As a fellow poet, nice to meet you!

😂 Haha... business is business... 😭 we need more libraries... books free for all......

Ah, old Noam. No hate against the old man, but letʼs not pretend this phenomenon is beyond our grasp and understanding...!

This. When I first read Joyceʼs Ulysses, I was stunned. It was difficult, yes, but it opened up a whole new world. Itʼs hard to capture that feeling in writing, but it made me read more and more 📚

I agree. Maybe they will dial back to an older design and override the “oni.” Time will tell.

The Rucka one is good too, but the OG Conway/Romita design just hits different. Just covering the whole damn torso 😩

I think part of the problem is that itʼs really beyond a legal solution, and has turned into a cultural thing; the association is probably stuck in peopleʼs heads by now.

Iʼm not sure an “oni” was the right option, but itʼs definitely very much distanced from the original motif. I can see the rationale behind their decision. I would have preferred just going back to the OG blocky skull.

Sounds interesting!

True. The republic of letters, quoting Hari Kunzru, is supposedly “a country of the mind that knows no national or linguistic borders.” But this intuition of equality and freedom... co-exists with the intuition of antipathy. Apolitical universalism can only go so far.

No wonder Marvel wants to change the skull symbol to an Oni symbol. The abuse of the Punisher symbol is damn insane, all the way back to Chris Kyleʼs appropriation

I would agree. At most, itʼs probably a vague distortion of the “Punisher” but NOT the actual Punisher qua Frank Castle (and its critique of the justice system). Iʼm a fan of the Punisher and I dislike it when people shamelessly appropriate him without the slightest understanding.

Great article!

“This might explain the appeal of the Punisher logo, a police force that dreams that [it] is a vigilante force is one that admits that it enforces other laws than the ones that are on the books.”

I have observed something similar with Judge Dredd, albeit less popular.

The legal and moral approaches are both fundamentally one-sided. The former is too crystallized in its (deeply problematic) framework. The latter is lost in its own inwardness. The solution will not be found in the (false) separation of the objective and subjective. Great essay!