Don Perlin, Co-Creator of Moon Knight and Bloodshot, Passes Away at 94

Don Perlin, the longtime Marvel artist who co-created Moon Knight and drew The Defenders for many years before being one of the major artistic forces at Valiant Comics (where he would co-create Bloodshot), has passed away at age 94.

I did a spotlight on Perlin a couple of years ago, and I’m using that to celebrate his life now.

Perlin started his comic book career in the late 1940s. Like a number of would-be comic book artists in the era, Perlin had to scrounge around wherever he could to find work. Here’s Perlin doing a romance story for Love at First Sight #7…

and a horror story for The Beyond #1 (both for Ace Magazines circa 1950/51)….

After Perlin was drafted into the military in 1953, when he returned, the comic book industry had changed dramatically, and it was much harder to get work, so Perlin got into technical drawing, which he did for a number of years. In the 1970s, he was looking for new work and, as he explained to Bryan Stroud back in 2010:

I was going for a job interview with another company to do paste-ups and mechanicals. This was before computers. I was going in on Monday morning and Sunday morning I got a call from Roy Thomas. I’d been doing some comic book work in the evenings when I got home from working at the different day jobs that I had. Roy had seen some of the horror stories that I had done for DC. He told me about two books that they were looking for artists for and asked if would I be interested? One of them was Werewolf by Night and the other was Morbius, the Living Vampire. When I went to Marvel and spoke to them I was told that Werewolf was a monthly and Morbius was a bi-monthly so I took the monthly book deciding that would be a great job….So, from then on, I worked for Marvel and didn’t miss a day. I went from the Werewolf to Ghost Rider and Defenders and Transformers. I worked on most of the characters that Marvel had while I was there. Then I went to Valiant.

Jon B. Cooke interviewed Perlin for TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Artist #13 and they discussed Moon Knight a little:

Cooke: Did you help develop Moon Knight?

Perlin: Well, actually, Moon Knight was developed by Doug and I for Werewolf. I designed the first costume. Marvel wanted us to come up with a new costumed hero, to help sales of the title. Moon Knight was eventually featured in two issues of Marvel Spotlight. Then we never heard about the character again. Down the line, they revived him, but I never had a hand on it again. Never got anything out of it. Unfortunately, Moon Knight was created before the royalty system was established.

Cooke: Did you ever see any royalties?

Yeah, I did pretty well on The Transformers which did well. That did pay well. I made a big mistake at one point. They were looking for somebody to do The Avengers and offered me the book. But I was already doing The Defenders, which was a team book and I didn’t want to do another team book. This was a lot of work with all those super guys. So they asked me to do just the current issue, which was #212, and at that point, they instigated the royalty system. They gave The Avengers to somebody else and that title made great royalties. That one issue I did made more royalties than I made on any other book. I’ve done a lot of “duh!” things like that. I also turned down the G.I. Joe series (thought I did a back-up story in the first issue and the entire second issue).

Perlin famously had a roughly SIX-YEAR run on Defenders from 1980-1986, working with writer Ed Hannigan at first, then J.M. DeMatteis, and finally with Peter B. Gillis (by which point the series had been re-titled New Defenders)….

Daniel Best interviewed Perlin about his departure from Marvel to Valiant in the late 1980s:

Best: What prompted you to go over to Valiant with Shooter?

Perlin: It was a more creative job. At Marvel I’d oversee what somebody else had done, and show them how. To a guy who had spent most of his lifetime pencilling, inking and drawing and meeting deadlines, working around the clock this was very unsatisfying. When I got the offer, Shooter promised me that there’d be more creativity; I’d be in there creating comic books and characters. I’d get to draw a books, I’d get to edit books and I’d get to do almost everything that needed to be done around a comic book. And more money. So I went and it was an adventure. I’d never been in on the start of a comic book company and I have no regrets. We did some pretty nice stuff there.

Perlin was the original artist on Solar, Man of the Atom, written by Jim Shooter. Perlin also went to work as an editor at Valiant, but he is probably best known for his hit co-creation, Bloodshot (who he co-created with Kevin VanHook and Bob Layton). He discussed Bloodshot with Best, as well:

Perlin: Are you familiar with Bloodshot?

Best: Yes I am. Out of all the Valiant characters the ones I liked the most were the Eternal Warrior for some reason, and Bloodshot – he even looked cool.

Perlin: He looked good until they made him look ugly. I don’t think that character should have been ugly. He was supposed to be a ladies man; he should have been what we made him to be in the first place. But when the comic book sales started dropping they didn’t know what to do so they started screwing around with it and that’s what happened.

And later….

Best: Your favourite character that you’ve ever drawn.

Perlin: I think it would be Bloodshot. I had a hell of a lot to do with creating the character. I would say it’s Bloodshot.

In recent years, Perlin had done a number of commissions for fans, especially featuring Moon Knight.

Perlin’s daughter, Elaine, confirmed her father’s passing on social media.

Our condolences to Perlin’s family and friends.