NULL-MYTHS: PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL VOL. 1 (2018)

I''ve never read any of the PUNISHER features with any regularity, even back when the character's popularity skyrocketed in the nineties. I've enjoyed odd issues in the same way that I've enjoy Chuck Norris films: lots of extravagant action with not much plot or characterization. Nevertheless, the Punisher has gone through many permutations, and so it's possible that he might take on mythic stature in one tale or another.

I picked up a library copy collecting PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL from the 2010s. I had some vague memory of having heard that this one was one of the better Punisher titles, though now that I've read the collection, I feel sure that I must've heard some compliments for an earlier incarnation of the title. All of the stories in this collection, authored by Matt Fraction, are lightweight in the extreme. I've read little or none of the work for which Fraction became popular in the 2010s, but his other work must have more content than this garbage. 

The eighties was a time in which many comics professionals, particularly those from Merrie Old England, began producing "grim and gritty" versions of superhero features aimed at the dominantly older DM comics-audience. Yet all of these pros had been raised on the G-rated comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages, and many of them sang the praises of the comics' "age of innocence." Grant Morrison did a story of an aging superhero in some issue of ANIMAL MAN, Neil Gaiman did a Riddler story, and Alan Moore wept crocodile tears for lost innocence with the Kool Aid Man.

A reader could read any of these and get the gist of Fraction's work on the first twelve issues of WAR JOURNAL. Of course, Moore, Morrison and Gaiman all showed numerous times that they could do much more than self-conscious parody. But that's all there is to Fraction's Punisher.

Here's Frank Castle deciding that he just won't put up with the silliness of the Silver Age, by blowing away the Stilt Man's junk.

Later, at the supervillain's wake, a bunch of classic and not-so-classic villains, mostly from the Silver Age, get together and talk about the Good Old Days as if it was all a big game, and didn't involve them trying to murder the heroes who interfered with them.

(On a side-note: even though these old villains used G-rated violence, G-rated violence can still kill a person! One of the main virtues of SPIDER MAN HOMECOMING was the bracing scene in which the movie's version of the Vulture shows just how dangerous a flying villain can be to a non-flying crusader.)

There's not much more to these twelve issues than the dubious pleasure of seeing a "realistic" hero blow away all these colorful fantasy-figures. Fraction has no psychological insight, even of a deconstructive kind, into either the Punisher, his allies (an obscure seventies villain, Rampage, gets recast into the role of the main hero's weapons maker), or any of the villains. It's all pseudo-Moore sardonicism with none of Moore's skill with satire. It's as if Fraction read Moore and the other "adult pulp" writers of the eighties and thought that their pretensions to realism were the only things worth imitating. 

Oh, and I don't know if Fraction started this, but now the vigilante hero has a deep and abiding regard for Captain America for some reason-- apparently because Cap beat up Frank Castle during some army training maneuvers? These issues take place around the time that Steve Rogers was temporarily killed off, so there's an arc of stories dealing with how a new, white-nationalist version of the Hate-Monger tries to usurp Captain America's uniform. Fraction is just as incompetent in dealing with "real problems" like racism as he is in playing games within Marvel's immense fantasy-cosmos.

Next to self-important tripe like this, even throwaway trash-tales of Castle shooting up a bunch of drug-dealers are preferable by far.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE BULLY" (DAREDEVIL #257, 1988)

When Frank Miller left the DAREDEVIL feature for the first time in 1983, subsequent creators had a hard act to follow. I've read all the subsequent stories by such talented people as Klaus Janson and Denny O'Neil, and I remember barely anything from this post-Miller period. In contrast, while I was not a huge fan of writer Ann Nocenti, whose tenure lasted from 1986 to 1991, I have to admit that her DAREDEVIL stories offer a fresh take on Miller's transformation of the feature into hard-boiled crime.

"The Bully," graced by splendid art by John Romita Jr., is not precisely a stand-alone story, though it can be read independently. As the cover makes clear, once again the starring hero contends with the ultraviolent vigilante known as the Punisher. However, the main plot of "Bully" intersects with that of an issue of PUNISHER published in the same month as DAREDEVIL #257. In the first story, executed by Mike Baron and Whilce Portacio, the Punisher searches for a culprit who has inserted cyanide into aspirin tablets made by the company for which he formerly worked. The vigilante fails to corral the perpetrator, Alfred Coppersmith, but continues to pursue the poisoner. I have not read the PUNISHER story but apparently it loosely overlaps the events of the DAREDEVIL story.

Many of Nocenti's stories tend to come off as somewhat rambling. "The Bully" is a happy exception, dealing with the problematic nature of violence without simply issuing the standard ultraliberal/ Marxist denunciation. In fact, there is no single character in the story who fits the dictionary definition of a bully. Nocenti seems to be using the process of "bullying" as a metaphor for any unjust use of force against a less powerful individual. 

Nocenti also observes that "force" may be in the eye of the beholder. No less than three times does some character in the story muse on the facelessness of enemies in modern society. 

First, the Punisher, prior to gunning down a gang of drug-dealers, thinks to himself that "the enemy is everyone, anyone, and no one."

The second instance merges the idea of the faceless enemy with that of the bully. Daredevil seeks to garner information on Coppersmith by interviewing one of the man's former work-mates. The worker tells the hero how Coppersmith was laid off by the aspirin company, where Coppersmith had worked for many years, because he simply couldn't master the complex computers introduced by the bosses. The worker opines, "How do you fight it when a computer takes over? It's like when a big new bully moved in on your block. But who do you fight? The enemy is technology! How do you fight that? Where do you strike?"

Finally, the unemployed Coppersmith is seen alone in his apartment. He looks like the standard depiction of a bully: a muscular fellow seen doing reps with weights. Yet though he looks like a bully, he's the one who feels bullied by the company that fired him, and to himself he justifies his indiscriminate poison-murders by musing, "All men, any man. My enemy is faceless."

Given that slipping poison into medicine-pills should strike most readers as a contemptible form of violence, Nocenti is remarkably successful in making Coppersmith seem mildly sympathetic in his derangement. The criminal is duly overtaken by the Punisher, but Daredevil intervenes to keep Coppersmith from being executed. Inevitably the two fighters clash, seen through Coppersmith's eyes, who is too stupefied by the fight to escape. Indeed, he continues his "bully" theme by thinking to himself, "There's no difference between the two of them. Both bullies, and all bullies think they're the one that's right. Everybody can't be right." Coppersmith doesn't quite have enough self-awareness to apply this insight to his own campaign of violence, and in fact he finally does try to escape, only to be crowned into dreamland by Daredevil. 

The resolution of the conflict between the heroes is more fully explicated in the PUNISHER cross-over story. But before Coppersmith has his lights knocked out, he has a strange insight that belies all the rhetoric about bullies and faceless enemies, as he watches Daredevil and Punisher battle:

I feel like I'm witnessing something superhuman, something special and powerful-- like this is the best of the best-- and they're fighting over ME--

Daredevil wins the argument by taking Coppersmith into custody, and the story ends as lawyer Matt Murdock meets with the addled murderer. Murdock tells Coppersmith that though he will go to prison, he deserves mercy because "society must take care of the people it crushes."

While "Bully" covers some of the same territory seen in Miller's tenure, Nocenti has a refreshingly un-derivative take on the violence of the superhero genre; neither fully approving nor disapproving. 

I'll note in closing that though the story includes a subplot involving a long-running Daredevil-foe, Typhoid Mary, even the subplot works in unison with the main theme. During the subplot, Typhoid easily manipulates her boss the Kingpin with sex, thus showing that there are ways to "bully" even without violence. 

INFINITELY REGRESSIVE UTILITARIANISM

One of the CBR threads informed me of this VOX article discussing the interactions of utilitarian philosophy and "deonotological philosophy" in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

Frankly, I've yet to find any MCU movies, except possibly the original IRON MAN, which articulate a coherent philosophical stance. In any case, I responded to the essay twice in the CBR thread. First:

In the essay the writer associated "the greater good" with pure, unfettered utilitarianism. I think that's an overstatement, and the writer himself brings up an extreme case of real-world utilitarianism, as well as pointing out that sooner or later Thanos will just have to start killing again. It's pretty hard to regard either example as being truly "for the greater good," particularly since the result is a total acceptance of brutality as a means to an end. 

BTW, if there's one intellectually dishonest aspect of INFINITY, it's that it doesn't really specify why Thanos thinks that galactic overpopulation is a given. At least when Ra's Al Ghul excoriates the ecological chaos of Earth, it's something readers can see for themselves.

The "no-kill" policy is often framed as a preventive to unfettered utilitarianism. Sometimes the arguments in its defense are clever; sometimes not.  But the policy isn't quite as divorced from real-world consequences as the Kantian model suggests.

Second:

 I'm not convinced that utilitarianism applies to INFINITY WAR. I think it's a big weakness of the script that the heroes have access to two stones, the destruction of which will prevent Thanos from the specific goal of destroying half the people in the universe. But OK: say that in some alternate world, the heroes succeed in destroying one or both stones, whether it costs Vision his life or not. What happens then? Thanos just shrugs his shoulders and goes home? Hah, we're talking about someone who's already wiped out multiple worlds with his space-army. No, thwarted of his goal, Thanos takes revenge and obliterates Earth.

On another thread I saw someone complain that the Wakandans were being needlessly sacrificed to protect the Vision's life. I wasn't particularly fond of the "ticking clock" trope involving the Vision. But the Wakandans are not being used as cannon-fodder. It's their bloody world too, and they've just as much reason as anyone to defeat Thanos.  Suppose the movie starts out with a pure endorsement of utilitarianism: some hero who doesn't mind "trading lives" kills Vision right off, defeating his larger goal. The menace doesn't go away; Thanos just goes after the whole world, and Wakanda's isolationism doesn't help it one damn bit. So here's another case where, in contrast to the thrust of the online essay, pure utilitarianism leaves those involved no better off than they were before.

I didn't bother pointing it out on the thread, but this 1980 issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, written by Mike Barr, plays Captain America and the Punisher off one another as representatives of what might be called "enlightened vigilantism" vs. "unenlightened vigilantism," or what I called "unfettered utilitarianism."

Morally, Barr's story does set up its oppositions better than INFINITY WAR does. In this scene, the Punisher takes the utilitarian POV, referring to his ethic of treating the war on crime in terms of real war, while Captain America holds to a vision of moral compass, stating that there's a moral code that the "good guys" should advocate.

The upshot of the story is clearly in Cap's favor, particularly when it's revealed that one of the Punisher's "hits" on a big mob-meeting would have killed  not only real criminals, but also an undercover police agent. The Punisher escapes Cap and, to the best of my knowledge, rarely encounters such challenges to his utilitarian POV in his own title-- much as, in my own experience, the critics of the HOODED UTILITARIAN website rarely responded well to having their regressive ethics challenged.

HERO VS. ANTIHERO VS. DEMIHERO

The term "antihero," which dates back to 1714, is defined thusly on Wikipedia:

 a leading character in a film, book or play who lacks the traditional heroic qualities

My concept of the "demihero" will probably never supplant this better-known formulation, but in my essays I've tried to show that "heroic qualities" can appear in all four of my persona-types, as can "unheroic qualities"-- which in this case would probably parallel other paired concepts in my system, ranging from "life-affirming forces/life-denying forces," "glory/persistence," or "idealizing will/existential will." In THE COMPLICATIONS OF COMEDY PT. 2 I noted the intermixing of the "positive" and the "negative" in Marvel's "unheroic hero," The Punisher:

It's less typical for focal heroes to have negative manifestations.  Marvel Comics' Punisher would probably be one example, in that his obsession to eradicate crime, though certainly larger-than-life, is rooted in his personal animus rather than in concern for life.  The Punisher does end up supporting the forces of life, but he's not always admired for his persistence, so that he ends up becoming a quasi-villain in the features of other Marvel heroes like Daredevil and Captain America, or getting beat up by Batman in a throwaway scene of JLA/AVENGERS.

An even better example of this intermixed quality appears in a novel I recently reviewed on my book-and-comics review site OUROBOROS DREAMS: the character of Hell Tanner, the hero of Roger Zelazny's 1969 DAMNATION ALLEY. In part I wrote:

Zelazny isn't simply glorifying the type of antihero that became fashionable in the 1960s.  Although Hell is a son of a bitch, he begins to have a very unsentimental appreciation for the magnitude of his task...

This appreciation appears in this excerpt from Hell Tanner's thoughts about his mission:

 Nobody had ever asked him to do anything important before, and he hoped that nobody ever would again. Now, though, he was taken by the feeling that he could do it. He wanted to do it. Damnation Alley lay all about him, burning, fuming, shaking, and if he could not run it, then half the world would die, and the chances would be doubled that one day all the world would be part of the Alley.

Now, going by the Wikipedia definition-- and by the generally lax way that the term "antihero" is tossed around-- one could judge Hell Tanner to be an "antihero," simply because he "lacks the traditional heroic qualities." Indeed, I have seen two online reviews of the novel that use the term. However, I think that even though Tanner has any number of negative aspects, his heroic ones dominate the unheroic (or demiheroic) ones.  The passage cited above is not the sort of thought one would find in the heads of characters usually out only for themselves, indicating to me that author Zelazny wanted to delve into deeper waters. He seems to have wanted to put a vicious son-of-a-bitch in the position of acting heroically even though he has no sentimental regard for society or its members. Like the Punisher, Tanner is a hero who affirms life even though he may choose at any time to kill or maim anyone he doesn't like. 

The reverse is seen in the case of the cinematic Rick Deckard of Ridley Scott's 1982 BLADE RUNNER. In this essay I gave my reasons for regarding this Deckard as a combative demihero. Through a Google search I've seen many online sources regard Deckard as an "antihero," but in my opinion the use of this term blurs a crucial distinction between Deckard and Tanner: that the former is motivated only by the quality of "persistence"-- that is, of making sure that he and his immediate loved ones can survive-- while the latter is motivated by the quality of "glory," that of doing something great even though it defies the logic of survival.

ADDENDA EST

While working on part 4 of GATE OF THE GODS I decided to get a couple of addenda-items out of the way.

First, in AGON IN SIXTY SECONDS I wrote:

"As far as I can think, the "noncombative" mode doesn't apply to the adventure/romance mythos at all, given the strong emphasis of the mythos upon physical striving."

But on further consideration I did think of a type of adventure-story that could take place in a "noncombative mode:" namely, the so-called "Robinsonade," the subgenre of lost-on-a-desert-island stories that were spawned by the considerable influence of Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE. The basic idea of CRUSOE that's become known to all those who've not read it (including me) is that a shipwrecked protagonist stuck on a desert island has to fight for his survival. Because "physical striving" is at the heart of this sort of story, this means that it would fit into the matrix of the adventure-mythos. Now, some "Robinsonades" may indeed include some "man vs. man" conflict as well as "man vs. nature," even as the original Defoe work does, but this would be enough to move them into either a "combative" or "subcombative" mode. Perhaps the purest example of a Robinsonade known to modern audiences would be the 2000 T0m Hanks film CAST AWAY, since the Hanks character's only struggles are to maintain both physical and psychological equilibrium.

There also certain adventure-stories in which the main hero is passive and noncombative, such as Poe's NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, but the Poe work is at least subcombative, since the titular character depends on his more active ally Dirk Peters to do most of the hard work of fighting mutineers and such.

My second addenda speaks to this excerpt from GATE OF THE GODS PART 2:

'Though I haven't seen the specific films that CRWM defends on the basis of their not needing a "higher purpose" to be interesting, I've certainly sampled many, many works whose only aim was to excite the audience n what I've called a "kinetic" manner. Some of these works fail even at that aim and so are both lame and dull: PUNISHER WAR ZONE comes to mind as one that failed to impress, despite its considerable production budget. While not the worst work of its kind ever produced, it was still less interesting than a lot of drive-in junk that on occasion had nothing more than a daring, exploitative idea to run with.'

Having written this, I wanted to come up with an example of a good trash-film which had no higher aim than PUNISHER: WAR ZONE in being focused wholly on martial conflict, to the exclusion of characterization, theme or interesting symbolism.

My choice is 1997's MEAN GUNS, directed by noted trashmeister Albert Pyun. It's by no means a good film except in the sense of being "good of its type," but it does put forth a wide variety of kinetic battles in its rough hour-and-a-half running time, and so should please the lover of pure action far more than the more expensive-- and more tedious-- WAR ZONE. In fact, it's almost the action-film parallel to the old Vaudeville adage: If you don't like one of MEAN GUNS' many gun-battles, wait a minute and there'll be another one from which to choose.

Also, where WAR ZONE is just another by-the-numbers hero-vs. villain tale, MEAN GUNS at least has a striking if absurd premise for an action-film, in which one hundred assassins are turned loose in an under-construction prison to kill one another, with the last three people left standing will get a fabulous prize, in addition to basic survival.

MEAN GUNS' direction looks like Pyun was trying to channel John Woo, without the latter direction's more admirable stylistics (though Woo too has his shortcomings). But in a purely-kinetic work, being derivative isn't so much a knock as a given.

And thus endeth the addenda.