A man is the sum of his experiences, and as Garth Ennis explains, this is never more true than when talking about Frank Castle, the Punisher. While the murder of his family in front of him in Central Park is often cited as the Punisher's "origin," Ennis' view is different - Frank Castle became the Punisher long before the park, in the jungles of Vietnam. Castle's story is told in Born, a four issue Marvel Knights miniseries beginning in June. Newsarama spoke with Ennis about the project.

Newsarama: To begin with, let's go back to the beginning of Born. Both Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas have compared it to Origin in that you're exploring the roots of the character. Was this something you came up with, or was it suggested to you as something you should tell?

Garth Ennis: It was pretty much my idea. I think it fitted in with what Joe and Bill have been doing at Marvel anyway, with various other Origin-type stories both with Wolverine and Captain America. At first, Joe had talked to me about maybe going back and retelling the Punisher origin, the classic story where his family is shot down in front of him in the park, but I wasn't really interested in doing that. It happened; we know it happened, and there's not really much you can do to it. Going back to Vietnam, and seeing what he was like there, before he actually became the Punisher was something that was much more interesting to me.

NRAMA: Was there any temptation to move the story out of Vietnam? After all, the film version is tweaking the origin somewhat to making Frank Castle a former undercover FBI agent…

GE: Yeah, they have to revise the origin for the movie. You really wouldn't buy Thomas Jane as being 50 years old or so. With the comic though, no, there was never any talk of doing anything of the kind. The idea of Frank coming out of something as hellish and horrible as Vietnam is so completely appropriate that that to start messing about with that would just make a mess of it all. In the comic, of course, you can go into his earlier life and origin in much greater detail than in the five-minute recap that they'll have to do in the film. So, for that, the Vietnam War was much more appropriate.

Also, in the comic, these days we don't worry quite so much about continuity. Personally, I don't worry about it at all, so the thought that Frank Castle is technically in his early 50's doesn't bother me a bit. I like the idea of him getting older and getting meaner.

NRAMA: It does fit with your approach to him…

GE: Yeah. I like the idea of the guy getting older and not mellowing at all. If anything, he just gets more brutal and more cold and ruthless.

NRAMA: Will you be handling the miniseries as a whole-cloth approach to his Vietnam experience, starting with him stepping off the plane in Vietnam as a combat virgin and going form there, or will you be looking at it in a different way?

GE: No - the miniseries opens with him halfway through his third tour of duty. We learn that on his first tour, he was just a Marine officer, and on his second, he was taking on a lot of Special Forces work. Now, on his third tour, the war is winding down in Vietnam. It's late 1971, and no one really knows what to do with people like Frank - these incredible super-competent Special Forces killers that have been honing their skills for years. So we see him simply posted as a Marine captain posted to a foreword firebase where he's left…well, twiddling his thumbs, really. There's not very much room to do anything.

Frank being Frank though, he finds stuff to keep him occupied.

NRAMA: Going back to what you said there at first - this is Frank's third tour. People didn't get three tours in Vietnam. It was usually one and you were sent home, wasn't it?

GE: As I understood it, you could volunteer for a second and a third if you wanted. After that, if you stayed, you were so far up the military hierarchy or so deeply involved in the blacker side of things that Vietnam had probably become your second home. Frank fits into that little world perfectly.

NRAMA: So just the fact that he's on his third tour speaks volumes about his character, and where he is as a man.

GE: Yeah - he volunteered for more. He couldn't get enough of it. He may not have been the Punisher, but he was certainly a combat junkie. There's no doubt about that. He's one of these guys who gets into the military, gets into the more action-packed Special Forces end of things and has probably never felt so alive. He finally realizes what he was put on earth to do.

NRAMA: So basically then, your goal for Frank in the miniseries is to set him up so that, when his family is killed in Central Park, the only logical option in his mind is to hunt his enemies down and kill them, effectively becoming the Punisher.

GE: Very much so. Obviously it was the incident in Central Park that snapped him and sent him over the edge, but the groundwork for that had been laid a long time before.

NRAMA: Are there going to be any key episodes or landmarks in Frank's development as he becomes more of the Punisher persona, or is this more just a flat-out war story set in a unique theater of combat, and the experience as a whole created him?

GE: It is essentially a war story, but you are going to see moments in Frank's life where you can see him accepting what he is. He may not understand it, but he is starting to accept it. For instance, you see the first time he kills someone simply out of justice, not shooting an enemy soldier to do his job, but to kill somebody effectively to punish them. At that point, he isn't the Punisher, but that's what's motivating him to do it.

You'll also see him - it's a little hard to describe here, as we play this kind of subtly - but we see Frank make a choice. He comes to understand certain things about himself. He has a choice to make at one point towards the end of the story, and he makes it. That, more than anything else, more than what happens in Central Park perhaps, it's that one moment that really sets him on his life's course.

NRAMA: So essentially, the way you have it set up is that by the end of the miniseries, Frank, for all intents and purposes, is the Punisher, but there's still a veneer of civilized society over him.

GE: Yeah, the foundations have been laid. The groundwork has been done. All it will take is something to set him off.

NRAMA: Your War Stories at DC all seem to have a vein of black humor that sneaks in. Is there going to be some of that in Born, or is it just too dark a story for that?

GE: There's not much humor in this at all. This is one of the bleakest and most brutal things I have ever written - possibly the bleakest and most brutal. There's no grotesque characters with their faces all fucked up, there's no people dying amusingly in toilets. There's not even anything much in the way of a humorous one-liner tossed in by a character. This is a pretty nasty goddamn book. It's pretty much a vision of hell.

NRAMA: And Frank going through his personal crucible that transforms him…

GE: Yeah. It's something I've been thinking about more and more as I've been writing The Punisher is to confront what Frank is head-on. It's certainly where I'm going to be taking the regular Punisher title - further and further into darkness. You're going to see a lot less of the goofier stuff that's been going on in the book, maybe in its first year or so.

NRAMA: What brought about the change?

GE: I guess I just probably found myself using up the jokes. I thoroughly enjoyed writing characters like the Russian, and having Frank bump into some of the superheroes who he usually makes mincemeat of in a number of amusing ways, but really, I've just found myself thinking more and more about what the Punisher is all about. When you've effectively got the monthly adventures of a serial killer, eventually the funny side of that recedes, and you find yourself more interested in the nastier, darker side of it. You find yourself wanting to explore that a lot more.

It's just a case of finding one aspect of the character and his story more interesting than the others. At one point, it was the funnier side and the black humor that seemed to come naturally from Frank's adventures, now, the nastier side has my attention.

NRAMA: But does going in that direction require a bit of caution on your part, to make sure you don't necessarily put Frank on a road he can't come back from or escape, aside from dying?

GE: I don't think there is any coming back fro Frank. One thing I've done throughout everything I've done on The Punisher is that I haven't messed with that character. You can put Frank through pretty much any situation, and I've put him through some pretty goddamn ridiculous ones, but he stays Frank, whether it's a serious situation or a goofy one. He is an irredeemable, ruthless, cold-hearted killer. Nothing's bringing him back from that.

So, I'm not worried about immersing Frank in more and more hellish scenarios, because whether he's having a terrible time, or for him a comparatively good time, he remains Frank Castle, he remains the Punisher.

NRAMA: Going back to Born for a minute - the timeframe for the story itself - he's entrenched in his third tour. Does it end with the end of his tour, or getting back to the US, or when?

GE: More or less, each episode takes place in one day, so you're talking about the last four days of Firebase Valley Forge, which is a Marine fire base up on the Cambodian border. We see the last four days when the Marines own the base and some of the supporting characters there, as well as Frank himself. The end of the fourth issue has Frank returning to the States, to the bosom of his family.

NRAMA: And from there, everyone knows what happens…

GE: Right. That goes back to what I was saying earlier - what happened to Frank in Central Park has been done, and while I might return to it at some point just to sort of represent it in somewhat of a more brutal and graphic way, I don't think there's any need to change it, and I don't think it's something that you can do in more than six to eight pages. We all know what happened, and we know what happened to him because of it, so it's not something that I really need to dwell on.

NRAMA: With this story was there as much, even on a casual level, research as you've put in on your other war stories, or was it more focused on what's going on inside Frank, and the details fall into the background?

GE: I had to re-read a lot of my Vietnam books that I picked up over the years, mostly for the nitty gritty, the stories about and from the guys who were there - the kinds of things that you never really read about in history books, the weird little details that spark stories. So yes, I did research it quite thoroughly. I know Darick [Robertson] is really pulling out all the stops. He's digging up reference stuff from all over, and doing a brilliant job.

NRAMA: Taking the other war stories you've written in context, does the Vietnam War itself play a role in the creation of Frank Castle? In your view, could the Punisher have been created from any other conflict?

GE: No. The particular character and nature of that war is very important and very appropriate to Frank Castle. Not to over-egg the pudding here, consider it this way - you've got the Vietnam War, the most grotesque and awful end result of…well, sad to say, the slightly inept American colonial adventurism that began after the second World War combined with what Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex - the vast American war machine that occasionally needs to exercise itself.

So, you have that on the one hand, and Frank on the other - a character who needs to be in war forever. Considering what's going on in the news at the moment, I think that has certain implications that go beyond the Punisher. I think Vietnam is the most obvious illustration of that - it's completely appropriate that a character as fucked up and cold, and dead behind the eyes as Frank came out of that terrible, dreadful mistake of a war. There were so many guys like Frank created in that particular charnel house. It seems to be particularly appropriate to be talking about it now.

NRAMA: In other words, leaving fiction behind, this story and the Punisher himself almost raises a question of what is being created right now that we won't see fully developed for years.

GE: Yeah.

NRAMA: End on a down note, I guess.

GE: There aren't too many up-notes when it comes to Frank. There is plenty of action though, I can promise you that. It's a bang-up war story that's going to show the creation of Frank as the Punisher, a man who kills other people for a living - it's not going to be pretty…or happy.

To discuss this article, click here.