Happy Birthday: David Michelinie
Born in 1948, David Michelinie loved comic books from early on and knew he wanted to write them. So he took a chance, and in the early 1970s he moved to New York to work for DC Comics.
He started out writing backup stories on House of Mystery and House of Secrets, then wrote seven issues of Swamp Thing. In 1978, he switched over to Marvel and immediately began writing The Avengers. From there he moved to Iron Man, Amazing Spider-Man, and Star Wars.
Michelinie was responsible for introducing both Jim Rhodes and Tony Stark’s alcoholism during his run on Iron Man, but he is perhaps best known for the supervillain he created and introduced in Amazing Spider-Man: Venom.
Since then, he has worked on Action Comics, Rai, H.A.R.D. Corps, Captain Fear, The Bozz Chronicles, and many others.
Unless I'm mistaken, Michelinie's first full-time DC gig was writing the Unknown Soldier in Star-Spangled War Stories, which certainly predated Swamp Thing. I'm not sure exactly how many he wrote, but I'd bet it was more than a dozen- and in my opinion, he never topped this run for the rest of his career. Many of his Soldier stories are reprinted towards the end of the first Essential Unknown Soldier collection, if anyone would like to check them out; hopefully they'll reprint the rest of them eventually.