Before creating The Boys, prolific comic book writer Garth Ennis delivered some of the most brutal and memorable The Punisher stories of the past 20 years. But much like the Punisher’s original creator, Ennis is not a fan of Frank Castle’s skull logo being used by cops and, more recently, Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol building last week. When asked about the Punisher logo popping up during the MAGA coup, Ennis blasted anyone who are misunderstanding the Frank Castle character and co-opting his symbol without truly thinking about his message.
“Nobody wants to pull three tours of duty in a combat zone with the last one going catastrophically wrong, come home with a head full of broken glass, see their families machine-gunned into bloody offal in front of their eyes and then dedicate the rest of their lives to cold, bleak, heartless slaughter,” Ennis said before tearing into the MAGA insurrectionists. Via SyFy:
“The people wearing the logo in this context are kidding themselves, just like the police officers who wore it over the summer,” he added. “What they actually want is to wear an apparently scary symbol on a T-shirt, throw their weight around a bit, then go home to the wife and kids and resume everyday life. They’ve thought no harder about the Punisher symbol than the halfwits I saw [on Wednesday], the ones waving the Stars & Stripes while invading the Capitol building.”
Frank Castle’s original creator, Gerry Conway, took a more active approach to denouncing the use of the Punisher skull by police officers during last summer’s protests and encouraged young artists to repurpose the logo into a symbol for Black Lives Matter. Punisher star John Bernthal has also been vocally opposed to seeing the skull twisted into a symbol of the far-right, and he had very blunt words when asked about it by Esquire: “F*ck them.”
(Via SyFy)
