Despite what the college catalogs had indicated, Alfred offered only one two-credit creative-writing course, in which the instructor, Dr. Ernest Finch, required the composition of only three short stories.

It was at about this time that he discovered the new Marvel Comics being written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Don Heck.

[8] Using his brief term as Lee's assistant as a calling card, Skeates picked up work at Tower, Charlton, DC, Gold Key, Red Circle, Archie, and Warren Publishing (for whom he wrote 72 stories from 1971 to 1975).

[9] With cartoonist Sergio Aragonés, he won the ACBA Shazam Award for the best humor story of 1972, which was "The Poster Plague," a tale that inspired DC's dark-humor anthology Plop!,[10] the series about which Skeates professes to be the proudest because it "spoke quite emphatically to the disillusionment extant at least throughout this country during the so-called Watergate era."

Of all of his artistic collaborators, Skeates named as his favorites Pat Boyette, with whom he worked at Charlton (his favorite employer);[11] Jim Aparo, his partner on a highly regarded Aquaman run that lasted until April 1971;[12][13] and Steve Ditko, with whom he co-created the quirky team Hawk and Dove in Showcase #75 (June 1968),[14] despite the fact that progressive Skeates and Objectivist Ditko are politically polar opposites.

In 1984, while he was taking various story ideas into editors' offices, Marvel's Larry Hama tapped him to script the Generic Comic Book, which he did anonymously.

[15] By the late 1980s, Skeates felt burnt out from trying to write comics for the more demanding hardcore fans and left the industry to take up bartending.

This left him with a creative need that was going unfulfilled, so he finally went to the only daily newspaper in the area of his residence and presented its editor with the idea for a locally oriented comic strip called The Adventures of Stew Ben and Alec Gainey, that Skeates would write and draw for the Sunday Spectator, which was the Sunday paper for both The Hornell Tribune (Steuben) and The Wellsville Daily Reporter (Allegany).

After a year (summer 1989-summer 1990) of producing "that very strange little avant-garde entity," Skeates ended his "most interesting experience within the wonderful world of comics" by having his protagonists sacrifice themselves to save the Earth.

At the same time, Skeates self-published a 22-page magazine-sized comic called “Could I Have My Reality Check Please?” which was created in the style of the Underground comix of the sixties and seventies and sold at conventions.

At San Diego Comic-Con in July 2012, Skeates received the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing.

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/blogs/entry/33665-the-spirit-of-stephen-skeates/ Canadian comics creator Jonathan A. Gilbert wrote of Skeates, "The reason Steve is such an influence on me creatively is because of his unique writing style.