Comic book writer Gerry Conway, co-creator of the popular Marvel anti-hero The Punisher, wants the character re-imagined as a black Army veteran who “faces the issues that minorities in the world face today.”
Conway had previously made his thoughts known about his hope for the violent, revenge-seeking character that debuted in 1974, during a chat with hosts Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson on the Endless Thread podcast. During the discussion, Conway again visited his complaint that undesirables have appropriated the Punisher’s skull logo in real life.
As Breitbart News reported in December, for years Conway has complained that members of the U.S. military and police officers have taken to using the Punisher’s skull logo, and the writer despises this fact.
Recently, Conway blasted the police, saying, “For too long, symbols associated with a character I co-created have been co-opted by forces of oppression and to intimidate black Americans.” And he added that he hopes that the skull logo associated with the character Frank Castle could be used to support Black Lives Matter instead.
Conway wants to take that BLM support one step farther, Bounding Into Comics noted. The author would like to see Frank Castle re-imagined as an oppressed black man.
“You know, there’ll come a time, just like in the 80s, when that character can be rebooted, you know, and turned into something new,” he said, adding that his “personal preference would be that the next iteration of The Punisher would be a black vet, you know, who comes back and faces the issues that minorities in the world face today.”
Conway added that such a reboot would be the only way “I’ll be proud of him again.”
A race-swapped Punisher would not be new for Marvel or other big superhero comic publishers. It has been over seven years since the publisher handed the title of Captain America to Sam Wilson, the character who Anthony Mackie played for Marvel Studios’ Avengers series and later the Disney+ show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In that television series, the Wilson character faced ham-handed moments of “systemic racism,” such as being denied a bank loan seemingly because of his ethnicity.
Recently, DC Comics debuted a version of Superman who is bisexual, which has significantly hurt sales for the franchise.
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