Four figures. A petty thug, his gun smoking. A man and a woman, both lying dead on the ground. A young boy, crying as his life is shattered.
_____Which of these four haunts Bruce Wayne? Who is it that drives him to be the Batman?
_____I submit that it is the boy, Bruce himself. This is not the usual view, which would hold that it is Bruce's parents. This is also not the view that Chuck Dixon apparently has, since he felt that he needed to "unsolve" the murder in order for Bruce to have a reason to continue to don the cape and cowl.
_____But I think that Batman has always, first and foremost, been a protector, not an avenger nor a hunter.
_____He is not Batman to stop criminals, really. He is not Batman to balance the scales of justice, like the Spectre. He is Batman to keep the innocent safe.
_____To keep little boys from having to live life without their parents.
_____Stopping Joe Chill wouldn't bring his parents back. But more importantly, it wouldn't stop other innocents from being in danger. It wouldn't ensure that no one ever had to go through what he did.
_____The editorial decision that Batman does what he does because he is still trying to catch his parents' murderer loses sight of this. It makes the Batman less than he should be.
_____The Punisher, by contrast, wages a one man war on crime as a way of coping (or rather as a very bad substitute for coping) with the deaths of his family. Like Bruce, Frank Castle does not struggle with the memory of the criminals who killed his family (indeed, the very nature of the character, as I will explain shortly, all but demands that he generalize the specific criminals into anonymous representatives of crime). But unlike Bruce, it is the dead who haunt Frank, his wife and family.
_____The theme of the Punisher stories could ultimately be seen as the hollowness of vengeance. He killed the people who killed his family, but his family was still dead, and his pain is still there. Frank can't cope with this, so he goes out and kills more criminals. He has no other coping mechanism then to lash out violently, and since this will never ease the pain, he will always continue to lash out. Ultimately, he has forced himself to select "crime" itself as his target.
_____The recent Punisher re-vamp, as well as missing the flavour of the character as a down to earth vigilante, attempted to re-motivate the Punisher by having him find out that his family could still be avenged directly, that their killer was still out there.
_____Creative teams on both these characters, and others besides, have managed to forget that what makes these characters larger than life is the fact that they react in larger than life ways. They declare entire cities under their protection, or vow to single-handedly wipe out all criminals everywhere, while a more normal person would grieve and eventually move on. And even a normal person would continue to be haunted by the slaughter of their loved ones after the actual killers had been caught; this isn't like recovering a stolen bicycle. What makes these characters interesting is the extremes to which they take these reactions, and perhaps vicariously allow the reader to over-react along with them.
_____What do you think?