LogFAQs > #899185547

Zeus posted...

Plus Punisher lacks Batman's sense of the theatrical.

Arguably he doesn't - he explicitly explains the skull on his chest with justification that is almost identical to ways Batman has explained his costume in the past (ie, to scare the shit out of criminals, and to encourage them to aim at the part of his body where the body armor is, and not his unprotected head).

Punisher LOVES the fact that he's basically become something of an urban legend in the criminal underworld, and has repeatedly exploited this fact, as well as gone out of his way to occasionally stoke it.

The real separator is that Frank doesn't really have limits, and there's less need to be blatantly theatrical when you're going to shoot every criminal in the face than there is when you're planning to get them arrested.



Zeus posted...

So they might have been doing it more to combine the sidekicks than factoring solely on a Wolverine/Batman connection?

Potentially. But probably less in a "Hey, let's make Batwolverine so we can combine Robin and Jubilee into his sidekick", and more "Hey, these two characters are similar enough in mentality to both have younger sidekicks that act as morality pets, lets explore that."

(Though Robin + Jubilee is a perfect match regardless, since Jubilee was a blatant Robin riff, right down to wearing the exact same color scheme. Which they openly mention during the Marvel vs DC fights that led to Amalgam in the first place.)

Obviously, the sidekick thing goes back to the old 1940s-era comic mentality where every hero had a young sidekick (which lasted even into early Marvel, with Rick Jones), but from an in-universe perspective the idea that this dark, brooding vigilante (or hairy berserker killing machine) is dragging a young teen sidekick into lethal situations is kind of fucked up, so it makes for interesting thinking to break down just what sort of motivation leads to that sort of thing. And the motivation for both Bruce and Logan is extremely similar in a lot of ways (and is very different from the reasons why Captain America had Bucky and/or Rick Jones, or why Reed let his girlfriend's kid brother into the rocket ship with them when they went to space).

Spider-Man, on the other hand, while being more than willing to team-up with pretty much every young hero (and most of the old ones) in the Marvel universe, never really had a sidekick, because his mentality didn't really led itself to one. Short of the brief period in Ultimate Marvel where Peter sort of became the Uncle Ben figure to Miles Morales, he never really had that type of interaction. Even characters like Spider-Girl were usually independent and just happened to use the name (the same way most of the Spider-Women were).


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