How JLA/Avengers’ Batman/Punisher Fight Came to Be

Welcome to the 898th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our first legend is about whether it was Kurt Busiek who decided to have Batman take down the Punisher between panels in JLA/Avengers.

In 2003, Marvel and DC delighted comic book fandom when the two companies finally released an event literally twenty years in the making with the miniseries, JLA/Avengers, which had perviously been intended to have been a crossover event between the two companies in the early 1980s, with art by George Perez, before the project fell apart due to disputes between Marvel and DC over plot approvals (I’ll leave it to you as to who you think was right or wrong in said dispute). Thankfully, DC and Marvel came together again and allowed Kurt Busiek and George Perez (along with colorist Tom Smith) do a beautiful team-up of the company’s two most famous collection of superheroes. Busiek and Perez, of course, had previously had an award-winning run on Avengers together, and Buseik would go on to have a fine run on JLA, as well (Perez, of course, famously drew Justice League of America in the early 1980s, following Perez’s initial run on Avengers in the 1970s. Perez was the first artist to follow longtime Justice League of America artist Dick Dillin after Dillin’s sudden passing in 1980).

In the first issue of the event, the Justice League find themselves transported to Marvel’s Earth. They find themselves puzzled by the world (this allowed Busiek to fit in a number of fascinating pieces of commentary about how the two universes were so different in so many ways). Batman tells the others that they have to monitor this world carefully, but not get involved themselves at the moment, until they can figure out what the larger game is here. However, as he is telling them this, he sees on the monitor the Punisher in action in New York City..

And sure enough, between panels, Batman heads off to New York City and takes down the Punisher, leading to Plastic Man teasing Batman about breaking his own rule about not getting involved…

This, naturally, has led fans to read the scene as Busiek’s commentary on the idea that Batman would never tolerate the Punisher, despite the two having a team-up during the 1990s, when Marvel and DC did a bunch of team-up projects. A fan on Twitter even made this point…

As it turned out, though, it wasn’t Busiek’s idea at all to have Batman take down the Punsiher in JLA/Avengers!

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What was the state of Batman and Punisher’s comic book interactions to that point?

In 1994, DC and Marvel did two Batman/Punisher team-up prestige format one-shots. The fascinating thing, though, is that the timing of the crossovers was such that the Punisher actually ended up teaming up with two different Batmen! You see, the first crossover came out during the KnightsQuest era of the Batman titles, at which point Jean-Paul Valley had taken over as the new Batman following Bruce Wayne suffering a severe spinal injury from the villainous Bane.

So Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire (by Denny O’Neil, Barry Kitson and James Pascoe) saw Punisher and Az-Bats (Jean-Paul Valley was originally known as Azrael. O’Neil actually co-created the character, and O’Neil, Kitson and Pascoe would later become the creative team for Azrael’s ongoing series following Bruce Wayne’s return as Batman) have a tentative team-up to stop a team-up of Jigsaw and Joker, with Valley then trying to capture the Punisher at the end of the story, but Punisher defeating him in a fight and escaping…

Later in 1994, after Bruce Wayne returned as Batman (his back got better – you really don’t want to know how), the two teamed up again in Batman/Punisher: Deadly Knights by Chuck Dixon, John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson. This was a sequel to the first book, with Jigsaw and Joker once again teaming up together. This time around, Batman actually allows for the team-up to take place one time, and thus doesn’t try to take the Punisher in at all, even after the Punisher fights HIM (it’s all really an oddly told story, now that I re-read it. I think I’ll cover it in the future. It really doesn’t work very well).

Okay, so as you see before, folks believe that Busiek’s off-panel fight in JLA/Avengers was therefore his response to those stories. However, that wasn’t the case.

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Who came up with the idea to have Batman dispense with the Punisher between panels?

Busiek responded to the tweet by explaining, “The plot had Batman ignoring the Punisher originally, but one of the editors — I want to say Dan Raspler, but I’m not sure — thought it was out of character for him to let that go by. I pointed out that it was his plan to be gathering data only. The editor agreed that it was absolutely in character for Batman to make that plan, but it’d be out of character to ignore an armed lunatic murdering people. And we had no room to add a fight scene (and the Punisher wasn’t an Avenger), so we had it take place off-panel. I thought it worked really well.”

Tom Brevoort, one of the editors on the project, confirmed that it was Raspler (the editor of JLA from its launch in 1997 until earlier in 2003) who came up with the idea.

Very cool stuff. And yes, it did work well.

Thanks to Kurt Busiek and Tom Brevoort for the information, and thanks to Doctor Handsome for the tweet that started it all!

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Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com.