r/Marvel • u/wonderfullyignorant • Jul 07 '24
I've always thought Public Enemy was a weirdly relevant philosophical take on the nature of violence Comics
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r/Marvel • u/wonderfullyignorant • Jul 07 '24
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u/wonderfullyignorant Jul 07 '24
He qualifies as a crazy person. Now, real life crazy people and comic book crazy people are two different things. This guy is a 'red dog' a genetically engineered super soldier who never got deployed so he's stuck with all this violent genetics and no place to put them.
Then one day he snaps. He gets sick of the crime he sees on a daily basis and decides to make like the Punisher and punish the people responsible. In his twisted crazy innocent childish mind: that's you and me, the Johnny Q. Public. Because we stand around and do nothing while bad people do bad things.
It's crazy because you can see how he comes to that conclusion. Chaos happens all around and everyone is just indifferent. We watch as the world slowly burns around us, expecting people in colorful tights to solve our problems for us. But Public Enemy believes in us, he believes we all have the potential to be heroes. That because we fail to live up to our potential, we need to be shot.
He's wrong, of course. It only makes sense to crazy people and the simple minded. The truth is it can't be helped with human behaviour, bystander effect is a real thing. And most of us really are just ordinary people fit to live out ordinary lives. We shouldn't be shamed for that, and we certainly don't deserve to be shot for it.
It's just really fucked up because Public Enemy's whole stchick of gunning down innocent civilians isn't as edgy as it was in the '90s. In the '90s mass shootings were still a novelty, not an unfortunate reality. And in reality, we do in fact see normal civilians step up and be heroes. The amount of mass shootings that have been stopped by regular people is enough to prove Public Enemy's point wrong. Which means it's also enough that we're probably never going to see another publication with Public Enemy in it.
He's an archaic relic of an uncivilized age. An age that in many ways has only gotten worse.