History
After losing his family in a violent shootout between mobsters, Frank Castle waged a one-man war on crime as the Punisher. At some point, his age got the better of him, and he was captured and taken to Sing Sing, specifically the D-block where apparently, the worst offenders were locked up. However, his war didn't stop there—he proceeded to kill the criminals, with 36 dead at his hand on his first month. By the end of his first year there, a judge said that "sending a man to Sing-Sing was like feeding a tiger meat."
As World War III reached its climax with a full-scale global nuclear holocaust, the governor gave the soldiers at Sing Sing the order to shoot all the prisoners. As the soldiers made their way down through D-block, killing the prisoners, they started talking about the Punisher and his undesirable reputation there. When they reached his cell and prepared to shoot, the lights went out as the first nuclear missiles hit ground zero. The soldiers started to panic, and Frank took one of their weapons in the darkness.
While it is unclear what exactly came next, it is mentioned that Frank survived in the fallout shelter for a year with the five guards, short-con operator Paris Peters, MIT employee William Teacher (who had followed the guards to the shelter from the hospital), and two other inmates. However, all of them except for Frank and Peters died, as they started to turn on each other due to insanity. Teach was fatally stabbed in one of these conflicts, but he made himself live long enough to tell Frank about a group of people that started the war, referring to them as "the Coven." Teach also revealed to Frank that he was hired by them to design their bunker, though afterwards he started to have doubts about the ethics surrounding it, and tried to expose them, but they had him framed and sent to Sing Sing, believing that no one would listen to him. He used his final breathes to tell Frank the location, codes, layouts and system of the Coven's bunker. After the year in the shelter, Frank left with Peters in search of the Coven.
As they walked on, they took in all the corpses and destruction, with Frank assuming that due to the lack of evidence of panic, the attack itself was most likely a surprise. When it started snowing soot heavily, they stayed in a school bus full of assisted suicides to spend the night, during which Frank explained how the decade-long war resulted in the holocaust. Peters asked Frank his reasons for killing Kenning, Young, and Leary (three of the people in the bunker with them). Frank reasoned that they were going insane, and would've put them in danger had he not killed them. Peters then asked him about his purpose to keep moving, saying that he knew where he was going, why he was doing it, and that there was still work to be done.
When they reached Long Island City, they found a vessel and made their way across the Black East River to New York, where they found the bunker, just as Teach described it. They entered the room, but they were knocked out by tranq-gas. When Frank woke up, the doctor told him that he and Peters would be dead by morning due to exposure to radiation. Frank then proceeded to kill the guards and killed the doctor after she woke up Peters, claiming that she was a part of it. He took the guards' weapons and left the room with Peters, proceeding to kill any guards and soldiers that he came across.
Frank eventually found the Coven and confronted them, revealing everything Teach had told him about them, and that he was what they let loose. One of the Coven members begged him to wait, playing a recording of the President and the Secretary of Defense killing each other with firearms out of insanity. The Coven member explained that what had happened to the world was beyond what the human mind could process, and that the smaller bases around the world had self-destructed due to insanity, effectively making them the last people alive on Earth. However, with the resources in the shelter, they could repopulate the Earth. Frank killed them all anyway, much to Paris' shock. When asked about his motive behind effectively dooming humanity, Frank replied: "The human race. You've seen what that leads to."
He then killed Peters after the man tearfully admitted the reason he was in the D-Block was that a insurance scam he pulled involved setting fire to an empty building accidentally leading to kindergarteners from a nearby school dying from the fire getting out of control, with Punisher noting "see what I mean about the human race" before executing him. The dying Frank then left the bunker and tried to make his way to Central Park, getting caught in flames in the park wreckage and perishing.[1]Paraphernalia
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See Also
- 1 appearance(s) of Francis Castle (Earth-40616)
- 3 image(s) of Francis Castle (Earth-40616)
- 1 quotation(s) by or about Francis Castle (Earth-40616)