The Punisher and Daredevil are the two vigilantes of Hell's Kitchen, and they live by opposite codes. Frank Castle, the Punisher, kills criminals, because the system failed to punish the men who murdered his family. Matt Murdock, Daredevil, is a blind lawyer who fights crime at night but will not kill, because he believes in the law and in a second chance. The skull on Frank's chest is both a warning and a target.
This follows the comics, with the films and the Netflix series, which put the two of them on screen together, flagged where they differ. Frank's prints are on the Punisher shelf and Matt's on the Daredevil shelf.
Frank Castle: the origin
Frank Castle is a decorated US Marine. In the original comics he served in Vietnam; later tellings move his war to fit the times, and the Netflix series makes him a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Home on leave, he takes his wife Maria and their children, Lisa and Frank Jr, for a picnic in Central Park. They witness a mob execution, and the gangsters shoot the whole family to leave no witnesses. Frank alone survives.
When the law cannot touch the killers, he starts a war of his own on all organised crime, and he has never stopped. He first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #129 (1974), hired by a villain called the Jackal to kill Spider-Man, whom he had been told was a murderer. He was meant to be an antagonist and became one of Marvel's best-known characters.
Versions differ on the details. The 2004 film moves the massacre to a family reunion, and the Netflix series ties it to a cover-up reaching back into Frank's military service. The rules stay the same: he kills criminals and only criminals, he does not target police, and he tries hard never to hurt the innocent.
What the Punisher's skull means
The skull does two jobs. The first is fear: criminals who see it know who has come for them, and that he is not there to make arrests. The second is practical: a big white shape on a black chest draws the eye, and the gun, to the place where his body armour is thickest, instead of to his unprotected head.
It is the most recognisable mark in his story, and Frank has worn it in many styles over the decades. One Man War is the campaign in three words, and Two Guns is the way he wages it.
The War Journal
Frank keeps a war journal: dated, numbered entries recording targets, weapons, kills and lessons, written in the flat voice of a soldier filing a report. Many Punisher comics are narrated as entries from it, which gives the books their cold first-person feel, a man explaining a massacre as if it were a supply run.
Punisher War Journal became the title of his second regular series in 1988, and the name has come back for later series since. When readers search for the war journal, they usually mean one or the other: the notebook or the comic named after it. War Journal takes its name from both.
Daredevil and the radar sense
Matt Murdock grew up in Hell's Kitchen, the son of a boxer, Battlin' Jack Murdock. As a boy he pushed a blind man out of the path of a truck, and a radioactive canister fell from it and splashed his eyes. He lost his sight, but his other senses became far sharper than any human's.
He also gained a radar sense: an awareness of the shapes around him in every direction at once, like sonar. It shows him form and movement but not colour, so he cannot read a screen or a photograph; he reads printed pages by feeling the ink with his fingertips. A blind martial arts master called Stick trained him to use it. The Netflix series has Matt describe it as a world on fire.
When gangsters killed his father for refusing to throw a fight, Matt became two things: a lawyer, to fight crime in court, and Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, to fight it at night. He first appeared in Daredevil #1 in 1964.
Hell's Kitchen and Matt's enemies
Hell's Kitchen is a real neighbourhood on Manhattan's west side. In Marvel's comics it is a rough, working-class district, and it is Matt's patch: his law firm, Nelson and Murdock, run with his best friend Foggy Nelson, sits there, and so does most of his war.
His enemies are built around it. Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, runs organised crime from behind a businessman's front. Bullseye is a hired killer who can turn anything into a weapon and never misses. Elektra Natchios, Matt's first great love, became an assassin; Bullseye killed her in 1982, and she was later brought back. Behind several of them sits the Hand, a cult of ninja. Hell's Kitchen is Matt's home turf on one print.
Punisher vs Daredevil
The two first met in Daredevil #183 and #184 (1982). A schoolgirl dies after taking drugs, Matt goes after the dealers, and the Punisher turns up hunting the same men. Frank wants them dead; Matt wants them in court. They fight, and the argument behind the fight has run ever since.
The Netflix series staged it most memorably. In its second season, Frank chains Matt to a rooftop and makes him argue the case, then tells him he is one bad day away from being just like him. Matt and his partners later defend Frank in court. The 2025 revival, Daredevil: Born Again, brings them back face to face.
Neither code wins outright. Frank's way gets results and leaves bodies; Matt's keeps him human and keeps letting killers walk. That is why writers keep putting them together.
On the back of a tee
Frank is on the Punisher shelf and Matt on the Daredevil shelf, both drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why they work on the back: a white skull on black and a red figure with horns are two of the simplest marks in comics, and each tells you its whole code before you read a word.
Read next: Spider-Man's rogues gallery explained (where the Punisher made his debut) and Joker, Clayface and Harley Quinn: Batman's Gotham explained.
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