After seeing a rioter in Captain America gear during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Neal Kirby, the son of Jack Kirby, has condemned the use of his father’s character by the far right. “Captain America is the absolute antithesis of Donald Trump,” he wrote, later adding “My father, Jack Kirby, and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America and WWII veterans, would be absolutely sickened by these images.”
The problem with the Punisher: The Punisher’s elongated skull logo (and specifically, the version used in the 2004 film) has become an icon for white nationalists, Proud Boys and Blue Lives Matter enthusiasts. At Inverse, Eric Francisco offers a brief history of the alt-right’s use of the skull and Disney’s failure to assert its IP rights. At CBR, Cass Clarke summarizes the thoughts of Gerry Conway, who created the character. At SyFY Wire, Mike Avila calls on Marvel to retire the logo and “give the Punisher a makeover.” He also reached out to former Punisher writer Garth Ennis, who had this to say:
The people wearing the logo in this context are kidding themselves, just like the police officers who wore it over the summer. What they actually want is to wear an apparently scary symbol on a T-shirt, throw their weight around a bit, then go home to the wife and kids and resume everyday life. They’ve thought no harder about the Punisher symbol than the halfwits I saw [on Wednesday], the ones waving the Stars & Stripes while invading the Capitol building.
Finally, at AIPT, Patrick Ross presents both sides, the cases for and against retiring the Punisher.
Too soon: Pearls Before Swine cartoonist Stephan Pastis alerted his readers on Twitter last week that the strips scheduled to run the week of Jan. 18, which featured a storyline about an attempted military coup, were drawn before the storming of the Capitol on January 6 and had nothing to do with it. Now Andrews McMeel, which distributes the strip to 850 newspapers, has pulled that storyline. They will run a different set of comics, already drawn by Pastis, and will plan on running the coup series sometime in the future.
Ben Garrison booted from social media: Both Twitter and Facebook have suspended conservative political cartoonist Ben Garrison, according to The Daily Cartoonist. This Tweet appeared just beforehand and seems to be the precipitating factor:
At the Washington Post, Michael Cavna rounded up other political cartoonists’ responses to the storming of the Capitol.