The Punisher

Frank Castle came home from war a decorated Marine and lost everything in a park. A mob hit at a family picnic in Central Park killed his wife Maria and their two children, and the courts that were supposed to answer for it did nothing. Castle buried his family, walked away from the man he used to be, and started a war of his own that has never had a ceasefire. The skull on his chest is not a symbol of hope. It is a target he paints on himself so the people he is hunting always know exactly where to shoot.

What makes the Punisher genuinely frightening is that he is not a brawler with a grudge. He is a logistics operation with one employee. He runs safehouses, builds his own ammunition, keeps a war journal, forges credentials, and treats organised crime as a supply chain to be dismantled node by node. Where other vigilantes escalate, Frank plans. That is why he is one of the very few street-level operators who can walk into a room with superhumans and come out the other side.

He is also Marvel's most uncomfortable mirror. Daredevil, Spider-Man and Captain America all want him stopped, and none of them can argue with the arithmetic of what he removes from the city. Frank knows it. He is not looking for a redemption arc and he does not think he deserves one. He thinks of himself as a weapon someone else built, and he intends to keep firing until something finally stops him.

Gerry Conway created Frank Castle as a one-off Spider-Man antagonist in The Amazing Spider-Man #129, a hired gun tricked by the Jackal into hunting the wall-crawler. Readers refused to let him go. Marvel Preview #2 in 1975 finally told the Central Park origin in full, and by the early 1980s the Punisher was one of the most requested characters in the line.

The 1986 Steven Grant and Mike Zeck limited series turned demand into a franchise. Circle of Blood led straight into an ongoing title in 1987, and at the peak of the boom Frank was headlining three books at once. The 1990s over-exposed him badly, and by 1995 the character had been run into the ground.

Garth Ennis rebuilt him twice. Welcome Back, Frank in 2000 played the black comedy of Castle's war for laughs and gore in equal measure. The Punisher MAX run that followed from 2004 stripped out every superhero element and delivered the bleakest, best-reviewed work the character has ever had, including Born, which reframed his origin as something that started in Vietnam rather than in Central Park.

Under Marvel Knights, Frank became the ugly conscience of street-level New York, colliding repeatedly with Daredevil and Kingpin. Later runs pushed him into stranger territory, from Franken-Castle to a stint commanding the Hand, before Marvel walked the skull logo back and handed it to a new bearer while Castle returned to the shadows.