Frank Castle AKA The Punisher puts the 'grit' in gritty superheroes. He is one of the first comic characters you think of when you see the word 'anti-hero'. He's the guy who prefers punishing the guilty to saving the innocent, preferably in a suitably gory and over-the-top manner. Think Deadpool without the meta-humor.
But Punisher has not always been the paragon of gritty realism. In a long and storied career, Marvel Comics has put the character through the wringer in a number of ways, sometimes in the silliest manner possible. Here are 10 such times:
10 Frankencastle
After a fight with Wolverine Jr. Daken finds Frank Castle hacked to pieces, the Legion of Monsters use their expertise to revive Frank, as a patchwork of his body parts mixed with some cybernetics and witchcraft.
The resulting monstrosity is known as Frankencastle!, a creature that is as bloody and violent as the Punisher of old but is now also an undead. Proving that you can't keep a good antihero down, even after carving him up into many pieces.
9 Meeting Archie Andrews
Archie Andrews for the longest time was the embodiment of good old-fashioned all-American teen high jinks. Life did not get more complicated for Archie and the gang than figuring out who to ask to the prom, or which soda pop shop to visit while bunking classes.
But one time Archie ran into more serious trouble when a drug smuggler that Punisher was hunting escaped to Riverdale. Bearing a striking resemblance to Archie, the smuggler ensured Archie and Punisher would cross paths. The resulting story sees Punisher actually get affected by the aw-shucks innocence of Archie and the gang, prompting him for once to use non-lethal methods of bringing down the criminals. Ironically, the Punisher would fit right in with the current gritty retelling of Archie comics, on the TV show Riverdale.
8 Batman's Beatdown
During the JLA/Avengers crossover, Batman and Plastic Man take a secret trip to the Marvelverse, where the Dark Knight spies Frank going to town on an army of drug dealers as is his style. As is Batman's style, he tracks down Punisher and proceeds to beat him to a pulp for his violent excesses against the criminals.
What makes the ordeal particularly humiliating is that the fight is not even shown on-panel. We just hear Plastic Man yelling at Batman for wasting twenty minutes beating up Frank Castle. So much for being a loose cannon and a credible threat to other heroes.
7 Bulletproof Dictionaries
One time Frank Castle found himself fighting for his life against a heavily armed opponent inside a library. Because the sick freaks that the Punisher battles have no respect for the 'Keep Silence' signs found around libraries.
In order to evade the stream of bullets being deluged from the enemy's firearms, the Punisher hit upon the method of taping various thick dictionaries around his body to act as bulletproof vests. The villain must have been a very considerate fellow indeed, to wait patiently while Frank wasted several minutes hunting down the tape, and then attaching the dictionaries carefully and evenly all over his body.
6 Manga Punisher
Marvel characters have been given the Manga makeover on more than one occasion. One such occasion saw the Punisher reinvented as a woman, who tortured her enemies by tickling them to death. The Geisha Punisher also embarks on her war against crime armed with whips and paddles.
Also, this Punisher has a secret identity as a principal of a private school. Something tells us the writers had been reading some very weird manga comics when they came up with this concept.
5 A New Face
You read that right. One time the Punisher was ambushed in prison, and attacked by his enemies, leading to numerous injuries, especially to his face. After escaping, Frank gets his face redone by a surgeon to become unrecognizable. You see where this is leading up to, right?
The face that Frank Castle ended up getting was black, along with a change to the skin tone of his entire body. Cue the next few Punisher comics featuring the Black Punisher, with his iconic skull logo turned black to honor the change.
4 Suitcase Mongolian
One of the strangest fights that Frank has ever indulged in. While on a mission in a Russian missile silo, Frank finds himself accosted by a small Mongolian emerging from a staircase and attempting to strangle him to death while wearing nothing but a pair of briefs.
It led to one of the most brutal moments in Frank's history, as, instead of relying on guns, he had to use his hands to grab the Mongolian by the leg and swing him around like a club until he got smashed into the ground enough times to die from the injuries, the whole scene reading like a bizarre, R-rated moment from a Looney Toons cartoon.
3 Thanos the Punisher
If you want further proof of how bonkers comics can get, check out the following arc: Thanos comes to Earth and slaughters everyone, including Frank. Frank goes to hell and makes a deal with the devil to become Ghost Rider. Frank returns to Earth as the Spirit of Vengeance, but everyone on the planet was dead already. After roaming the Earth alone for countless eons, Frank teams up with Galactus to seek vengeance against Thanos. Instead, Thanos beheads Galactus and makes Frank his own servant.
We're not done yet. Many more shenanigans resulted in Frank eventually traveling back in time to kill baby Thanos, only to decide to raise the babe as his own instead. Flash forward a few years, and Thanos has grown up to be the new Punisher, just like his adoptive dad. Only this Punisher was unable to let go of his dictator tendencies and had become Earth's new ruler. Then Uatu the Watcher waved the infinity gauntlet around a few times and rebooted reality back to the way it was before. So... yeah. Comics.
2 Avenging Angel
Frank Castle, the Avenging Angel? Why not? After dying yet again, Frank finds himself resurrected and imbued with new, angel powers to exact divine retribution against sinners. This was all apparently part of a plot by the Angel Gabriel against the forces of hell, who in turn had another, even older plot in place to have Frank do their dirty work for them.
Needless to say, a lot of sacrilegious stuff goes down, Frank gets to meet the guardian angel who was supposed to be looking out for his family, and ends the series believing he is still capable of attaining a seat in heaven someday.
1 Killing... Everyone. Just Everyone.
The Punisher kills the Marvel Universe is exactly as gimmicky a comic as the title makes it sound. The Punisher gets some misguided reason to kill every hero in the world, and the rest of the issue is the writers coming up with one preposterous idea after another why Frank was not swatted away two seconds after trying to take on Avengers or the X-Men and ending the story then and there.
It is daftly entertaining to watch normally intelligent and well-prepared heroes stupidly walking into one of the Punisher's traps after another, but the proceedings do get monotonous after a while, aside from stretching the bounds of comic-book suspension of disbelief well past Batman taking on four fully powered Martians single-handedly and winning.