Marvel Writer Garth Ennis Says Outrage Against The Punisher, Skull Symbol Is “A Massive Pointless Distraction”
Like most sane individuals, veteran The Punisher writer Garth Ennis believes that not only is the outrage against the Marvel Comics character “a massive pointless distraction”, but it is also entirely performative.
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Ennis, whose character bibliography includes such notable runs as Marvel Knights Punisher and the first volume of Punisher MAX, offered his thoughts on society’s recent ‘anti-Frank’ turn during a recent interview given to YouTuber Comic Book Herald.
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Asked by his host how he would “approach [Marvel Comics’] political hesitation” towards the Punisher should he ever have the opportunity to write him again, Ennis asserted, “The first thing I would ask is ‘What sort of creative freedom are we talking about here?”
“If it was to go ahead in neutered form, I just wouldn’t be interested,” said the storied comic creator. “At the same time, if people are so nervous about the skull symbol, I wouldn’t care about that. I wouldn’t mind jettisoning that. All that is, in storytelling terms, is a distraction. It’s like Batman’s bat signal thing on his chest. It draws an opponent’s eye and gun sight away from his head because if he gets shot in chest, of course, he’s got kevlar under there.”
“There’s also a bit of psychological warfare to it,” he continued. “But it’s not important. If I could go ahead and write the punisher the way I did for those sixty issues, I wouldn’t care about skulls. The real question I would be how nervous are they? Are they nervous? Having tested the waters with Get Fury, is there perhaps not such as big a fuss as they thought there might be? Do people have bigger fish to fry politically nowadays? I think they do.
However, far from his willingness to trade the skull symbol for the green-light to get truly bloody with his writing being an indicator that he endorsed the idea that it was somehow inherently dangerous, Ennis then declared, “I mean, I regard the controversy over The Punisher and the symbol as a massive pointless distraction.”
“It could be that Marvel are coming to the same understanding,” he admitted. “I just don’t know. It would depend hugely on what I was able to do.”
In turn met with Comic Book Herald’s observation that the entire discourse regarding the symbol being “misappropriated” by law enforcement was “a very outside of story problem”, the comic book writer affirmed, “I think so. I think it’s one of those things that people like to focus on when they’re trying to figure out if they can make a difference in the world.”
“They look at fiction and comics in particular, a very easy target, very easy to scapegoat,” said Ennis. “It’s far easier to say “Let’s get rid of the skull symbol. Let’s get rid of the Punisher,’ then it is to say ‘Let’s upend society so that black people are no longer actually in police gun sights due to their economic circumstances. Let’s spend the money and change attitudes and improve police training.’ No one is going to do that in a million years, but let’s attack attack comics, let’s blame fiction, that’s so easy to do. After all, no one ever really sticks up for comics in a serious way.”
“So, to me, it’s quite silly really,” he added. “It’s making excuses. It’s blaming a comic book and a comic book character for much bigger problems. In fact, problems that are so much bigger that they utterly dwarf what we’re talking about here with a comic book character.”
Turning to the topic of law enforcement’s relationship with the character, Ennis then declared, “The suggestion that any police officer wants to be the Punisher is silly.”
“Again, what they want to do at most is wear a scary t-shirt while they shove black people around or worse, and then they go home to the wife and kids,” he argued. “They don’t want to be a Punisher type of character. They don’t want to lose their family in some ghastly massacre and then devote their lives to a one-man wart on crime. Again, ‘Let’s blame the comic. Let’s blame fiction for a problem that actually it has very little bearing on and that it’s removal will make no difference to whatsoever.'”
Ennis’ latest Marvel series, the MAX-label revitalizing Get Fury Vol. 1, is currently hitting shelves on a monthly basis.
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