When Marvel’s Punisher returns to comics next year, he’ll be going on a road trip — and taking inspiration from a couple of unlikely sources — as part of an unexpected new mission: hunting down the source of a new drug flooding New York City.
The new series, announced last week, will return Frank Castle to NYC after a stay in Los Angeles as part of the character’s last series, but according to new writer Becky Cloonan, he won’t be sticking around. “Frank finds himself following a lead on a new and dangerous synthetic drug hitting the streets,” she told Marvel.com. “He takes the show — and a bunch of guns!—on a blood-soaked road trip through the Northeast to a place I don’t think even he will see coming.”
Don’t take this new anti-drug crusade to mean that the character is climbing onto the straight and narrow, however; Cloonan’s choice of role models for her take on Frank suggest that she’s very aware of how monstrous the vigilante actually is.
“When I first started thinking about what kind of story I wanted to tell, I kept thinking about a few of my favorite characters from film: Rambo and Jason Voorhees,” Cloonan said. “Both of these dudes share some very similar characteristics to Frank, and different aspects of this have inspired some of the ideas for this series.”
It can only be hoped that Frank will take up wearing hockey masks — actually, that’s been done when it comes to comic book vigilantes — or taking on foreign regimes at the behest of the military in the new series launching early 2016, ahead of the character’s debut in the second season of the the Netflix series Marvel’s Daredevil later that year.
