@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yeah. I think there we're getting into the fact that Western comics tend to pass between authors while manga are often very much single author driven. I've seen Punisher arcs where he's presented with a straight up heroic character (which... doesn't really ring true to me, honestly) and one's where he is all about the revenge and really the only redeeming quality he has is that the people he wants revenge on are not very nice™. Manga tend to be more consistent on character motivation from what I've seen.

Still poking at the edge of whether I've understood you (I'm actually pretty interested in what we can learn from the different ways that other cultures approach storytelling, hence the digging), would somebody like the original (book) James Bond fit the bill? Obviously a nasty piece of work in many ways, choosing to keep the world a safer place for everybody else as a line of work bit with little evidence that I remember that he does for any particular moral reason.​