My thoughts on The Punisher differ to some extent. Not in that I prefer the ultra-violence version of the character that basically exists as the comic book equivalent of an exploitation action film - I don't mind it, it has it's place and I like
Welcome Back, Frank as it's own thing - but in that I don't see Castle so much as a man in perpetual pain as he's someone completely pushed beyond that barrier. Batman is a man motivated by pain, as is someone like Daredevil or Wolverine.
To me, The Punisher is someone with the broken mentality of a dead man wearing a human suit who feels as though he's legitimately transcended humanity to become a walking agent of death. He's basically a hardened war veteran stuck in a Vietnam flashback that never ends. He lost his family, so he feels incapable of emotion and instead has instinct to guide his hand. And what I like about that is, due to that, he doesn't necessarily have to work as a character with nuance and layers ontop of layers - he can just be a force of nature that influences the story.
Greg Rucka's run on The Punisher is excellent and one of my favorite comic book runs of the last decade, and it does alot to expand upon this. There's a scene where Frank is trying to talk sense into a would-be version of himself in the form of an ex-military woman whose husband was murdered at their wedding, and he basically says to her "You want to be like me? Toss away the phone. Toss away the makeup. The fast food. Toss away everything that makes you feel human, because you're asking to be dead. And the dead don't get to have any of that."
It ends with the woman burning the only photograph she has from her wedding day, and it's a great symbolic portrait of Frank himself. In the version I most prefer, he doesn't really actively mourn his family because he's not Frank Castle anymore, in his own mind. He's basically stuck in limbo between life and death, thinking of himself as an afterlife construct of the man Frank Castle was whose sole purpose is to make the guilty suffer. That's the only way, to me, that the skull imagery and the idea of him being the Grim Reaper of criminals works. He's incapable of reconciling being human anymore.
But that's one version, and it's a version I acknowledge isn't written all the time. Sometimes he is just written as a crazy dude who unloads buckets of bullets at criminals and broods about everything. There are some exceptions to the rule, like Bernthal's Punisher in the Netflix series and of course,
@Simple Unicycle's gun-fu version that has been really entertaining. The version I described above is just the version I happen to gravitate to the most.
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