This exclusive Punisher interview with Greg Rucka is part 2 out of a 3 part series. Please feel free to provide feedback and enjoy the interview!
By @neil4LOST , Lead Punisher Central Contributor
PART 2
Neil Byce: How are you feeling about the aspect of Frank’s
eyepatch? Frank’s eye and other injuries are healing but it has now been over
100 days since his encounter with the Vulture…are the wounds that Frank is
compiling right now going to stay with him through the series to cause him to
break down physically?
Greg Rucka: He will recover from the wounds, a majority have
healed but not every single one of them. And the next two to three issues that
have followed the 100 days have been
within the space of two to three days, at the most. Time has not past
significantly enough at this point for the him to be completely healed.
You touched on the reason why I am doing it this way, which
is that Frank is human. There are others that can shrug off injury ,that have
an incredible array of super-powers ,but Frank is entirely human. It is
important, and it’s one of the things that makes him so awesome , and I never
want anyone to forget that he is human. Here is a guy that freaks Spider-Man
out and Spider-Man can cling to walls. But Frank Castle gives Parker the
heebie-jeebies. In the “Omega Effect” coming up , Frank is face to face with
Daredevil, he doesn’t back down, he’s not in any way intimidated by him, or by
what DD can do to him. That to me is one of the things that makes Frank so
cool. He is always entirely human. So when he does get hurt it is important to
hurt him like any other human being, not like Wolverine. He will eventually
lose the eyepatch. But speaking as someone who has had an eye injury himself, they do not heal quickly at all. It’s
going to linger.
Neil Byce: Now that the “Omega Effect” crossover between
Punisher, Avenging Spider-Man and Daredevil has been announced, I have been
wondering….in your take on Frank, how is he going to be able to deal with other
super-heroes?
Greg Rucka: There is this great line that Mark Waid wrote at
the end of Avenging Spider-Man where Spider-Man and Daredevil have turned to
Frank and said “I want to do this thing and I want you to help me do it” and
Frank says “Give me forty minutes”. Then Daredevil says, “Without killing
anybody,” and Frank responds “Give me forty-five”. That is the last line from
Frank for that issue and the thing that I loved about it was that for
everything that Frank does he has to be tactical. He has to be very smart to
survive. He is never going to charge into something blind if he can help it.
Every time he has to deal with someone like Daredevil and Spider-Man he has to
be asking himself what happens when they try to take me in? They are, however,
offering him something he is willing to play their game for.
The other thing about Frank, I think, is that he is a man of
his word… up to a point, I think. He will keep his word if he can when he gives
it, but he doesn’t give it lightly, ever. Everything he does is because he is
on mission. Either it is to promote the mission or it is going to assist the
mission. If it doesn’t do any of those things than he doesn’t have the time for
it at all.
In issue eight, when Frank is looking at Cole and they are
gathering all of the electronics up, he’s looking at her and thinking is she in
my way or not? The decision there was that she wasn’t and then he says, “Stay out of my way.” He
does not have a problem with what she is doing because they can work towards a
similar agenda.
When Mark and I were first starting to work on the “Omega
Effect” crossover Mark wanted to call Rachel Cole Frank’s apprentice and I was
like, NO, NO, NO! She isn’t at all. Not only is that an incorrect assessment of
who she is but it is also – to me – an incorrect
assessment of who Frank is. Frank has no interest in an assistant. He does not
want to be teaching somebody how to do what he does. There is a further implication
in that, in that people want to divorce a sense of morality in Frank, but for my purposes, he knows exactly what he is
doing…he is not crazy. This means that he has made a choice and he knows that
he has made a horrible choice to live a life that is an immoral life. Why in
the world would he want anyone else to do that? Frank wouldn’t approve of this
type of life for anyone else but himself. He is not going to create a bunch of
Bat-acolytes. There is never going to be a Punisher family in the way that
there is a Bat family. The difference there is that both Batman and the
Punisher believe 100 percent that what they are doing needs to be done, but
Batman believes that he is absolutely right and I don’t think Frank believes he
has the moral high ground at all, I don’t think he would argue a moral
imperative or right to what he is doing. He knows that he has recast himself as
a soldier in a literal war on crime, and in so doing he has absolved himself of
the fact that he is committing murder on a gloriously huge scale. But I hate
the interpretation of Frank that says that he is crazy, because the second you
do that you end up taking away the responsibility for the choices that he has
made. I find it far more compelling to think that Frank is making a series of
choices that have had an element of sacrifice to them and he can argue that he
had no choice in the matter but the fact is that he could stop if he wanted
to…but he is not going to. Not ever.
Frank is the revenge story that keeps on going. You cannot
argue now that what he is doing is for revenge, it’s not. He is doing it
because he feels it needs to be done and somebody’s gotta do it. He may dress
it up and say that he is doing it because of what happened with his family
but the people that were responsible
died a long time ago. And as I have said in other interviews before, if you are
a member of the mafia and you are living anywhere in the New York area you are
an idiot! At this point that story is done and he has killed them all. If he hasn’t
gotten them all you would expect that they have figured out that at some point
he will and they need to get out of town ASAP.
Neil Byce: Do you intend to further shed light on Frank’s
past, the stuff that has already been visited and dealt with or do you intend
to shed new light on Frank through some of the other more centralized
characters in this series?
Greg Rucka: I’m not sure I know anything about Frank that everyone
doesn’t already know.. Jason Aaron added the part about Frank and Maria separating
in the MAX version and it worked there, but it doesn’t work in the series that
I am doing. It works in MAX where you are fraught with issues of self-doubt and
guilt. We have to take what we have offered up from Frank at face value, I
think. I don’t want to change his motivations so I don’t feel that there is any
light that I can shed on his past. The origin works and I don’t need to tinker
with it.
We talk often about feature film adaptations and how many
bad ones there are. People come along and say that they are going to change
this thing about the origin of a character that has been around for sixty,
seventy or eighty years. It’s like, well, that is a stupid thing to do. Frank
works as he is, and so what I am more interested in is something that comes up
in issue 12 where Frank sort of lays thing out in a scene with Cole. He
basically says to her, “if you are doing this than this is the way that it
works and these are the things that you have given up.” You don’t get to bitch
and moan about it…you made the decision and here you are now. Frank made a
choice and that choice is now dictating the rest of his entire life. It is all
that he is ever going to do until the day he dies. Honestly I think that’s the
way it should be. If I came along and I wrote a story where Frank is going to
get remarried and he and his new wife are going to live happily ever after I
should be booed off the stage and readers wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Readers
would take it in and say, “Well that isn’t going to last.”
Frank doesn’t want to be happy. It isn’t about happiness.
Neil Byce: Did the “Omega Effect” collaboration that is
coming in April alter any original plans that you had for ‘The Punisher’
series?
Greg Rucka: Ironically enough no…it ends up working in very
well. I hadn’t planned for it at exactly this moment in the story, but it works
there too. I would have liked to have had it tied a little bit more strongly to
the story with the Exchange plot. But that being said, the Exchange fits into
it very well. You actually see it begin to tie in at the end of issue 9. It
also feeds very well into a different story that we want to tell further down
the line.
Check back soon for PART 3 of this interview coming soon to Punisher Central!
Check back soon for PART 3 of this interview coming soon to Punisher Central!
Again great interview, keep them coming Neil. :D
ReplyDeleteThanks for all the support! I am really looking forward to sharing the last part of the interview! We are only getting started :)
ReplyDeleteNeil, just stumbled across this through Greg Rucka's twitter. Thanks for asking some really good questions. Looking forward to part 3.
ReplyDeleteHey there partner,
DeleteThanks for the encouraging words. We are really trying to bring quality content to the community through the site! BTW, part 3 of the Rucka interview should be coming very soon!
- Neil