WARNING: The following article contains minor spoilers for Marvel's The Punisher, streaming now on Netflix.


The most notable supporting cast member from The Punisher's comic book series, Microchip, makes his television debut on Marvel's The Punisher. However, the character has undergone a number of notable changes beyond a name change to "Micro" (even there, The Punisher often referred to him as "Micro" in the comic books). Let's examine the comics history of Microchip, and then contrast him with how Micro is depicted on the Netflix drama.

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When The Punisher debuted, worked with a man named Reiss, whom he dubbed "the Mechanic." The Jackal murdered the Mechanic in 1974's The Amazing Spider-Man #129 to frame Spider-Man for the crime so that The Punisher would kill the wall-crawler in retribution. With the Mechanic dead, The Punisher no longer had a weapons specialist, which wasn't such a big deal when the vigilante appeared infrequently, but when he gained his own ongoing series in 1987, that wouldn't do. So Mike Baron and Klaus Janson introduced Microchip in The Punisher #4. However, Microchip then was an entirely different guy, different name, Lowell Bartholomew Ori, and he was much older (and he worked with his son).

A few issues later, Microchip's son is killed. However, soon Microchip is pretty much a completely new guy. It seems likely that Baron never gave the character any more thought at first beyond, "Here's a guy who I can use to explain where The Punisher gets his battle vans from." Soon, however, it became clear that there was always going to be a need to explain where The Punisher gets his gear from, so he might as well make Microchip a permanent part of the team. Microchip was then de-aged a bit and became almost a source of comic relief within the series. In a lot of ways, Microchip humanized The Punisher, as he gave him a legitimate friend, something The Punisher obviously has very few of in this world.

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Look at this bit from The Punisher #28 (by Mike Baron, Bill Reinhold and Mark Farmer), by which time the relationship had been solidified into the setup that we would see for the next few years, as The Punisher comic book franchise was hitting a boom period.

The two of them are just sitting there bantering with each other.

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As The Punisher franchise continued to expand into three ongoing series and a bunch of miniseries, Microchip became more and more of an important character, as there was so much story room to fill that a number of writers filled some of it with further details of Microchip. He also sort of became a kind of counselor for the Punisher, as he would be the guy who would try to talk The Punisher into doing things like taking some time off from all of the killing.

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Eventually, Microchip even got his own miniseries detailing his origins:

As it turned out, Microchip was a traditional computer hacker who made a good living from ripping people off through computers. However, his wife left him because she didn't wish to expose their son to his father's criminal ways. Sadly, as we mentioned earlier, eventually Microchip's son took after him and went to work with his father, which was how he got killed. Microchip first joined forces with The Punisher when Microchip's nephew, trying to copy his uncle, did some hacking and was caught and killed by the Kingpin. Microchip sought out The Punisher's help in avenging his nephew, and the two became close working acquaintances from that point forward.

Eventually, The Punisher's time as a franchise character was coming to an end, and Marvel decided to eliminate two of the character's three ongoing titles. For a final storyline, they had Microchip decide The Punisher had gone too far, and he locked up Castle and tried to replace him with a more rational Punisher.

It didn't work, and Microchip ended up being killed by another enemy of The Punisher's, leaving Castle to wonder whether he would have been able to go through with killing his old friend.

Years later, the Hood resurrected Microchip and forced him to work against The Punisher in exchange for restoring his dead son. In the end, The Punisher killed Microchip. (But not before Microchip sacrificed SHIELD Agent, G.W. Bridge, to resurrect Micro's son and Castle's family, as well; Castle killed his family right away, insisting their resurrection was bogus.)

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On the Punisher TV series, Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays David Lieberman, aka Micro, an NSA analyst who gets in too deep after discovering a recording of the execution of an Afghanistan National Police officer who had stumbled upon a heroin trade intended to fund an illegal covert CIA operation. Framed as a traitor by elements of the U.S. intelligence community, Lieberman is publicly gunned down by a dirty Homeland Security agent. Although presumed dead, he was saved from the bullet only by the phone in his shirt pocket. Lieberman goes underground, determined to expose those behind the coverup and clear his name. For that, however, he needs the help of another "dead" man: Franck Castle.

Like the comic book version of Micro, the character on the Netflix drama is a computer expert.

But the similarities really end there. The main aspect of the character, though, is that he clashes with The Punisher because their personalities are so different and yet, in the end, the two relate to each other because they both lost their families.. In the case of Micro, however, he believes there is a chance he could return to a normal life with his wife and two children. Unlike Castle's family, Micro's is still alive, although they believe him dead.


Available now on Netflix, The Punisher stars Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, Ben Barnes as Billy Russo, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Micro, Amber Rose Revah as Dinah Madani, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Daniel Webber as Lewis Walcott, Shohreh Aghdashloo as Farah Madani, and Paul Schulze as Rawlins.