Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: comic con, Duane Swierczynski, idw, san diego, sdcc, valiant

Twenty-One Things You Probably Didn't Know About Duane Swierczynski Revealed At San Diego Comic Con

By Hannah Means-Shannon

Duane Swierczynski, who seems to be just about everywhere these days, has always had a big old soft spot for true crime and writing about criminal behavior in both his novels and his comics, and his spotlight panel at SDCC uncovered a lot of the reasons behind his obsessive topic. The panel was one of the most entertaining at SDCC because it went off the grid in terms of structure; hosted like a game show with two of Swierczynski's editors at St. Martin's Press (Michael Homler and Marc Resnick) taking to the dais as his "Hollywood Squares" consultants for the audience, fans had to guess "true" or "false" about the gamut of factoids thrown at them for a good 40 minutes. The game itself was followed by some even stranger questions from the floor, egged on by Swierczynski's no holds barred attitude about his life and motivations. Here are some of the highlights that turned out to be "true".

He wrote a series of stories about an axe murderer for a Catholic school nun who encouraged him to keep writing fiction as a weekly spelling and vocabulary test exercise as a kid. This resulted in trying to determine whether the axe-murderer in question should commit suicide, and the nun was all for it.

His son is named "Parker" after both Peter Parker and the Parker "thief" novels in prose and adapted by Darwyn Cooke.

He played in a bar band from the age of 10 in Philadelphia clubs accompanying his guitarist father.

He thoroughly "cased" a bank in detail while researching his first nonfiction book The Wheelman, and asserts that if he hadn't written the book, he would have been forced to actually rob the place, just to get all the research out of his system.

His parents sold his family home to a nice couple who turned out to be hardened drug dealers.

He ended up "drinking his face off" to write a non-fiction work, The Perfect Drink for Every Occasion. This was not amusing to his pregnant wife who could not partake.

He's "fascinated by the things you shouldn't do", the motivation behind just about all of his work.

He wrote his first book somewhat randomly, compiling 1000 words a day into a "book shaped mass" and though it was never published because it was so disorderly, it was a "huge revelation" about becoming a full-time writer and put him where he is now.

He realized that when he "wrote for fun", his books got the attention he wanted, case in point The Wheel Man.

He stares off into space a lot thinking about his fictional worlds and comes off as a loony as a result.

He is heavily influenced in writing his characters by thinking of what his kids will be like as teenagers or adults and wanting them to have "role models" when they get there.

He broke into comics as an already established author by writing a fan letter to Ed Brubaker, who, having read The Wheel Man, then asked him if he'd pitch, resulting in Werewolf by Night, which was based on a children's book with a record that had mezmerized him as a kid.

He resisted leaving a job as a newspaper editor to become a full-time writer despite his success, but has now been freelancing for 5 years.

Bloody, violent crime stories set in cities are really what he wants to write.

He writes books and scripts totally out of sequence and then pieces them together just to get the ideas down as they occur to him.

He's an on-location and in-depth researcher, visiting all the locations he writes about personally and shuffling through gruesome medical reference on a regular basis.

He describes his back and forth method of writing on a project as being a "squirrel on crack".

Fiction is his "favorite" genre because he can be a "little god of the universe".

Philadelphia is his home "turf" and he once tried to get an internship at EC, only to be told that at three employees on staff, they just didn't need or have internships.

Lionsgate has optioned a screenplay on one of the novels he's written, Severance Packages, and though he worked on it for an entire year, he's now playing the waiting game since films are "slow" to get made.

He regularly develops a character based on himself in each of his books, and when he feels comfortable with the development of the book, he viciously kills off his token character to focus on the ones he's really interested in.

The Hollywood Squares approach to the panel had fans reaching for comic and poster prizes, and the rattle bag of strange facts Swierzcynski revealed turned out to be an excellent way to present just who he is and what he does. Points to Swierczynski for rethinking what SDCC panels can do, and what he really wants panels to be about, the strange underbelly of writing and the even stranger routes comics creators take to get there, often leaping between genres and mediums to talk about the subjects that drive them to keep telling the kind of stories they want to read, too. You can catch up with Swierczynski's work if you're as fast as a squirrel on crack by reading Judge Dredd from IDW, Bloodshot from Valiant, and X from Darkhorse.

Hannah Means-Shannon writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress. Find her bio here.

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