In 2000, Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, and Jimmy Palmiotti revived The Punisher for Marvel Comics and Marvel Knights. In which the Punisher discovered that he had inspired copycat characters such as Mister Payback, who took his own personal brand of vengeance against corporate CEOs. Both in the boardroom…
…in the airspace above the city…
… and then taking his message to the media of the day as well.
However, Frank Castle has an issue with Mister Payback as much as he did with the Punisher wannabees, in that innocents got killed in his targeting of CEOs.
Jimmy Palmiotti also wrote, “In 2006 – based on an original story Justin and I did, we had a screenplay written by Chris and Ruth Gage called BALLERINA- About a sniper killing the CEOs of a corrupt corporation that made the studio rounds. Drawing of the character by since-passed Steve Lightle. The story was a soldier overseas gets word her retired military father killed himself. She comes home and finds out the company he worked for did it and takes out the CEO’s as they hire assassins to take her out first.” Any relation to the John Wick spinoff? “We shall see.”
And I am also rather disturbed by how some folks who would be usually averse to the death penalty are suddenly… less averse.
Cope, nerd. Luigi was kind enough to keep him from suffering…
Akumetsu (manga, 2002-2006) has a very similar theme.
(Three manga panels, read right-to-left with the third spanning the width of the page beneath the other two, depicting an angry young man in a spiky mask with long demon horns and fangs who is aggressively posing over a frightened old man with underwear on his head. The young masked man says “That’s right! He died!! BECAUSE OF TEN MILLION YEN!!!” across all three panels, in increasing intensity. I forget how the underwear factors in.)I love how the last panel on this page sneaks in the guy from Action Comics #1. :)
