Anna Daniels
By 1995, the age of Frank holding down three monthly titles and flooding the market with spinoffs were over, but to be fair, it wasn’t just him. After the massive speculator-driven boom in the early ’90s that had seen comics like X-Men #1 selling in the millions, the comics industry nearly collapsed, with a contraction that saw Marvel declaring bankruptcy in 1996. This led the company to sell off the movie rights to popular characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men, leaving them with the ones nobody was really interested in. You know, Iron Man, the Avengers, those guys.
Anyway, after Punisher, War Journal, and War Zone got the axe, Frank was caught up in a crossover called Over the Edge, which, among other things, saw him having a mental breakdown and killing Nick Fury. Fury got better, but Frank also believed that he’d killed an innocent family in Central Park, much like his own family had been murdered. That led him to finally turn himself in and plead guilty for what we can only assume were several thousand murders. He was sentenced to die via electric chair, only finding out seconds before they threw the switch that the family had been killed by Bullseye, who framed Frank so convincingly that he bought it himself.
It will not surprise you to find that Frank’s execution was a hoax. Instead, he was broken out by a crime lord who wanted the Punisher to take over his empire. “Punisher joins the mob” was an intriguing hook, but the relaunched Punisher only lasted ten issues.
Written by: Looper
