his creator received no royalties, but the showrunners "tried to make good" by changing Carrot Man's true identity to Stephen Skeates. As a result, people would stop the writer on the street and say, "You were on TV!" The 1980s In the early 1980s, Skeates was working for comics "from a distance," writing for Gold Key and Marvel through the mail. 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. During the mid-1980s he also co-wrote a handful of episodes of Transformers, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, and Jem. 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). While it looked like a humor strip, it was actually a continuing adventure story about two private eyes. Skeates was initially afraid that his little section of New York State wasn't ready for the "bizarre mish-mash of stuff that didn't quite mesh" which he was turning out, but readers caught on quickly. The newspaper's publisher did not, however, and wanted the strip canned, but the supportive editor convinced his employer to let the subscribers decide by way of a ballot placed in the paper. Skeates made a bundle of ballot photocopies and bribed his regulars with free drinks to save the strip. 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. 1990s–2010s Skeates moved back to Rochester in 1993 or 1994 to help his mother care for his father, who had developed Parkinson's disease. In 2000, he began writing articles about comics for Charlton Spotlight, and he continued that until 2006. In 2011, Surprising Comics head Mark Davis found some of Skeates's Facebook