Who are Elektra and the Punisher?

We’ve only seen a few episodes of season two of Daredevil but the Punisher and Elektra will be making appearances. I can’t say who they are on TV but I can tell you who they are in comics.

The Punisher debuted in Spider-Man in the ‘70s before appearing in Daredevil (these two heroes share some supporting cast, like the Kingpin). He is Frank Castle, a man whose wife and children were murdered, I believe during a picnic, by the mob. Frank flips out and decides to bypass legal requirements and just shoot criminals, making him a foil for lawyer Matt Murdock. Originally Frank was a Vietnam vet but that became less plausible as the decades wore on so Marvel did the sliding timescale thing and made him a veteran of an unnamed, more recent war, so they wouldn’t have a 70-year-old man running around with a machine gun.

I never cared about the Punisher. He’s all GUNS GUNS GUNS and I’m not interested. When I’m reading a superhero comic, I’d rather see some type of raygun or futuristic weapon, rather than a bullet gun. I appreciate the Punisher illustrating the idea of vigilante superheroes violently taking the law into their own hands but we’ve been here before and it gets old. We’ve had so much inter-hero conflict in comics recently and so much anti-heroism that it would be a novelty to see heroes actually saving people.

On the other hand, I love Elektra. She is Elektra Natchios, a Greek girl who dated Matt before he was Daredevil. After her father was murdered, she studied martial arts with Stick, who had trained Daredevil. However, she turned to the darkness and allied herself with the ninja assassin group the Hand.

Elektra’s initial run from 1980-81, written by Frank Miller in Daredevil, was highly popular. She and Matt crossed paths for months and under the employment of the Kingpin, she murdered an informant in a movie theater to intimidate journalist Ben Urich from pursuing a damaging story against a corrupt New York City mayoral candidate. The Kingpin’s then assigned her to kill Matt’s partner, Foggy Nelson. He recognized Elektra as “Matt’s girl” from college and she couldn’t kill him.

Kingpin then hired the assassin Bullseye to kill Elektra for defying orders, and he stabbed her through the heart with her own sai. In a famous sequence, a wounded Elektra crawled to Matt’s apartment and died in his arms on his doorstep. Daredevil then beat Bullseye nearly to death and went crazy with grief, exhuming Elektra’s body in the false belief that she wasn’t really dead. Shortly thereafter, the Hand tried to resurrect Elektra. Somehow Matt purified her soul, although the story left it vague whether Elektra was alive again or not. Elektra has since been resurrected and is a part of mainstream Marvel, having been briefly impersonated by a Skrull.

One of my favorite stories in comics is 1986’s Elektra: Assassin miniseries, an out-of-continuity look at the character published after her death (although there is a dispute as to whether it takes place prior to her appearance in Daredevil). It was written by Miller and features totally bizarre, stunningly beautiful painted artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz. Elektra spends the beginning of the story heavily sedated and remembering her past through a distorting fog. She teams up with the cyborg John Garrett (who appeared in Agents of SHIELD) to stop the demon known only as the Beast from getting a presidential candidate elected who will nuke the Soviet Union. Amusingly, this candidate resembles John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and seems like a hippie but is truly evil, and would replace the incumbent president, a combination of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. In addition to her ninja skills, Elektra demonstrated low-level psychic powers. She also says exactly three words out loud in the story, communicating mostly in thought balloons.

Elektra: Assassin was a great story and also a satire of ‘80s comics and movie clichés on violence, sex and attitudes toward women, featuring underwater ninjas and a secret agent dressed like a nun. It blew my mind then and is still great today.