Steve Englehart

Steve Englehart (/ˈɛŋɡəlhɑːrt/; born April 22, 1947) is an American writer of comic books and novels. He is best known for his work at Marvel Comics and DC Comics in the 1970s and 1980s. His pseudonyms have included John Harkness and Cliff Garnett.

Steve Englehart majored in psychology at Wesleyan University, where he was a member of The Kappa Alpha Society, earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969. After graduation he was drafted and served in the United States Army as a journalist at Aberdeen Proving Ground. While there he went to the Manhattan offices of Marvel Comics to ask if he could be an assistant to Neal Adams when his Army tour was over. "Why not now?" Adams asked, and Englehart started spending weekends in New York and weekdays at Aberdeen. The Vietnam War was in full swing, though, and Englehart realized he felt unable to support it. He was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector that fall .

Englehart's first work in comics was on a 10-page story by writer Denny O'Neil in Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror comics magazine Vampirella #10 (March 1971). After briefly serving as a member of the Crusty Bunkers, Englehart started working as a full-time writer. He began with a co-writing credit, with Gardner Fox, on the six-page, Englehart-drawn "Retribution" in Warren's Eerie #35 (Sept. 1971). Then, as Marvel editor Roy Thomas said in a 2007 interview, Englehart became

...a summer replacement or some such for [writer] Gary Friedrich. When Gary wanted to go away for a while, he got Steve, who was sort of a young aspiring artist when he came up to Neal [Adams]'s studio, and he ended up at Marvel as a proofreader. Then he wanted to write, and I believe he wrote a few pages of a sample script. Anyway, I gave him "The Beast" [in Amazing Adventures] to try out on, and that worked out pretty well.

Englehart said he had first done uncredited co-scripting on a number of stories:

When Gary Friedrich's Sgt. Fury #94 came in, de facto editor-in-chief Roy Thomas wanted major revisions in the script and had me do them. Evidently he liked the result, because right after that, Gary turned back a job he'd been holding onto - dialoguing a little story plotted by Al Hewetson - and Roy asked me to script it from scratch. That was [the seven-page] "Terror of the Pterodactyl" [drawn by Syd Shores, in Monsters on the Prowl #15 (Feb. 1972)] and my first credited job.... Over the next six months, even as my credited stories began to appear, I continued to do uncredited collaborations - sometimes by design and sometimes at the last minute."

This uncredited work included Friedrich's Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #97, Iron Man #45, and The Incredible Hulk vol. 2, #152, plus two romance comics stories and a Western tale. Englehart then wrote two romance stories under the pseudonym Anne Spencer, in Our Love #18 (Aug. 1972) and My Love #19 (Sept. 1972), and, under his own name, a standalone supernatural story in the anthology Journey into Mystery vol. 2, #1 (Oct. 1972)

During his first credited superhero work, on a series starring erstwhile X-Men member the Beast in Amazing Adventures vol. 2, #12–17 (May 1972 – March 1973), Englehart integrated the Patsy Walker character, the star of a teen romantic-comedy series, into the Marvel Universe alongside the company's superheroes. He and artist Sal Buscema launched The Defenders as an ongoing series in August 1972 and introduced the Valkyrie to the team in issue #4 (Feb. 1973). Englehart has stated that he added the Valkyrie to the Defenders "to provide some texture to the group."