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The Sweet Smell of Excess

Noir Novelist Duance Swierczynski Takes the "Punisher" to a New Extreme: Philadelphia

by Steven Wells

Hyperviolent vigilante Frank Castle—aka the Punisher—is on vacation in Philadelphia when he finds himself in the middle of a shoot-out between transvestite Mummer cops coming out of Geno’s and hipster porn merchants coming out of Pat’s. As countless civilians are toppled like so many gore-spewing skittles in the relentless crossfire, the Punisher judges both sides guilty and so punishes them—with leaden death.

This leads to an increasingly absurd avalanche of Philly-cliche mega-violence that reaches a bloody climax at the Wing Bowl, where the Punisher—cunningly disguised as a contestant in a Benjamin Franklin fat suit, pince-nez and powdered periwig—literally eviscerates Philly’s organized crime community with fragmentation grenades and blazing AK-47s.

None of the above happens (so far as we know) in the new issue of The Punisher, published by Marvel and set in Philadelphia. (As we go to print only the first of five issues is actually in stores.) But what does happen in the popular comic is bound to be almost as crazy, because the current author is 36-year-old Philly crime writer and former City Paper Editor Duane Swierczynski. And he’s fucking bonkers.

Not in person. Swierczynski is as big as a Budweiser Clydesdale but not quite as pretty. And while he could crush your skull like an eggshell with his mighty fists, he almost certainly won’t. He lives with his wife, 6-year-old-son and 5-year-old daughter in a perfectly normal house in a perfectly respectable part of Northeast Philadelphia. His first job every morning is to make his kids breakfast (Coco Puffs, Special K and/or yogurt and frozen pancakes).

Then he might spend the rest of the day walking the streets of the city that he loves and loathes in equal measure, thinking about absurdly violent stuff happening to awfully unlucky people. The kinds of thoughts one needs to have in order to write about a protagonist like Frank Castle, who Swierczynski calls “a psychopath.”

Frank Castle’s story is a spin on the dark Bruce Wayne mythology. A Vietnam vet, Castle became the Punisher after he saw his wife and kids killed in the crossfire of a Mafia shoot-out in Central Park. In a comics universe full of fancy-dan meta-humans with blithe but strictly observed moral codes (even the similarly un-superpowered Batman desists from murdering his enemies), the Punisher broke all the rules. If you were bad, you died. End of story.

Dark light: Even in the daytime, "Punisher" scribe Duane Swierczynski sees the city's gloom (Photo by Michael Persico).

Except, of course, it’s never that simple. In a recent story line, Frank Castle refused to help the CIA track down Bin Laden, citing his experiences in Vietnam as reason for his skepticism about government-sanctioned violence. Typical Castle stubborness.

Then there’s the classic vigilante question: What criteria do you use to decide who deserves to die? The comic book Black Summer, for instance, started its brief 2007 run with a superhero walking into the Oval Office and summarily executing its occupant for taking the U.S. to war on a lie. Begging the question: If you’ve pledged to rid the world of the evil, why waste your time with mere criminals?

“With the Punisher you’ve always got to ask who’s he going to punish and how much they deserve it,” says Swierczynski. “And who are the motherfuckers who really need to be punished?

“I don’t want to say I want to go around killing people, but wouldn’t you like to see the Punisher pop into the offices of the major banks where they’ve taken public money and paid each other these billion-dollar bonuses and say, ‘Hi, guys. What’s going on?’”

So where do you draw the line? And perhaps more important, if you get the chance to bring the Punisher to your hometown, how do you resist having him wipe out everybody who’s ever cut you off at the light? Or didn’t return your hedge-trimmer?

The warped and pulpy fruits of Duane Swierczynski’s conflicted and deranged Philadelphian imagination are to be found in his series of increasingly strange Philly-noir novels. The Wheelman stars an Irish getaway driver who gets T-boned on the Fairway and spends the rest of the novel dodging the snapping jaws of grim and absurdist death.

The might-soon-be-a-movie The Blonde has a businessman in the Philadelphia airport get infected with deadly nanobots by the eponymous blonde, and has an unforgettable scene set in a Philly police-run mutual masturbation club.

And Severance Package sees a “Jason with tits” slaughter the employees of a government Black Ops unit that’s operating out of an office on Broad Street.

Before all the mayhem, Swierczynski was the editor of City Paper (Oct. 2004 through Feb. 2008) and taught journalism at La Salle University. For most of that time he’s been part of Philly’s small but tight-knit noir scene; the city is home to NoirCon, the nation’s premier celebration of all things tight, pithy and dark.

Last month Swierczynski and a dozen other Philly noir heads spent a cold, bleak Sunday afternoon in Roosevelt Memorial Park at the grave site of David Goodis, the Philly noir writer who died in 1967. Swierczynski posted about the ceremony on his blog, which also features mini tributes to the hard-bitten, chain-smoking, Remington-hammering real-life heroes of the great American “racy” pulp-fiction boom of the ’50s and ’60s. Like the superbly named Orrie Hitt, who sat at his manual typewriter in a trailer park in upstate New York, surrounded by iced coffee, screaming kids and clouds of Winston cigarette smoke, battering out an average of one sex- and violence-packed masterpiece every two weeks.

Given that Swierczynski worked as an alt-weekly editor and therefore almost certainly had to nurture college-educated writers through deadline-induced nervous breakdowns, it’s no wonder no-nonsense blue-collar wordsmiths like these are his hard-bitten heroes.

“Er, kinda,” says Swierczynski. “But I don’t want to spend my life writing porn.”

Like many of his fellow noir writers, Swierczynski is conflicted about his hometown, which might be why he tends to portray it in his fiction as a surreal obstacle course. And like many Philly natives, Swierczynski nurtures a kind of bleak nostalgia.

“I’d really like a time machine to walk around Philly in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. It all comes from seeing old photographs, hearing my father and grandfather tells stories. And the Philly they talk about is grim. It’s not paradise by any stretch.”

And the violence has always been with us, says Swierczynski. Doing research into the history of his home neighborhood of Frankford—“it basically went from a country village to somewhere with some of the city’s worst drug corners”—he came across newspaper references to a 1959 Philly knifing epidemic.

“Everybody was slashing one another. It was like Jason Voorhees was on the loose.”

“There’s so much beauty and history here,” he told Comic Books Resources, “but over the years that has been undercut by greed, apathetic leadership, grinding poverty and a thirst for violence that strikes down innocent bystanders—and, far too often, the people who’ve sworn to protect those innocent people. This is the town where somebody shot a dude in the arm for talking during a Brad Pitt movie, for God’s sake.”

The plot of the Philly-based Punisher story—“6 Hours to Kill”—is typically and dementedly Swierczynskian. Meaning it starts with a bloody massacre and builds to an even bloodier climax. Swierczynski is anything but a subtle plotter. His motto seems to be, “If it’s not broken, break it.” Stuff happens. Then weirder stuff happens. Then even weirder stuff.

“My editor at Marvel likes my books,” says Swierczynski. “He said, ‘If you dropped the Punisher into a Duane Swierczynski novel, what would happen?’”

The answer is the following: Lured to Philly by an anonymous tip, the Punisher breaks into an “at-risk juvenile learning center” that’s actually a front for a heroin and sex-trade slave ring. After he slaughters the entire staff, the Punisher returns to his guns-and-ammo-stuffed van, where he’s gassed and kidnapped by a geek scientist working for a quasi-governmental operation that has offices in the penthouse suite of the PNB building on South Broad Street.

One thing leads to another and the first chapter finishes with the Punisher injected with a deadly poison and with only six hours to live. Six hours that the Punisher decides to spend hunting down and savagely whacking assorted Philly scumbags in various Philly locations including Drury Street (near McGillin’s Old Ale House), the Northeast, the Fishtown waterfront and that notoriously crime-stricken sinkhole of drugs, degeneracy and vile corruption, Chestnut Hill.

“What I’m trying to show is the city after dark. Like, who’s up?” says Swierczynski. “Philly is notoriously known as the city that rolls up its sidewalks at night, as a dead town after dark, and I wanted to see, well, who’s around from midnight to 6 a.m.? And in this Philadelphia, that’s when all the monsters come out to play: the predators, the crooked politicians, the dirty cops, the gangsters—all kinds of nefarious folks. While the rest of Philadelphia is sleeping, they’re out playing in the streets.”

Including, as seen in the first chapter, a very un-Nuttery sleazebag mayor.

“I very consciously did not want to have people saying, ‘Ooh, it’s Nutter.’ It’s totally not. He’s the anti-Nutter. I wanted to throwback to the fat-cat politicians of the ’60s and the ’70s—a fat greedy poltician who has his hand in too many things.”

This isn’t Swierczynski’s first stint on The Punisher. In fact, his first outing as a Marvel comics writer was with a one-off Punisher story in which a bunch of Jersey mafiosi no-goodniks are stranded in a small boat off the coast of Wildwood.

In an interview he gave in 2007, Swierczynski babbled about his new assignment like an excited fanboy. He cited a scene written by British writer Garth Ennis in which the Punisher used the body of the unconscious Spider-Man as a bludgeon to beat a baddy to death.

“After it’s over and Spidey regains consciousness, Frank tells him: ‘We had a team-up. You were great.’”

“What I love about Frank Castle is that he doesn’t have superpowers. He’s just very, very fucking determined,” said Swierczynski. “He’s relentless. He’s efficient. He doesn’t get cute or fancy. He kills lots and lots of bad guys. And he has awesome taste in T-shirts.”

So that’s a no-nonsense, unfancy, gun-happy antihero in a gun-happy city that prides itself on its unfanciness. No surprise, then, that there are some who see Frank Castle’s sojourn in Philadelphia as a return to his spiritual home. Or maybe it’s something more.

“I think we have to see Swierczynski’s take on the Punisher as an exercise in Bush catharsis,” says comics critic (and former PW contributor) Tom Cowell. “And where better to exorcise crimes committed for your country than in the cradle of liberty? The Punisher is totally not a superhero for the Obama era. In fact, he’s actually a mirror image of the Bush administration— blunt, amoral and unilateral. Both Frank Castle and Dubya were very good at bringing the pain, but not so hot with the self-examination. So who better to sit in judgment over the last eight years? It’s just a shame the Punisher wasn’t in town last year when Alberto Gonzales came to speak at Penn.”

Final question: Does Swierczynski give in to temptation and use the Punisher to settle a few personal Philly grudges? Did he, for instance, send photos of the City Paper publisher to his artist and ask if he could draw a similar-looking villain?

“I have no grudges, Steven. Come on.”

Or are we going to see any egomaniacal Philly gossip bloggers get a shotgun blast to the face?

“Ah, if only!” says Swierczynski, with obvious relish. “Although actually, while the Punisher’s on this fast-paced rampage through the city, he meets certain kinds of criminals—and one maybe-kinda hipsterish one. Kinda. You know, jeans that are too tight, looks like he needs a haircut and a hug. He’s involved in the genre of porno film known as throat-fucking, and he’s also killed a few people. So he’s not just killed for being a hipster.”

The real attraction of the Punisher, says Swierczynski, is that he cuts through all the bullshit in life. “The shortest route for him is always A to B. There’s no politics for him, no playing around, no negotiations. He just gets the job done.

“The rest of us, we have to jump through hoops. And that’s a good thing. I mean, life is a negotiation with those around you. But sometimes you just think, ‘Fuck it. Put a bullet in his head and be done with it.’ So in the end I guess the Punisher’s kind of a wish fulfillment. An all-action, blood-frenzy wish fulfillment.”

So when was the last time Swierczynski wanted to put a bullet in someone’s head?

He laughs. And then pauses.

“Oh, God. This morning maybe?”