Mark Verheiden

Mark Verheiden (born March 26, 1956) is an American television, movie, and comic-book writer. He was a co-executive producer for the television series Falling Skies for DreamWorks Television and the TNT network.

Verheiden's introduction into writing comics came in June 1987, when he penned The American, which was published by Dark Horse Comics in its second year of operation. Starting in March of the following year, he wrote what was to be the first of many Verheiden/Dark Horse comics based on the 20th Century Fox film-series Aliens, and comics based on the similarly licensed property Predator soon followed. A character in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator, involving a crossover conflict between the Aliens and Predators, was named after him.^{[citation needed]}

In January 1989, he wrote the first of several stories featuring Superman for DC Comics' then-weekly title Action Comics, from #635. Verheiden later wrote scripts for the 2001 Smallville television series featuring Clark Kent in his pre-Superman teen years, and was supervising and then co-executive producer for Smallville during its first three seasons. He also wrote for DC's tie-in Smallville comic.

He contributed to the 1989 Harvey and Eisner A1 anthology series.

Commencing in the same year, his Phantom stories featured in a 13-issue maxi-series from DC Comics (following a four-issue Peter David-written miniseries) and took on 'real-world issues', such as poisoning, illegal weapon trading, racism, and toxic dumping. The stories usually took a more psychological approach than the Lee Falk-written comic strips. Luke McDonnell was the regular artist.

He followed this in 1990 as co-writer on Epic Comics' 12-issue series Stalkers.

Verheiden contributed to scripts for the feature films The Mask and Timecop, both based on Dark Horse comics, and the latter based on Verheiden's creation. Verheiden was also the creator/writer and supervising producer on the ABC television series Timecop.

In 2007, Verheiden began work on the live-action screenplay for a Teen Titans film for Warner Bros., as well as an adaptation of his own Ark (written for Dark Horse Presents in the mid-1990s) with Sony Pictures.