THE PUNISHER

Frank Castle revered exactly one superhero. During Civil War he aided Captain America's anti-registration side, took a beating from Rogers without ever fighting back, and then watched his hero get assassinated on the courthouse steps. Castle had already picked up Cap's discarded mask at the close of Civil War #7 — and by Punisher War Journal vol. 2 #7 (2007), by Matt Fraction and Ariel Olivetti, he had gone considerably further.

Castle commissioned a new uniform that fused his own iconography with Rogers': navy-blue armour with red piping, a white star on the mask, and the Punisher skull kept front and centre across the chest. He wore it to hunt the Hate-Monger, a white supremacist who had crowned himself the new Captain America and was rallying followers to atrocities in Rogers' name.

The star-spangled Punisher lasted only for that Initiative-era arc before Castle returned to plain black. Even so, the costume stands as the clearest evidence on the page that his war was never only about vengeance — for a few months in 2007, Frank Castle tried to make himself worthy of a dead man's flag.