[3][4] Michelinie grew up in Louisville, Kentucky,[5] and worked at a commercial film production company before moving to New York to take part in an apprenticeship program started by DC Comics.
[6] Some of Michelinie's earliest work appears in DC Comics' House of Secrets and a run on Swamp Thing (#14–18 and #21–22), the latter illustrated by Nestor Redondo.
[13] Among Michelinie's best-known work are his two runs on Iron Man with co-plotter/inker Bob Layton,[14] in the late 1970s and early 1980s which introduced the character's alcoholism and his specialized power armor variants.
He introduced two of Stark's closest comrades, Bethany Cabe[15] and Jim Rhodes[16] as well as new enmities with Justin Hammer[17] and Doctor Doom.
[18] 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.
[22] 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)[23] and Carnage in #361 (April 1992).
[26] He began working for DC again with the launch of the Justice League Task Force series in 1993 with artist Sal Velluto.
David Michelinie and artist Paul Ryan are the only comic book creators to have contributed to the wedding issues of both Spider-Man (Peter Parker marrying Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, 1987)[28][29] and Superman (Clark Kent) marrying Lois Lane in Superman: The Wedding Album (Dec.
[34] Also for Moonstone, he wrote several prose short stories which appeared in the anthologies The Phantom Chronicles (2007), Werewolves: Dead Moon Rising (2007) and The Avenger: The Justice Inc.
[38] As screenwriter, Michelinie worked on two episodes of the animated series Iron Man: Armored Adventures (with Bob Layton as co-writer) and wrote the short films Hellevator (2011) and Nobody's Tomorrow (2018).