The insanely deadly assassin, John Wick, has never had a target he couldn’t kill which is an attribute he shares with Marvel Comics’ the Punisher, and the two share more than their aptitude for murder as shown in John Wick’s own prequel comic. In his films, John Wick has killed an insane amount of people—all of which stemmed from the theft of his car and the murder of his dog. While the Punisher has killed just as many if not more people than John Wick throughout his comic career, his reasoning for doing so is completely different from John as established in the John Wick film franchise. However, in the comics, their motivations are aligned as John Wick basically started out as the Punisher.
In the comic series John Wick by Greg Pak and Giovanni Valletta, fans are given a look at John Wick’s life before the events of the first film. In the limited series, John Wick is on a killing spree as he is hunting down the members of a gang responsible for burning down a town in which he was living as a child. The Three Bills gang, along with their psychopathic ally Calamity, killed more than fifty people in John Wick’s childhood town. Now as an adult, John is tracking them down and making them pay for their evil acts of murderous villainy by doing what he does best and taking them out for good.
Like the Punisher, John Wick kills every member of the Three Bills simply because they are bad people who he believes deserve to die. John Wick’s motivations in the comics are more similar to an antihero like the Punisher than the vindictive assassin he is portrayed as in the films. In the John Wick movies, John only kills people either out of revenge for their wrongdoings against him or simply because he is fighting for his life. In the prequel comic, John goes after known assassins to punish them for killing a whole town of innocent people, something that the Punisher would undoubtedly do as well.
Their motivations aren’t the only similarities between John Wick and the Punisher as shown in John’s comic series. In the early days of his assassin career, John Wick had yet to align himself with any criminal organization and was just a freelancer, open to any and all contracts he deemed worth his time. In the films, fans learn that John Wick used to work for the Russian Mafia before leaving the criminal underworld entirely. However, his comic book origin depicts him as being much more like the Punisher as John Wick would only kill who he wanted when he wanted without being ordered to do so.
Throughout John Wick movies, John is rubbing shoulders with known killers and hardened criminals without ever making a move against them unless they did so first. If the Punisher was in his shoes, he would have killed every single assassin he met on principle, while John has no problem aligning himself with evil doers in order to stay alive. If going off of the films alone, John Wick and the Punisher couldn’t be more different aside from the fact that they are both extremely good at killing people. However, as shown in his comic book prequel series, John Wick basically started out as the Punisher.