MICHELINIE
David

• 1. Marvel

David Michelinie is an American comic book writer best known for scripting Marvel Comics' The Amazing Spider-Man and Iron Man and the DC Comics feature Superman in Action Comics. Among the characters he created or co-created are Venom, Carnage, Scott Lang / Ant-Man, Taskmaster, Ghost and War Machine.

Marvel

Among Michelinie's best-known work are his two runs on Iron Man with co-plotter/inker Bob Layton, in the late 1970s and early 1980s which introduced the character's alcoholism and his specialized power armor variants. He introduced two of Tony Stark's closest comrades, Bethany Cabe and Jim Rhodes as well as new enmities with Justin Hammer and Doctor Doom. His most noted cliffhanger was when Stark is thrown out of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s helicarrier and has to don his armor completely to use its flight function before he hits the ground. After leaving the title in 1981, Michelinie reunited with Layton on the book late in 1986, and along with penciller M. D. Bright, closed out preceding writer Dennis O'Neil's Advanced Idea Mechanics arc and launched the "Armor Wars"; during this time he and Layton introduced the character Ghost. Michelinie said that he had thought he would never return to Iron Man, feeling that by the end of his run he and Bob Layton had done everything they set out to do with the series, but when the editor offered him the assignment, he agreed to do it after thinking about it overnight. Michelinie left Iron Man again after issue #250, closing his second collaboration with Layton with a sequel to their Iron Man-Doctor Doom time travel episode from issues #149–150.

Michelinie was one of the writers of The Avengers from 1978 to 1982 and worked with artists John Byrne and George Pérez. During this time he and Byrne created Scott Lang in The Avengers #181 (March 1979), and he created the Taskmaster with Pérez in The Avengers #195 (May 1980).

From 1987 to 1994, Michelinie wrote The Amazing Spider-Man series, which featured the art of Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, and Mark Bagley, while introducing the supervillains Venom in issue #298 (March 1988) and Carnage in #361 (April 1992). Michelinie had planned to introduce Venom earlier and included a "teaser" scene in Web of Spider-Man #18, in which Peter Parker is pushed by an offscreen Venom into the path of an oncoming train, the symbiote being unsusceptible to Spider-Man's "spider sense" that would have normally warned him of the attack. This was the first of what was to be several clues leading to the reveal of Venom. Michelinie left Web of Spider-Man shortly after and was not able to continue the introduction of Venom until his time writing The Amazing Spider-Man.

Behind Stan Lee, Michelinie had the second longest run on The Amazing Spider-Man as a writer.

He also wrote the limited series Venom: Lethal Protector in 1993, where Venom was the main character and acted as an antihero instead of villain for the first time.