond to kill his villains—people only give him guff for sleeping around too much, being licensed allows you to kill apparently.

This brings us to the why and the why is obviously The Punisher. An “anti-hero” who was the instrument of state-sanctioned violence who is failed by the same state he served (criminals gun down his family—criminals who, the state should have imprisoned) and then when he decides to go out and rectify the problem—suddenly he’s the issue. People yell that the Punisher is bad because “oh cops and military and right-wingers love the skull” well—guess what they all have—they have the exclusive authority to use force and violence. They are, like Bond, licensed to kill. The Punisher in all his stories is a far better judge of guilt than the state is. Frank Castle doesn’t run around murdering and jailing innocents. Castle doesn’t allow people who murder innocent people to walk free only to kill someone else days after they are released.

It’s wild to me that our fiction no longer is allowed to have a character that represents the rage at injustice and indiscriminate evil who isn’t also a representative of state force.

I read the stories about those grooming gangs in the UK and the mix of corruption and failure rampant there, and that, to me, is precisely the story that is begging for a Punisher character to exist in. It’s a story that is begging for some righteous anger to be channeled at it through fiction. Because ultimately the state is incapable of fixing the problems that they create and allow to fester.

Anyway, I apologize for my screed, I have been reading some books that are radicalizing me in some ways. Hope the comic works.

*Author’s Note: This was initially written when I thought I’d try to avoid the Punisher-ness of it all but, fuck it, I’m just going to make it a Punisher bootleg. Enjoy the freebie. New pages as I can make them. The whole story’s laid out just gotta ink it up.