Beginnings:
Scripting Larry Lieber’s plots in Two-Gun Kid #79 and 80 (Jan. and Mar. 1966)
Milestones:
T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (Tower Comics) / Abbott & Costello / The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves / Sarge Steel backups in Judomaster / Aquaman and Aquaman in Adventure Comics / The Hawk and the Dove / Teen Titans / Kid Flash in The Flash / Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella / Plop! / assorted DC mystery stories / Crazy / Plastic Man / Dr. 13 in The Phantom Stranger / Challengers of the Unknown in Super-Team Family / Blackhawk / Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham
Work in Progress:
“Possessions,” drawn by Dick Ayers, featuring the adventures of Tepeth-tet, forthcoming in All-Smash Funnies #2 (Comic Enterprise Publishing Group)
steve skeates
© 2009 Marvel Characters Inc.
Marvel No Frills (right) Skeates wrote Marvel’s Generic Comic Book #1 (Apr. 1984). Cover art by some old hack. (above) Bucky Bizarre appeared in this issue of Bizarre Adventures (#34, Feb. 1983). © 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.
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simply too dark—he wanted to throw in there at the end of each issue a short light humorous entity that perhaps would even offset any suicidal urges brought about by the rest of the stories in that particularly depressing magazine, and he even figured that I’d be the perfect person to devise such a series. I came up with something called “Buck Bizarre,” a square-jawed, overly muscular time-traveling pseudo-hero-type who lived in a world of puns, but that wasn’t quite cutesy enough for O’Neil, so he added a “y” to the guy’s name, and had Hama work up a visual idea for the character, making him look more like a cute kid than like a muscular hero. Hey, fine by me! As a matter of fact, although there were indeed some clunkers, I do believe this baby had a better record of being spot-on than most other series of this ilk! SCHWIRIAN: The Generic Comic Book and Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham are fun reads— like your Gold Key material—yet they are pretty much the last of your mainstream comic-book material. What happened here? SKEATES: Larry Hama asked me to write something called The Generic Comic Book—I have no idea whose idea this was (perhaps Tom DeFalco’s, perhaps Hama’s)—but what this baby essentially ultimately turned out to be was an old-style ’70s sort of comic: clichéd, humorous, even silly, and with a what-if-superheroes-existed-in-the-real-world refrain. Wow, yes, I hadn’t had so much fun writing a comic book in something like five years, all of which convinced me that I really didn’t care where comics had gone, didn’t really care what editors now expected—this (the ’70s sort of comic) was what I wanted to write! And, if this sort of comic essentially didn’t exist anymore—well then, that was it for me! I wasn’t gonna struggle trying to write stuff I neither understood nor cared about! If the fun-to-write stuff no longer existed, then I was outta here! I quit! And that would have been it, too, if it hadn’t been for a phone call from Larry Hama. It seems, you see, that upon the demise of Crazy (which had never really sold well anyway), Hama had been given to edit a certain Star Comic featuring the antics of a funny animal with the unlikely moniker “Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham,” a character created by Tom DeFalco, who recently had replaced the departing Jim Shooter as Marvel’s editor-in-chief. DeFalco had told Hama that if he [Hama] couldn’t find someone else to write Spider-Ham, then he [DeFalco] could do the job. No way did Hama want his boss to be [on this particular project] working under him—you can just imagine the sorts of problems this could cause! So Hama had been asking everyone he knew if they’d please, please write this series. Thing is, this was during that period when Marvel was offering a nice piece of change to those writers whose books really sold, and everyone knew Spider-Ham stood no chance at all of selling even modestly well, so Hama (so far) had gotten no takers whatsoever! Finally, he thought about me, called me up, and literally begged me to take the job. Actually, it didn’t sound all that bad— a book I could easily twist around so that I was parodying Spider-Man’s adventures from the ’60s and ’70s rather than reflecting anything that was happening in the funnybook field at that particular time and place, so I easily gave in to all Larry’s sniveling pleading. SCHWIRIAN: Mary Skrenes is credited with working with Steve Gerber on several projects (mainly Omega the Unknown), but you’ve revealed that she co-plotted with you on several series. Can you give me a little background on this lady of mystery? SKEATES: Had Mary gone to the same high school as I, or even attended the same college, surely the two of