Frank Castle, is best known as "the Punisher."
The fictional antihero from Marvel Comics made his first appearance in 1974. And since then, the character has been depicted as a vigilante who murders, kidnaps, extorts, threats and tortures his enemies in his various campaigns against crimes and criminals.
Castle's rage is mostly a one-man war using various weapons, fueled by anger following the deaths of his wife and children.
Bearing the world-famous Punisher skull logo, Castle is most often portrayed as an angry vigilante.
This is why, despite being a war veteran from a U.S. Marine Corps Scout/Sniper in Force Recon, Marvel never portrayed Castle as a much of a good guy.
In the aftermath of the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2012, social media users urge Marvel to retire the logo because rioters were seen wearing that same skull logo.
One example was a masked "Punisher" who broke into the Senate building while holding a handful of zip ties, and appearing to be in possession of a firearm at his right hip.
On the front of his flak jacket, the Punisher logo is clearly visible on top of an American flag patch.
Social media users were concerning that the fictional character of brute and ruthless anger was adopted as a symbol of real and dangerous violence.
And also because the white skull logo is already famous among the Proud Boys, the far-right, neo-fascist, and male-only political organization that promotes and engages in political violence in the U.S. and Canada, as well as by other extremists, social media users and fans urge Marvel to change the Punisher logo, or halt the Punisher work for the time being.
Some even suggested Marvel to retire the character entirely.
There have also been discussions on social media suggesting Marvel should issue tougher enforcement of the trademarked logo.
This happened particularly after many online commerce companies selling American flags adorned with the Punisher skull logo.
Twitter users wondered why Marvel's parent company Disney didn't care much about suing.
This isn't the first time people on the web debate about the Punisher imagery in real world violence.
Previously, a literature promoting QAnon events has also used the Punisher skull logo. Some other white supremacists were also seeing wearing the skull logo as a symbol during a violent march in Charlottesville in 2017, which resulted in three deaths.
"This character and symbol was never intended as a symbol of oppression. This is a symbol of a systematic failure of equal justice," said Punisher co-creator Gerry Conway back in June 2020. "It's time to claim this symbol for the cause of equal justice and Black Lives Matter."
"I’ve said this before a couple of times, but no one actually wants to be the Punisher," comics writer Garth Ennis told SYFY WIRE.
"Nobody wants to pull three tours of duty in a combat zone with the last one going catastrophically wrong, come home with a head full of broken glass, see their families machine-gunned into bloody offal in front of their eyes and then dedicate the rest of their lives to cold, bleak, heartless slaughter."
"The people wearing the logo in this context are kidding themselves, just like the police officers who wore it over the summer," he added.
Ennis is known to be the co-writer of the Punisher miniseries in April 2000 to March 2001.
"What they actually want is to wear an apparently scary symbol on a T-shirt, throw their weight around a bit, then go home to the wife and kids and resume everyday life. They've thought no harder about the Punisher symbol than the halfwits I saw [on Wednesday], the ones waving the Stars & Stripes while invading the Capitol building."
