The Punisher

Publication history For complete list of Punisher titles, see List of Punisher titles . Creation The Punisher was conceived by Gerry Conway , a writer for The Amazing Spider-Man . Conway was inspired by The Executioner , a popular book series created by author Don Pendleton , in which a Vietnam veteran , Mack Bolan , becomes a mass murderer of criminals after the Mafia -related deaths of his family. He also says that he was partly inspired by The Shadow , "a character who thought he was a law unto himself.

"Conway said in a 1987 interview that "I was fascinated by the Don Pendleton Executioner character, which was fairly popular at the time, and I wanted to do something that was inspired by that, although not to my mind a copy of it. And while I was doing the Jackal storyline, the opportunity came for a character who would be used by the Jackal to make Spider-Man 's life miserable. " Conway created the unique outfit for the character along with John Romita Sr. As Conway recalled in 2002, "In the '70s, when I was writing comics at DC and Marvel, I made it a practice to sketch my own ideas for the costumes of new characters—heroes and villains—which I offered to the artists as a crude suggestion representing the image I had in mind.

" Conway had drawn a character with a small death's head skull on one breast. Marvel art director John Romita, Sr. took the basic design and blew the skull up to huge size, taking up most of the character's chest. Romita said that he was inspired by the Black Terror , a comic-book superhero of the early 1940s.

Amazing Spider-Man penciller Ross Andru was the first artist to draw the character for publication. Stan Lee , then Marvel's editor-in-chief, claimed in 2005 that he had suggested the character's name: Gerry Conway was writing a script and he wanted a character that would turn out to be a hero later on, and he came up with the name the Assassin. And I mentioned that I didn't think we could ever have a comic book where the hero would be called the Assassin, because there's just too much of a negative connotation to that word. And I remembered that, some time ago, I had had a relatively unimportant character ...