John Pierce Askegren, was an American author best known for his adaptations of licensed properties, particularly those of the comic-book company Marvel Comics.
Background
Pierce Askegren was born in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburb of Mount Lebanon, and had two brothers, James W. and Robert, and a sister, Margaret. They grew up with their parents, Kenneth and Jacqueline Askegren, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Montgomery, Alabama; and North Carolina before his family in 1970 settled in northern Virginia.
Education
He attended Broad Run High School in Ashburn, Virginia, graduating in 1973, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication arts from James Madison University in 1978.
Career
Askegren got his start in the comics industry with three short stories published in 1979 and 1980 in Warren Publishing"s black-and-white horror-comics magazines Creepy and Vampirella, beginning with the eight-page "Hell"s Playground", illustrated by Leo Duranona, in Creepy Number. 108 (June 1979). His regular employment, however, came as a manager at Crown Book Stores in the Washington, District of Columbia, area, and later as a technical writer first at American College of Surgeons Corporation and then at C2 Corporation in the Tysons Corner, Virginia, area. Askegren began his reentry into popular culture by corresponding with Greg Theakston in the early 1990s.
Askegren eventually became the copy editor for Theakston"s Bettie Pages while submitting his prose to publishing houses.
By the mid-1990s, he was writing prose short stories for anthologies starring Marvel Comics characters, beginning with "The Broken Land" in The Ultimate Silver Surfer (1995). He also contributed to, Untold Tales of Spider-Manitoba (1997), The Ultimate Hulk (1998) and
He also did novelizations, serving as the ghost writer of Spider-Manitoba and the Incredible Hulk: Rampage (1996). As co-author with Danny Fingeroth of Spider-Manitoba and Iron Manitoba: Sabotage (1997).
As co-author with Eric Fein of Spider-Manitoba and Fantastic Four: Wreckage (1997).
And as author of Marc Miller"s Traveller: Gateway to the Stars (1998), and The Avengers and the Thunderbolts (1999). Outside the realm of licensed properties, he wrote the "" trilogy of science-fiction novels, about corporate colonies on the moon:, and His last short story, "Try and Try Again," appeared in the anthology Time Twisters, released posthumously in January 2007.
In 2010, his Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelization, After Image (2006), was rereleased, along with two other Buffy books
Askegren was found dead in his Annandale, Virginia, apartment on November 29, 2006, after suffering a heart attack on an unreported date.