Evan Skolnick

Evan Skolnick is an American writer, editor and producer who has created content in a wide variety of media including newspapers, magazines, comic books, books, websites, CD-ROMs, computer games and video games. He is currently an instructor in the Game Design & Development program at

Skolnick grew up in several suburbs east of Hartford, Connecticut. From an early age his interest in both writing and art was apparent, and when he was 15 he began publication of Phantasy magazine, a small fanzine devoted to the then-wildly popular Dungeons & Dragons “paper and dice” role-playing games. The magazine’s popularity grew to the point that two local Connecticut newspapers, the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer, ran stories profiling the teenaged magazine publisher.^[1][2]

Marvel Comics

In December 1988, Skolnick was hired by Marvel Comics as an editorial assistant. Within six months he had been promoted to assistant editor, and over the course of the next few years worked with a succession of Marvel editors including Gregory Wright, Sid Jacobson and, ultimately, Fabian Nicieza, on a wide variety of properties ranging from RoboCop to Barbie to Bill & Ted to Wonder Man.^[3] All the while Skolnick was doggedly pitching various series concepts, including an over-pitched Turbo limited series proposal. He was continually rejected and told to focus on pitching fill-in stories for existing series, but his driving interest at the time was the creation of new series, or pitching to write for major new planned publications.^[4] Skolnick’s behind-the-scenes trials and tribulations in trying to get a Turbo mini-series published at Marvel Comics were described in detail in a letters column in New Warriors Vol. 1 #73, the very issue in which one of the Turbo characters is killed.^[5]

Eventually Skolnick heeded the advice of his superiors at Marvel and began to pitch and land small writing jobs on existing series, such as Iron Man, RoboCop and NFL SuperPro. Skolnick continued to sharpen his editorial and story-pitching skills under the mentorship of Nicieza, writing several prominent annuals for series such as Excalibur and Deathlok, and ultimately landing the regular writing post on New Warriors, from which Nicieza had decided to resign from issue #53.^[3]

Video games

Skolnick had several dalliances with the video game business well before entering it. At Marvel, he was the managing editor of the Double Dragon limited series, based on the popular arcade game. At Acclaim, he wrote for and edited several video game strategy guides.^[6] And at Archie Comics he plotted a back-up story starring Sonic the Hedgehog.^[3]

Skolnick was hired in 2001 as senior producer at Hyperspace Cowgirls, a small interactive studio based in Manhattan that was moving from developing

Skolnick has cited his role as lead writer on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 as the highlight of his years at Vicarious Visions, and the impetus for him to transition fully from game production into game narrative development.^[8]

In July 2011, Skolnick was hired as lead narrative designer on