Daredevil's Marco Ramirez On Bringing The Spirit of The Punisher to Netflix

With just days to go before Marvel's Daredevil gets its second season on Netflix, the fervor is increasing to see more and more of The Walking Dead's Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, the Marvel Comics antihero known as The Punisher.

The Punisher, of course, has more solo movies under his ammo belt than almost any Marvel superhero. For years, the Dolph Lundgren The Punisher was the only Marvel movie to have had a theatrical release and a legally-purchaseable home video bow. Later, there would be two movies released in rapid succession -- one with Thomas Jane and another with Ray Stevenson.

Back in October, ComicBook.com had a chance to ask Daredevil showrunner Marco Ramirez how his version of the character was truer to the comics than previous iterations.

"How is it going to portray it closer to the comic?" Ramirez asked back at us, and then launched into a lengthy, thoughtful answer:

"I think for some reason ... what we did season one was the spirit of Daredevil was very much our mission. The spirit that makes that comic work - the blue-collar, gritty, low-rent kind of back-alley nature, the realistic nature of it - is what worked for us so well season one.

"I think really it's ... a couple questions: how does our Punisher exist in his universe? We've all read the comics, we all love the comics, and we pull as much as we can from all different sources, but we've also got a very different person playing that than who's ever played before and it's weirdly a 'chicken or the egg' thing. It feels like 'Okay, we did this cool dance' and the show ends up right.

"Hopefully, coming to something that is ... What we want is the essence of The Punisher to be on screen, the same way that the essence of Daredevil is on the screen, even though Daredevil wasn't in his traditional costume for twelve episodes last season, but the spirit of who he is and who Matt Murdock is, that's the entire show. Even though it's not the one you would have assumed on a t-shirt."

Daredevil Season Two bows on March 18 on Netflix.