Comic Book Appropriation: The Battle for our Heroes
- W M Parslow
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
I published the original version of this article on Medium in July 2025. Given the way that things have developed around the world I wanted to revisit and update it, so here it is.
“A client of mine was shot, Frank. Guess whose logo I found on the bullet case.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Bunch of bullshit fanboys, huh?”
“Yeah, and a lot of them are cops.”
Matt Murdock speaking to Frank Castle from a scene in Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+)
In February 1974, Marvel Comics debuted a new character in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man. Wearing black with a skull emblazoned on his chest, The Punisher was born. Fast forward 52 years and that same skull logo can be seen on patches and decals, quite frequently worn or displayed by law enforcement professionals, especially in the dystopian hellscape that is the United States. But here’s the thing: the character that was created by Gerry Conway would never have sided with ICE. Quite the opposite.
This is the focus of this article – the attempted hijacking of pop-culture, specifically comic book characters, by the Right. It is a very real narrative in today’s culture wars, but as with so many other things, they get it very, very wrong.
1/ The One-Man Army
Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, was created initially as an assassin but quickly grew into one of Marvel’s greatest anti-hero characters. Although there have been various retcons of his origins, the core tenet remains that Castle was a soldier, a Marine who chose to wage war on crime following the murder of his family. That’s his thing: Frank Castle kills people.
Now, on the surface, it’s obvious why a Venn diagram of Punisher fans and ICE supporters might have a large overlap: Castle runs around in body armour with military ordinance, killing people. But, whilst the Punisher is many things, he is not a fascist. Were Frank Castle in Minneapolis, he’d stand against ICE, not with them.
The Punisher appears in the recent series Disney+ Daredevil: Born Again. He has a conversation with a group of corrupt and violent police officers, who offer him the chance to join them, telling him of their admiration for him and his actions. Many of these police wear tributes to Frank’s skull logo on their body armour. Minor spoiler warning here, but he tells them to go to hell.
The Punisher’s skull logo has been co-opted by individuals in the military and law enforcement for years. His philosophy of delivering lethal ‘justice’ clearly appeals to many men who would love to be able to do the same, and communicate this with skull patches or badges on their uniform and kit.
The thing is, Frank Castle is still a man of honour, and to him, the violence and abuse seen on the streets of LA, Portland, Chicago, New York and now Minneapolis would be the crime, not the people being brutalised and shot by body-armoured ICE stormtroopers. While Trump and Noem’s heavies might like to think they are channeling the character when they stick some Temu-bought skull patch on their kit, that they are somehow living out a violent fantasy that Castle would approve of, they are grossly, horrifically wrong.
Now as I write this updated version of my original article in January 2026, Disney are preparing to release the next series of Daredevil: Born Again as well as a one-shot special for Jon Bernthal’s iconic take on The Punisher. Let’s be honest – neither of those shows is going to be well-received by the MAGA faithful, but that’s because they stick to the characters and what they were created to embody. And that is not shooting defenceless women in their cars.
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The first version of this piece was written and published to coincide with one of 2025’s tent pole movie releases, which also focused on a superhero that MAGA and the self-proclaimed ‘Alpha Males’ like Andrew Tate have tried to perversely co-opt as one of their own. So, is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's...
2/ The Last Son of Krypton
Along with Messrs Bat– and Spider–, Superman must be one of the most widely recognised fictional characters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The blue suit, the boots, the cape, the shorts on the outside - instantly recognisable and utterly iconic.
It’s been several months since James Gunn’s Superman was released in cinemas, and the arguments still rage online about whether the iconic character went ‘woke’ in his latest iteration. Again, those who say that Gunn’s Superman is some kind of liberal pansy are painfully wrong.
The key issue here, as I see it, is in the adoption of Superman as a living, all-powerful, embodiment of America itself. This is from a USA Today article in 2013, where the director Zack Snyder was discussing his take on the legend, Man of Steel:
"For me, he's that perfect mix of Americana," Snyder says. "I really tried to do The Right Stuff-meets-Norman Rockwell with a strong dose of angst and 'who am I and where do I belong?' "
Superman was raised in Kansas after crash landing on Earth as an infant, yes. But, the character was created by two Jewish immigrants in the 1930s who were seeking to escape the growing anti-semitism in Europe.
Kal-El, Clark Kent, Superman himself, was written as a refugee, a child fleeing a destroyed world. He was raised by Johnathan and Martha Kent to believe in decency, of helping others, of supporting those who needed his help. In that regard, then yes, he is an all-American hero; an encapsulation of the words of Lady Liberty herself, standing in New York Harbour. But, that is not today’s America.
The film’s trailer opened with a scene of Lois Lane interviewing her boyfriend Clark Kent as his alter ego, Superman. In it, we see his growing frustration at her questioning of his intervention in a foreign conflict.
“You're seemingly acting as a representative of…
I wasn’t representing anybody except for me, and, and, and doing good… People were going to die!”
That snippet of dialogue, right there? That’s Superman. But, the internet is full of articles and posts bemoaning how the latest version of the superhero has ‘gone woke’; that the brooding God of Zack Snyder’s version has been made somehow weaker by showing compassion (this is in no way an attack on Henry Cavill, who I would love to drink beer and chat Tolkien with).
One of Lex Luthor’s lines in the movie is ‘They chose him [Superman], let them die!’ I think it’s only appropriate to mention here that, when the writers at DC Comics re-modelled Lex Luthor in the 1980s from a mad scientist to the ruthless billionaire he is known as today, they used one Donald J Trump as their inspiration.
The same Donald Trump who has sold NFT cards of himself as a ‘superman’ during his first term in office. The same Donald Trump who is now wielding the power of the presidency as a cudgel to beat his enemies with, who has just overseen the extraction of a foreign leader to American soil to face his ‘justice’. I am no fan of Maduro, but this is the tyranny that Superman stands firmly against, regardless of who plays him and how much he frowns.
I used ‘is Superman woke’ as a search term to research the original version of this article, and there were, as I thought there would be, lots of articles claiming that exact thing – that Superman has become somehow less ‘American’ in James Gunn’s version. Based on what we see coming out of American politics every day, if Superman aped that, he wouldn’t be Superman. He would be Homelander, the fascist ‘hero’ of The Boys.
The Right, particularly the American Right, likes to try and co-opt the character and iconography of Superman because of his immense physical strength and power. But, this is not where the true strength of the character lies. It is in his goodness, his integrity, his embodiment of basic human decency, and how he uses his abilities in service of that. The modern Right, or at least many elements of it, fail to see that as a strength, and that is why they fail here too.
I’m relatively insulated from the chaos radiating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – he’s not threatening to annex the UK (yet). I’m not Venezuelan, Mexican, Canadian or a Greenlander, but the threats, the chaos and the violence scares and angers me. But, in the midst of all this uncertainty and fear I can be certain of one thing. If they were real, both Frank Castle and Clark Kent/Kal-El would stand with the people.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to believe a man can fly.
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