The Punisher’s darkest story was told under the MAX banner of Marvel Comics, which pioneered more intense and adult storylines for the publisher. The Punisher has always been known for his murderous form of justice, killing criminals as opposed to sending them to prison like nearly every other vigilante in the Marvel Universe would do. Punisher MAX offered the character even more room to exact his brutal punishments on those he deemed guilty, and in his darkest story of all he was solely responsible for the end of humanity.
In the Marvel MAX one-shot, Punisher: The End by Garth Ennis and Richard Corben, the world has been thrown into World War III. The conflict quickly goes nuclear as many different countries of the world start dropping nuclear bombs on each other, effectively wiping out most of the population. The Punisher was able to survive the nuclear holocaust as he was hiding out in a bomb shelter inside a prison. While the world seemed to be on its last legs after the escalation of the World War, the Punisher puts the final nail in the coffin all to uphold his own moral code.
When the Punisher, now an old man, emerged from his protective shelter, he came across the men and women responsible for the apocalypse. The extremely wealthy and powerful people of Earth decided to wipe the planet’s slate clean and repopulate the world themselves, so they pushed the countries of the world towards nuclear holocaust to achieve that goal. The Punisher finds the evil members of the Earth’s elite hiding out in their own shelter, and while they plead for their lives by telling him they are humanity’s last chance at survival, the Punisher doesn’t care and kills every single one of them.
After the Punisher kills humanity’s last shot at survival, he takes one final step to wipe out all of the humans from the face of the Earth by killing himself. While Old Man Castle wouldn’t last very long in the apocalyptic wasteland anyway, let alone be able to repopulate the Earth with just himself, he takes the extinction of humanity into his own hands by setting himself ablaze and walking towards the area of New York where his family was murdered many years earlier.
Punisher: The End is grim, not only because of the story it tells but also because of the world in which it is told. The MAX corner of the Marvel multiverse is void of basically all superheroes and supervillains. The Punisher exists along with Nick Fury, SHIELD, and a few others, but the colorful champions of Earth who exist on Earth-616 are not present to stop the crimes of evildoers around the globe. The lack of superheroes within a world of elevated corruption inevitably led to the apocalyptic outcome of Earth and in turn led to the equally inevitable actions of the Punisher who completely doomed all of humanity in his darkest story.
