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Joe Q:"We can’t win, first we have to deal with people going all nuts because Marvel has a gay cowboy and now we have to deal with this extreme? Anytime the Punisher is involved these days in the Marvel U, you can expect the unexpected. The Punisher and especially the Punisher book, for better or worse is a farce, a comedy, a Road Runner cartoon parodied to the Nth degree. Does anyone remember his battles with Spidey or DD? If you haven’t gotten that by now then you’ve kind of missed the point of the book or of the character when he appears in a book.
What Frank (Tieri) was doing was invoking a line from Neil Simon's "Murder By Death" that was making fun of the stereotypical movie tough guy -- in this case, a gumshoe detective played by Peter Falk. Frank figured, what bigger tough guys are there in the Marvel U than Frank Castle and Logan?
The key to the joke is that the line is inconclusive and ambiguous. In some cases the line may say more about how it’s being interpreted than what it’s actually saying. Is Frank Castle gay just because he's got some muscle men mags? I think not, heck I have muscle men mags all over my art table for super hero art reference. No, really! But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Castle IS gay. Well then, that makes him one tough motherluvin’ gay guy, does it not? Would you mess with him?
Bottom line is people need to grow a sense of humor. For anyone who thinks we've actually "outed" Frank Castle, I'd say this: Whether you decide he's straight or gay at the end of the issue, he's still the stone killer you'd never mess with.
I see the closing scene as Logan's final eff you to Punisher. I mean, the way Garth writes Castle -- and Garth agrees -- is as a right-wing madman. A manly man to the Nth degree. Clint Eastwood on steroids. There's no gray area in his world. Logan, having just beaten him to a pulp, reminds him -- with a wink-wink -- that the world is plenty gray.
This is an extension of their entire conversation, in which Castle asserts that all bad guys should die, and Logan tells him it's an impossible dream. In this story, Logan's the realist, and Castle is the idealist."
And in reply to me: "See my previous post. By the way folks, unless someone hasn’t told me something, gay men have a sense of humor too.", we also get the patented sense of humour line. |
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