"[4] One of three children, all boys,[5] Steranko spent his early childhood during the American Great Depression living in a three-room house with a tar-paper roof and outhouse toilet facilities.

[7] Later, "Because my father had tuberculosis (and I tested positive), I began third grade at what was called an 'open-window' school, a facility across the city that had a healthy program for kids with special problems.

"[7] There, being smaller and younger than his classmates, he found himself a target for bullies and young gang-members[7] until he studied boxing and self-defense at the local YMCA and began to successfully fight back.

At school, he competed on the gymnastics team, on the rings and parallel bars, and later took up boxing and, under swordmaster Dan Phillips in New York City, fencing.

[19] During the day, Steranko made his living as an artist for a printing company in his hometown of Reading, designing and drawing pamphlets and flyers for local dance clubs and the like.

He moved on after five years to join an advertising agency, where he designed ads and drew products ranging from "baby carriages to beer cans".

[22] In 1966, he landed assignments at Harvey Comics under editor Joe Simon, who as one writer described was "trying to create a line of super heroes within a publishing company that had specialized in anthropomorphic animals.

His first published comics art came in Spyman #1 (Sept. 1966), for which he wrote the 20-page story "The Birth of a Hero" and penciled the first page, which included a diagram of a robotic hand that was reprinted as an inset on artist George Tuska's cover.

[25] He met with editor Stan Lee, who had Steranko ink a two-page Jack Kirby sample of typical art for the superspy feature "Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D."

Future Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, then a staff writer, recalled, [H]e came up to the office ... and I was sent out by Sol [Brodsky] to look at his work and basically brush him off.

feature in Strange Tales #135 (Aug. 1965), with Kirby supplying such inventive and enduring gadgets and hardware as the Helicarrier – an airborne aircraft carrier – as well as LMDs (Life Model Decoys) and even automobile airbags.

Steranko began his stint on the feature by penciling and inking "finishes" over Kirby layouts in Strange Tales #151 (Dec. 1966),[28] just as many fellow new Marvel artists did at the time.

Wrote Les Daniels, in his Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, "[E]ven the dullest of readers could sense that something new was happening.

Writer Steven Ringgenberg assessed that Steranko's Marvel work became a benchmark of '60s pop culture, combining the traditional comic book art styles of Wally Wood and Jack Kirby with the surrealism of Richard Powers and Salvador Dalí.

Steeped in cinematic techniques picked up from that medium's masters, Jim synthesized ... an approach different from anything being done in mainstream comics, though it did include one standard attraction: lots of females in skintight, sexy costumes.

#2, described by Robin Green in Rolling Stone: So one panel had the stereo in Fury's apartment to show there was music playing, cigarettes in the ash tray in one, there was a sequence of intercut shots where she moved closer to him, much more intimately, there was a kiss, there was a rose, and then there was one panel with the telephone off the hook, which the comic book code [sic; "Comics Code"] made him put back on.

(Marvel Enterprises, 2001; ISBN 0-7851-0766-5), however, Steranko's original final panel was reinserted: In a black-and-white long shot with screentone shading, the couple is beginning to embrace, with Fury standing and the Countess on one knee, getting up.

Yet after deadline pressures forced a fill-in "origin" story by another team in issue #4, Steranko produced merely a handful of additional covers, then dropped the book.

Decades afterward, however, their images are among comics' best known, and homages to his art have abounded – from updates of classic covers with different heroes in place of Fury, to recreations of famous pages and layouts.

[39]Summing up this initial stint in comics, Steranko said in 1979, I was getting the top pay at Marvel, along with Kirby and John Buscema, and I felt privileged to be considered in their class.

[11] From these inauspicious beginnings, he compiled a portfolio of half a dozen paintings ("two Westerns, two pin-up girls, two gothic horror and one sword-and-sorcery"[11]) and met with Lancer Books' art director Howard Winters, to whom he immediately sold his fantasy piece.

This led to a career illustrating dozens of paperback covers, popularly including those of Pyramid Books' reissues of the 1930s pulp novels of The Shadow.

[45] Steranko also formed his own publishing company, Supergraphics, in 1969, and the following year worked with writer-entrepreneur Byron Preiss on an anti-drug comic book, The Block, distributed to elementary schools nationwide.

Written by Steranko, with hundreds of black-and-white cover reproductions as well as a complete reprint of one The Spirit story by Will Eisner, it included some of the first and in some cases only interviews with numerous creators from the 1930s and 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books.

[11] Through Supergraphics he also published the magazine Comixscene, which premiered with a December 1972 cover date as a folded-tabloid periodical on stiff, non-glossy paper, reporting on the comics field.

[48][49] Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth recounts his time living with and working for Sterkano and Prevue in Reading, PA during a Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube interview in May 2020.

[50] Steranko wrote, drew, and produced the illustrated novel Chandler: Red Tide in 1976, for Byron Preiss Visual Publications / Pyramid Books.

His only major work for DC Comics appeared in Superman #400 (Oct. 1984), the 10-page story "The Exile at the Edge of Eternity," which he wrote, drew, colored and lettered.

[11] In 2008, he worked with Radical Comics, doing covers, character and logo designs for its Hercules: The Thracian Wars title[53] and Ryder on the Storm.

[58][59] He also served in a similar capacity as "project conceptualist" on Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992),[60] and wrote the episode "The Ties That Bind" of the DC Comics animated TV series Justice League Unlimited (2004-2006).