Kent Worcester: ‘If they need me, they can find me in the twentieth century’

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Ian Thomas | April 24, 2025

I have revisited Kent Worcester’s A Cultural History of the Punisher many times since my review of the book was published early last year. The invitingly legible format he employed in assembling his end-to-end history of the controversial character lends itself to perusal, but, over and over, that casual interaction segues into a close read. As with all of my favorite criticism, A Cultural History of the Punisher prompts me to engage with the source material directly.

I spoke with Worcester to learn about his motivation to write A Cultural History of the Punisher and how he approached the task. In this interview, Worcester traces his path from champion of comics scholarship as co-editor of the groundbreaking anthologies A Comics Studies Reader (with Jeet Heer) and The Superhero Reader (with Charles Hatfield and Jeet Heer) to his focused and expansive survey of the Punisher, one of comics’ most provocative creations. Importantly, it was a path charted with an eye to cultural currents both in and out of comics.

This conversation was initially conducted for a podcast. As it sometimes does, the conversation took a few too many detours into unplanned territory to be a proper fit there, but I feel it is a better interview for it. I am grateful to the editors at TCJ for giving it a home. — Ian Thomas

IAN THOMAS: We’re here to talk about your latest book, A Cultural History of the Punisher, but I wonder if you could speak about your background and how it relates to the book.

KENT WORCESTER: One of the arguments I make is that the story of The Punisher is grounded in a real-world polycrisis – what I refer to as the long seventies. The Vietnam War is constitutive of this extended crisis but so are rising crime rates and related developments in New York and elsewhere. The book has an autobiographical aspect in that I visited the city as a kid in the late sixties and spent time kicking around in the seventies before finally moving in the early eighties. I’ve always been drawn to the city as well as to stories about it. The fact that the character has enjoyed such a powerful impact on readers like me, as well as the wider culture, is presumably connected to the impact and legacy of the long seventies.

At the same time, my roots are on the left. The anti-Stalinist left, to be precise. I caught the political bug in middle school. Throughout high school and college, I read people like Hal Draper, Paul Foot, Nigel Harris, C.L.R. James, Sheila Rowbotham, Peter Sedgwick, E.P. Thompson, David Widgery, Raymond Williams, and Judith Williamson, along with Marx, Sartre, and Trotsky. It was a different world. For a while I was practically a clone of the annoying bookworm in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953).

I was also a fan of short form cartooning, the more radical the better. I remain immensely fond of politically engaged cartoonists like Steve Bell, Carlo (Jesse Cohen), Hunt Emerson, Gabriel (James Friell), Bryan McAllister, Donald Rooum, and Phil Evans, whose comic strip “Our Norman” used to appear each week in the British edition of Socialist Worker.

I'm sure many of them have not been collected anywhere. What were the publications you were reading then, if you could name a few?

International Socialism, Red Mole, Freedom, Big Flame, Radical America, Cineaste, Jump Cut, The Leveller, Labor Notes, Cultural Correspondence, etc. I also spent hours reading bound volumes of Labor Action and The New International in the college library. Both LA and NI folded a year or so before I was born.

When did the superhero stuff hit your radar?

The Watchmen era. I spent a year or so in London in the mid-1980s, researching and writing a dissertation on the trade unions and the Thatcher government. I ended up sharing a flat in Putney with three others, one of whom, Guy Lawley, was seriously into comics. Guy introduced me to his circle of friends – Roger Sabin, Richard Reynolds, Fiona Clements, Paul Hudson, and so on – who talked knowledgably not only about comic strips and comic books, but politics and culture in general, in ways that I found refreshing and compelling. They knew an immense amount about film, science fiction, and superheroes, and had a knack for looking at American pop culture as outsiders, finding humor in the most obscure artifacts one could possibly imagine.

Some of this sensibility rubbed off on The Punisher book. It’s politically and culturally minded. It’s aimed at general readers who can tolerate the occasional theoretical foray. And it’s alert to the inadvertent hilarity that this off-the-wall franchise still produces with some regularity.

How did you come to the Punisher? Was this one that you were picking up along the way? Is it something that you're mostly looking back on in retrospect?

It was love at first sight. I can still recall seeing his feral mug on the racks at Big Apple Comics. It was the inaugural issue of the first unlimited series. The cover was dated July 1987. Frank was aiming his bazooka at a group of drug dealers from eight or ten feet away. He was dangling on a fire escape. Not exactly safety conscious. Cupid’s arrow had found its target.

I had already been pondering the mismatch between what we were studying in graduate school, which had to do with abstract theories and party coalitions and social movements and so on and so forth, and what seemed to be driving political conversations in the city, and across the country, which was a devolving discourse about safety and the social order. A monthly four-color series centered around a sociopathic antihero revealed more about the consequential anxieties of my surrounding environment than the social science classroom.

This would’ve been when Ed Koch was mayor, right?

Yeah, Koch was the mayor from 1978-89 and then Dinkins, 1990-93, followed by Giuliani, 1994-2001, and Bloomberg, 2002-2013. Broadly speaking, crime – most notably violent crime – rises under Koch, peaks under Dinkins, and drops under Giuliani and Bloomberg. The murder rate in fact slips during the last year or two of the Dinkins administration, which is not often remembered. But my focus was not so much on what was happening at a policy or institutional level, but what was taking place at the level of discourse. What the city was saying to itself, about itself, as it were.

Enter superheroes. I was struck by how certain stories and characters spoke to the larger cultural/political questions I was interested in. This meant my reading habits were urban focused. If a costumed hero prowled the streets of Manhattan, or one of the outer boroughs, muttering about bleeding hearts, I was there. I had no time for stories set in outer space or mystical dimensions. I was also intrigued by the fact that Marvel comics back then were largely produced by staffers and freelancers who resided and, in many cases, grew up in New York.

It seemed as if Punisher comics managed to somehow tap into the real-time monologues and dialogues that city residents – as well as others such as Mike Baron, who had their own strong opinions to contribute – were having about crime and politics. Someone once described vengeance fiction as “an alternative location for the discussion of justice.” I’m not saying these discussions stuck to the facts. But I am suggesting that the Punisher phenomenon, especially in the crucial ten-year period between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, captured how a great many people were processing consequential questions. Something as provocative and extreme as The Punisher Armory tracked if not necessarily produced a broader shift in the prevailing structure of feeling.

Is it fair to say that your history with comics dovetailed early on with your history with politics?

Until meeting Guy I had no interest in monthly series or anything like that. I had fallen for comic strips as a kid, and political cartoons as a teenager. It was in the late eighties that I was pulled into the world of comics. That’s when I started attending conventions and collecting Punisher comics and related titles. The scene at the time was low key and friendly. It was a pleasure to go from a factional subculture to the comics world because so many of us shared so many assumptions, but we didn't have to debate the finer points. You could enjoy the work and the comradery without the doctrinal edge I was familiar with.

I'm assuming that at this time you were running in some radical spaces.

Mm-hmm, but my gears shifted as my perspective changed. I had initially assumed that the eighties would “make the sixties look like the fifties,” as Dennis Hopper once predicted. My expectations about how things would turn out after high school were astonishingly unrealistic. But then again, I had come of age at the tail end of a remarkable era of ferment and tumult. As a teen I had romantic and distorted ideas about the durability of certain forms of protest. I held inflated views about the role I might play as an organizer or writer. And I clung to unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved by way of sectarian organization.

There's no point in going through that kind of misguided experience without trying to make sense of it afterwards. It was disorienting to find myself marooned in the eighties, surrounded by people who were afraid of their neighbors and angry at the government. Rekindling the social democratic energies of the early postwar period, let alone anything more ambitious, seemed like a hopeless undertaking. By the end of the decade, I had a greater appreciation for the extent to which emotions, particularly so-called negative emotions like anger and hate, shape and constrain our horizons.

Were you well into your academic life when you identified comics criticism as a viable avenue for discussing social issues. At what point did writing about comics and politics start to overlap?

I used to maintain a firewall between my professional activities and my cultural interests. And I can tell you when the wall came down. It was August 2006. I was attending the annual meeting of the editorial board of a journal called PS: Political Science and Politics. Before walking into the room, I thought to myself, “Don’t mention comics.” But when the managing editor asked for suggestions for roundtable topics of general interest across the discipline, nobody said anything. I finally raised my hand and asked, “What about a symposium on the state of the editorial cartoon?” The editor furrowed his brow and said excitedly, “We can use pictures!” That’s when I came out in the discipline. I had already come out of the cultural studies closet at work. I was hired in 1997 and within two years had introduced the College’s first course on comics.

Talk about that.

It was an exciting challenge. The first cohort of students were fantastic. One of my favorite classes ever. But apart from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, there was not much in the way of secondary material that one could usefully assign to undergraduates. A single bookshelf’s worth, perhaps. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of plausible guest speakers.

The College was initially nervous about the course. This was shortly before the comic studies boom. The committee that assessed the proposal worried that focusing on comics was too narrow and suggested I return with a proposal for something on Comics and Animation. Sure, except for the fact that I had never paid much attention to animation except as an irregular and somewhat indifferent consumer.

I ended up learning a great deal about an interesting corner of the film industry. I became especially intrigued by the role of Disney and wrote lectures on topics like Winsor McCay, Max and Dave Fleischer, and Pixar. After a short interval, however, the situation changed. It suddenly seemed, to people across the College and the wider culture, that comics counted in some way. When I finally submitted a revised proposal, one that concentrated on comics, it sailed through the review process.

This partly reflected the impact of people like Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Scott McCloud on the art world, the museums, and the literary magazines. The remarkable success of graphic memoirs by Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, and Lynda Barry did not go unnoticed by trade publishers. University presses, led by the University Press of Mississippi, started taking an interest. Fantagraphics made a difference. There was also the superhero turn. Once Marvel was releasing top grossing films on a regular basis it became impossible to keep superheroes out of the academy. For a combination of reasons, the weather pattern changed in the early 2000s.

Arguing Comics ( 2004), A Comics Studies Reader (2008), and The Superhero Reader (2013) are footnotes to this larger shift. Jeet Heer and I first met in 2002, at a popular studies conference. Within a few minutes we realized we shared a common interest in midcentury essayists like Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Donald Phelps – writers from outside the academy whose ideas and careers unfolded in unpredictable ways. Few of the figures we were enthused by are what I think of as candleholders, i.e., writers who dedicate themselves to protecting the precious flames of ideology against the bitter winds of history.

We figured we might have a potentially interesting collection on our hands – essays on comics that predated the arrival of cultural studies. A few years after Arguing Comics appeared, our publisher asked if we might consider putting together a comics reader. Ironically, one reason they approached us is that we had published on things other than comics and cartoons. Jeet was already developing a reputation as a reviewer and essayist, and I had penned a biography of the West Indian writer C.L.R. James that was favorably reviewed in places like The Guardian and The New Yorker.

For some context, publications like The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes had been around for decades, but you're saying that the appeal was that you while you read and wrote for those kinds of publications you were not exclusively within those circles.

Right. Jeet ended up writing for The New Republic before becoming a columnist for The Nation. While he has core interests, he writes on varied and unpredictable topics. He is a genuine public intellectual. Pairing an academic with a freelance journalist was a clever move on the part of the publisher. It’s not an accident that both A Comics Studies Reader and The Superhero Reader include selections by non-academics as well as academics. We were invested in finding examples of thoughtful criticism without paying attention to distractions like boundaries and hierarchies.

This may be a good time to bring up my next question. I’d like to tease out what similarities and any distinctions you make between and among the different types of criticism, such as mainstream online criticism, academic criticism, or social media criticism. Do you think the channel by which a criticism is published is important insofar as diluting or concentrating its potency?

That’s a good question. We can start perhaps by distinguishing criticism that is grounded in ordinary language from criticism that is committed to obscurantism. Specialized terminology can be useful and is sometimes essential. But long blocks of impenetrable prose impose an unnecessary barrier between privileged insiders and everyone else. All too often, academic language serves as an instrument of self-advancement within narrow institutional spaces.

At the same time, we can presumably agree that there is a difference between hot takes and carefully constructed arguments. We can also stipulate, I think, that working in higher education can confer certain advantages, such as access to research libraries and travel funds. Yet neither assumption requires us to imagine that professional academics perceive our shared cultural reality more deeply and truly than anyone else. Ordinary language is compatible with the highest forms of criticism and non-academics can make considered arguments. It’s not the sociological location that matters but what a friend of mine used to call “the stuff.”

As far as social media is concerned, I find it unbearable. I lurk on Facebook, but in view of recent developments am thinking about exiting. I avoided Twitter and have less than zero interest in X. I can’t stand bad faith arguments and repetitive bullshit. Also, I am not very good at knowing when someone is being sarcastic without seeing their expression or already knowing them in person.

This may be another grumpy admission, but I generally find twentieth century cultural projects and debates more engaging than recent ones. Would I rather peruse Partisan Review (1937-2003), or Dwight Macdonald’s Politics (1944-49), or listen to a podcast? Flip through an alternative comic from the nineties or take part in an online debate? Be serious. Lately I have been telling friends that if they need me, they can find me in the twentieth century. This may be one of the weaknesses of A Comics Studies Reader and The Superhero Reader. They are by and for the world of print. The internet hardly comes up in either volume.

So, it’s that trade-off between perpetuity and immediacy.

Mm-hmm. I’ve always been interested in the question of what lasts, what matters, and why certain things that shouldn’t matter last anyway. That said, A Cultural History of the Punisher isn’t a canonizing book. I did not write it to make the case for the five greatest Punisher stories or whatever. It's not that kind of project.

I started reading comics in about second or third grade, that would have been about ’89 or '90. The direct market existed then, but my parents kept a very close eye on what I was reading and the Punisher was the forbidden book, so it always held this mystery to me. I feel like, in retrospect, my parents were right to try to keep it out of my hands. But I came back to it later, diving in the dollar bins. It was among the first books where I became concerned with the creative team and it was Mike Baron writing. And, especially coming back to those with a little bit of context, those Mike Baron stories read to me like letters to the editor in a local newspaper.

A bit more exciting, though.

Yeah.

There’s a touch-the-raw-vein aspect to Baron’s prose that I can appreciate. The professional culture that I am conflictedly part of sometimes likes to play the game of let’s pretend. Let’s pretend people who disagree with us are stupid. Let’s pretend ideas we don’t like don't exist. “Why would you want to write about The Punisher Armory?” sniffed a colleague. Why wouldn't someone want to find out more about one of the most amazing series Marvel ever published?

I am loath to get into the political correctness discussion, but I think it’s important.

I hope you saw that I tried to steer clear of sentimental moralism.

Yes, I did. How do you think that the way people consider comics has changed? For example, what do you make of notions of representation and how characters are depicted as it relates to storytelling? My impression is that there is a swath of readers who are vehemently opposed to addressing issues of identity in comics, especially genre comics.

It is a waste of time to argue with people who complain that comics didn’t use to be political. All you need to do is glance at the first Captain America cover or read the early Action Comics issues that pit Superman against enemies of the New Deal – bankers, lobbyists, industrialists – to appreciate how absurd this argument is. It is ludicrous to imagine a kind of Arcadian past where nothing ever sullied the sweet music of gendered innocence. I can’t stand that type of manipulative rhetoric.

On the other hand, progressives, in the academy and outside it, sometimes seem to find the very act of researching and writing about a hyper-violent character like the Punisher distasteful. I had an interesting experience promoting the book at last year’s MoCCA Fest. All my customers were men, and most were working class. There’s an understandable antipathy to the masculinist culture that the Punisher embodies, but this “nothing can be allowed to upset our NPR listeners” attitude gets us nowhere.

Do you think readers who dismiss work based on either the content of the story or the politics of the creator are imposing limits on their own political analysis? People read for different reasons, obviously, but I guess I’m referring to a reader who wants to read on a critical level.

It’s like trying to speak to someone wearing headphones. Unfortunately, this incurious attitude seems all too popular now. It feeds into a larger project of cultural philistinism. This is only loosely related, but the recent and abrupt shift from the textual to the visual on the part of my students is stunning. “Can I just watch the movie?” As if films and novels are interchangeable plot vehicles, and so long as you climb into the plot car, and drive to the end of the plot road, your plot journey is over. Regurgitate the lectures, don’t make waves, get a good grade. I don't know whether there has ever been a point where critical thinking was actively encouraged across the culture. But the future seems bleak.

In what sense?

The decline of reading for pleasure is troubling, as is the sense of resignation that many students have exhibited in the wake of Covid. More students are reporting intractable health problems and some just tune out. Cynicism seems more prevalent, and not just on the part of students. I recognize the pitfalls of soft lens nostalgia. But higher ed confronts formidable challenges, from public indifference, the erosion of tenure, and big donor interference to the commodification of campus life, declining numbers of traditional age students, and open hostility from one of the two major parties. Given the storm clouds of climate disruption, nuclear proliferation, billionaire oligarchs, insidious algorithms, ascendant far right parties and movements, and so on, it is little wonder that an undergrad might feel out of sorts and disconnected.

I wonder if you are familiar with Comicsgate, that reactionary, conservative contingent of creators.

I’m familiar with the debate but have not paid it much attention. When it comes to the culture wars, I can be something of a third camper. I too have inwardly groaned while reading something a Comicsgater might call out as propagandistic. At the same time, anyone who loudly and repeatedly complains that wokeness has “killed” comics, comedy, or the movies is – by definition – one of the worst people on the planet.

I don't have Mike Baron’s politics but can appreciate how much time and effort he gave to the Frank Castle storyverse. During his first decade, the Punisher haplessly bounced around the Marvel Universe and was a bit of a goofball. Then writers like Steve Grant and Mike Baron revived him. Baron appears to have given a lot of thought to questions like, “What would Castle read in his spare time? What kind of beer would he drink? Which shows would he watch? Which genres of music would he listen to?”

I have no idea if Mike Baron went to this much trouble because he wanted to push readers to the right. But he and his collaborators came up with a disturbing, compelling, and sometimes comical storyworld. What I guess I am trying to say is that I am not inclined to spend time fretting over things like Comicsgate or wokeness. I don’t want to decide what to be mad about or what to spend my money on because of bumper-sticker arguments.

To me it becomes a vote with your dollars, and I don't think that really enriches readers too much.

I don't want to vote for or against Mike Baron. I will happily buy his comics. My goal is to understand the world around me.

The publishing world that you write about in A Cultural History of the Punisher is vastly different from the world of today.

It was one of the surprises in working on the manuscript, seeing just how different the eighties and nineties are from the world we live in. If you walked into a comic store in 1994, anywhere in North America at least, it would likely have Punisher posters on the walls and Punisher comics and t-shirts prominently displayed. There were two and a half years where five different Punisher titles were being published simultaneously. That’s an astonishing number for a character who does not have much of a backstory other than that he's armed, angry, and from Queens.

It is now easier to publish a comic book than ever. My first question around this is whether you think the channel by which a creator gets the book out has any kind of political valence to it? Does it diminish the potency, for example, if a creator self-publishes a work, rather than seeking publish within traditional channels?

It’s easy to underestimate how useful a well-oiled publisher can be. But there are times when self-publishing is the only viable option. In general, I don't think anyone should turn down opportunities to reach the widest possible audience. Peter Kuper was right, I think, to publish The System with DC. Despite DC’s limitations as a publisher, I doubt The System is diminished or compromised by its connection to a corporate behemoth.

Pavement once sang about there being “so many fortresses and ways to attack.” Sectarians may insist there are a fixed number of avenues of attack, but that is not true.

Do you think that the freedom that people have to publish via so many different channels is helping to push the medium forward or do you think that it creates more noise?

I’m not in the best position to answer that question. “Both” would be my guess. More progress and less progress at the same time. But it is always interesting to see what’s on display at MoCCA Fest. In 2024 there were nearly 300 exhibitors. The largest tables were attached to Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly. But most of the tables belonged to friends, couples, classmates, and so on. I was one of the older exhibitors. Sold thirty or so books. The exhibitor next to me poured a delightful cocktail from the 1930s called a Scofflaw.

It is stunning to see just how many more people are making and selling their own work than when we launched MoCCA Fest in 2002. But I'm also struck by how many individuals and small press creators are invested in imagery and subject matter that I have no interest in whatsoever. Much of the work on display is either formalist or introverted in orientation. It is often as much about color or paper or texture or mood as anything else. It's about the surprises that can be built into comics, the language of comics, the wonderfully varied ways in which panels and drawings can convey feeling.

My favorite cartoonists tend to be political and not political at the same time. Seth Tobocman told me something interesting. We were talking about the squatter movement of the early nineties. At a large public meeting, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party pointed his finger and exclaimed, “Your problem, Seth, is that is that you're an anarchist!” Seth responded, “I’m not an anarchist, I'm Seth.”

I prefer creators who eschew talking points. “Here's why you should be a liberal. Here’s why you should be an anarchist. Here’s why you should be a Republican.” God, I despise that kind of cartooning.

What do you make of recent efforts to organize within the industry?

More power to them. But here too the storm clouds are formidable. AI, the downward pressure on wages, the consolidation of publishing, the slow-motion collapse of print, the war on organized labor, etc. Good luck trying to find an editorial cartoonist position at a daily newspaper, or steady employment as a comic strip artist, or a sinecure at a comic book company. The contemporary landscape combines unparalleled opportunities for self-expression along with astonishing levels of precarity. It’s a perverse combination.

As a fan of small press comics, I love meeting artists and writers at conventions like MoCCA Fest and supporting their work. But we need something more than small press conventions and GoFundMe to defend cultural workers and cultural spaces. Politics matters.

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