Prolific comic book artist, editor, and art director Don Perlin passed away peacefully from natural causes on May 14 in the company of his family in Florida.
Donald David Perlin was born in New York on Aug. 27, 1929, and grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn. “My father was what they called a ‘Sunday painter,’” recalled Perlin in a 2003 interview with Adelaide Comics and Books. “He had always wanted to be an artist but circumstances hadn’t allowed it. When I showed up being able to hold a pencil the right way he was thrilled. So it was always planned for me to be an artist. We never figured out what kind of an artist I was going to be.”
Perlin was drawn to comic books and cartooning, and at the age of 14, his father enrolled him in a series of Saturday morning workshops taught by Tarzan comic strip artist Burne Hogarth. “The Hogarth School wasn’t exactly a school,” recalled Perlin in 2003. “Hogarth had rented a loft in a small building up on upper Broadway in Manhattan and on Saturday mornings we had about half a dozen students.”
Perlin was a dedicated student, and not long after his high school graduation, his portfolio landed him his first professional assignment, a “cops and robbers” story published by Fox Features, inking a story penciled by friend and fellow Brooklynite Pete Morisi. A steady career penciling and inking crime, science fiction, and horror stories for Fox and other publishers, including Marvel Comics predecessor Atlas, followed. The versatile artist also provided uncredited assistance to the also-uncredited Jules Feiffer on Will Eisner’s classic comic The Spirit for a few weeks toward the end of 1951. “He was a consummate professional who was capable of drawing whatever style was needed,” recalls longtime friend Ron Evry, who collaborated with Perlin on a comic strip called Hollywood Vibes in 2000.
The young artist was drafted into the United States Army in 1953, and proudly served his country during the Korean War. “After his stint in the Army, he couldn’t find comics work anywhere, so he took a lot of commercial art gigs and did some technical drawings, too, for clients including Boeing” notes cartoonist Jeff Parker. “He studied on his own time and drew comics in his off hours to build a portfolio and took on odd comics jobs on the side. One of those ‘steady’ comics jobs was creating and drawing a born-again Christian comic book character with the very original name ‘Gospel Man.’ Some Evangelical Congregation in New York were the publishers, and they distributed the comics to a small number of churches around the United States. Don was Jewish, so he got a few laughs out of it.”
Perlin would continue to moonlight as an artist on comic book titles as diverse as Hogan’s Heroes for Charlton and illustrated biographies on Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King for Fitzgerald Publications.
By the early 1970s, Perlin was certain that his days as a full-time comic book artist were behind him, but an unexpected phone call from Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas, pulled him back into the fold. “I was going for a job interview with another company to do paste-ups and mechanicals. This was before computers,” Perlin told Bryan Stroud of Nerd Team 30 in a 2010 interview. “I was going in on Monday morning and Sunday morning I got a call from Roy Thomas, [who] 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 I would be interested? One of them was Werewolf by Night and the other was Morbius, The Living Vampire.” Werewolf by Night was a monthly title, while the Morbius feature was published bi-monthly, so Perlin chose the monthly title because it meant twice as much work. “So, from then on, I worked for Marvel and didn’t miss a day.”
Perlin enjoyed working on the title, and developed a loyal fan following during his three-year tenure on Werewolf by Night, a run written primarily by Doug Moench. The Werewolf, aka Jack Russell, resonated with teenage readers who clamored for darker, stranger Marvel heroes in the 1970s, as the reluctant lycanthrope crossed paths with a macabre menagerie of villains and adventurers. One of these characters was the costumed mercenary Marc Spector, better known as Moon Knight, who would become the most famous and enduring of Perlin’s co-creations.
“Moon Knight was developed by Doug [Moench] and I for Werewolf,” recalled Perlin in a 2001 interview with Jon B. Cooke. “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.” Moench would revive the character in the early 1980s with rising star artist Bill Sienkiewicz, establishing the character as fan favorite, and Moon Knight would headline his own Disney+ television series in 2022, demonstrating the lasting appeal and staying power of Perlin’s original design.
Moon Knight was one of Perlin’s most-requested subjects for commissioned pieces at comic book conventions, as well. “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.”
Werewolf by Night was followed by a highly-regarded four-year stint illustrating Ghost Rider, which featured the adventures of motorcycle stuntman Johnny Blaze and his flame-headed alter ego. “Don told me that he really didn’t want the Ghost Rider gig when Marvel offered it,” Jeff Parker recalled. “He hated the idea of drawing motorcycles over and over. But of course Don took the much needed job, and he got a couple of motorcycle model kits to use as reference. He still hated drawing motorbikes all those years though.”
That four-year run established Perlin as a fan-favorite Ghost Rider artist, and served as a major inspiration to the producers of two live-action Ghost Rider movies starring Nicolas Cage. Comic fans and creators also hold that era of the comic book series in high regard.
“Perlin is a fascinating figure, his early stuff in the ‘50s horror era is really intricate, but his late stuff for Marvel is also fascinating in a completely different way, because of how he minimized and streamlined over time,” observes graphic novelist Josh Bayer. “Just refining comics to the point where it’s an instrument of utter story functionality, designed for mass appeal. I loved his run on Ghost Rider, and it’s one of the few Marvel books I tried to find every back issue of.”
It was during his tenure as a Marvel Comics freelance artist that Perlin’s wife, Arlene, mother of their three children – Mindy, Elaine and Howard – passed away after a long battle with cancer. On Oct. 23, 1977, Perlin married Rebecca Blumenfeld and welcomed her and her two sons, Leslie and Larry, into, as his children put it, a “Brady Bunch'' family.
“We lived across the street from each other, and our moms were best friends,” recalled Leslie Blumenfeld. “They were there for each other when they both needed each other. Over the course of about a year, they helped each other through a tragic situation, and that culminated in marriage.
“We were already best friends, the five of us kids, and next thing you know, we were all together under one roof. It was two families that went through two tragedies at the same time. Don’s been a father to us, and my mother’s been a mother to them for 46 years. We never looked back. After being friends, we were brothers and sisters. He knew me when I was five, and became my stepdad when I was about 17.”
Don’s daughter, Elaine Perlin, is quick to point out that he loved all of his children unconditionally, and was overjoyed at how well the two families became one. “My dad was an amazing man, not with just the comics,” Elaine said. “He had two loves of his life, my mom and my stepmom, and we became the real-life Brady Bunch, minus one girl. A nice family dynamic. We don’t believe in that word ‘step’ when we’re talking about our family.”
Leslie’s brother, Larry, said he was grateful for family support at that difficult time in their lives. “I was a precocious teenager, already a writer, and thought of myself as an intellectual,” Larry Blumenfeld said. “I didn’t know much or care much about comics, and didn’t understand any of that, and didn’t really relate to Don, didn’t think he could teach me anything. But the more I got to know him and got to learn about what he did, the more I appreciated it and the more I related to him.
“A comic book artist doesn’t just draw. He creates characters, he’s a cinematographer, a storyteller, a director. I learned a lot about freelance life and creativity from him, and how to pursue my own career as a jazz critic and a writer based on what I learned from his career," he said. "He made a living his entire life as an artist, and that’s quite an accomplishment. He had talent and creativity, but his dedication to the craft and his art made him stand out.”
Perlin followed Ghost Rider with two years drawing the macabre Man-Thing series, further cementing his status as one of Marvel’s top horror and supernatural artists. Always a team player, Perlin went wherever his editors asked, delivering reliable, quality work, never missing a deadline, and he often found himself settling in for several years at a time on a popular Marvel title.
“When I started working with him on Defenders in 1980, Don had been in the business for decades,” recalls writer J.M. DeMatteis. “He started in the late 1940s, but he never let the difference in our age or experience come between us: never talked down to me, never pulled rank.
“In fact, Don was such an enthusiastic collaborator, so bubbling with creative energy, that it sometimes seemed he was the wide-eyed new recruit, not me. We’d talk on the phone regularly and soon became friends. Two kids from Brooklyn, separated by decades, but united by a love of comic books. If you’re working on a monthly series, you hope for an artist who’s a skilled visual storyteller. Don was certainly that—but he was also a warm, genuine human being,” DeMatteis said.
That humanity always came through in Perlin’s storytelling, and readers connected with that personal touch, according to his family. “It’s surreal to see all these people talking about him and his art. I never really read the comics, it wasn’t my thing,” daughter Elaine Perlin said. “Around the time I was 11 years old, he worked for Charlton Comics, and did these love stories, and I enjoyed them. He even tried to get monsters into the love stories, ‘I Married A Monster!’ When he’d talk to the Werewolf by Night writer over the telephone, it sounded like they were discussing real people that they knew.”
The real people that Perlin knew sometimes literally found their way into his artwork, too. “The publishers gave him leeway in his storytelling," Leslie Blumenfeld said. “They went from giving him full scripts to just simple paragraphs, because they trusted him to create, to tell stories. He was a storyteller in real life, too – you never got a simple answer from him, you always got a whole story.
“Everything he did was carefully researched. He was a huge history buff. Even the smallest background details were historically correct. And just for fun, he even worked us into some of his comics. One of his Ghost Rider comics has a poster advertising a concert featuring ‘Big Les & his sax!’ People he loved knew he was thinking about them,” she said.
In the mid-1980s, Perlin had an opportunity to showcase his technical illustration skills and his versatility as he was tapped to draw Transformers, a monthly comic book series based on the popular Hasbro toy line and television cartoon. “Don and I teamed up together on Marvel's Transformers comic for two years back in the 1980s; I was the writer and he was the penciler,” recalled Bob Budiansky. “What I remember most about him from that experience was how much I enjoyed working with him.
“From the beginning of our partnership I knew that he would have preferred to draw a book with a lot more humans and a lot fewer robots in it, but that didn't stop him from putting his best effort into every issue he drew. He did a great job bringing my stories to life, and came up with some truly spectacular visuals over the course of his run — just look at what he came up with when I asked him to draw a living space bridge in issue #18. No matter what crazy ideas I asked him to put on paper or how many Transformers I jammed into a plot, he would always rise to the task. I was lucky to have worked with him and to get to know him—not just as an artist, but as a person. He was a true pleasure to be around.”
Editor-in-chief Jim Shooter took note of Perlin’s people skills and artistic ability and asked him to leave the Transformers series to take a staff position as Marvel’s Managing Art Director. “The senior art director at the time was John Romita, the executive art director,” Perlin said in an interview with Adelaide Comics and Books. “I was what you’d call the Managing Art Director. [I’d take] three budding young cartoonists, who were a smidgen away from being professionals … [and] they stayed for a year to do the [in-house] changes and corrections [to freelancers’] artwork. The editors would bring the pages and things that they wanted changed, corrected or fixed or whatever, and it was up to me to see that was done. I was training these young guys and after about a year they were ready to go out and get work. That was the primary purpose of that job. I was a teacher, more or less.”
Perlin continued as an art director for three years when longtime friend Bob Layton, who had first worked with Perlin in 1978 on an issue of Ghost Rider, approached him with a business proposition that would allow him to get in on the ground floor of a new comic book publishing company. “When I left Marvel to help co-found Valiant Comics, Don reluctantly came along, but became a powerhouse force as editor, teaching our young fledgling artists as well as penciling Solar and working closely with Barry Windsor-Smith in that universe of the Man of the Atom,” Layton recalled.
Perlin’s reluctance was tempered by the fact that the man who had hired him as a Marvel art director, Jim Shooter, was the co-founder and would serve as editor-in-chief of Valiant Comics. Shooter and Layton promised Perlin an integral role in crafting the visual identity of the upstart comic publisher. “It was a more creative job,” Perlin told historian Daniel Best in an early 2000s interview. “At Marvel, I’d oversee what somebody else had done, and show them how. To a guy who had spent most of his lifetime penciling, inking and drawing and meeting deadlines, working around the clock [like] this was very unsatisfying.
“When I got the offer [in 1991], Shooter promised me that there’d be more creativity; I’d be in there creating comic books and characters. I’d get to draw 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 penciled one of Valiant’s first series, Solar, Man of the Atom, featuring a contemporary take on a character created by writer Paul S. Newman, editor Matt Murphy, and artist Bob Fujitani for publisher Gold Key in 1962. Rather than stick with Perlin’s preferred method of launching a title and staying with it for several years, Layton wanted to expand Valiant’s publishing line and encouraged his mentor to oversee and launch a series featuring a brand-new, wholly original Valiant character.
“When I offered him the penciling on the launch of a new title, Bloodshot, he was hesitant to leave Solar," Layton said. "As it turned out, once I paired him with writer Kevin VanHook, it became the most popular series of his long career. I even named the monsters in the Turok N64 video game after him. He did not think that was so funny ... until the game became a bestseller.”
VanHook was a relative newcomer when he was paired with Perlin on Bloodshot, an action series about a super-soldier whose blood is infused with nanite technology that grants him powerful, deadly abilities. Perlin’s bold, iconic character design and VanHook’s gritty scripts made the title a breakout hit for Valiant when the character debuted in late 1992. VanHook was grateful for the opportunity to learn from the veteran artist, who was then more than four decades into his professional career.
“Uncle Don, as most people in the office called him, treated me as a peer and a professional from the beginning. He was also my friend,” VanHook said. “When we did our first book together, he was 62 and I was 26. Our ages were palindromes. He liked the fact that I listened to his stories of his life. He had been around.”
One of VanHook’s favorite stories came from Perlin’s childhood, and a brief detour along the path to his career as a comic book artist: “He had always been physically big, even as a child. He said that when he played with the other kids outside between buildings, some of the women would shout, ‘the Haagen is killin’ der Kinder!’ He told me that they were calling him ‘The Horse,’ and that he was too rough with the smaller kids.
“He liked to wrestle. In fact, he decided that he was going to do it professionally. On the night of his first pro match, he was outside the door, waiting his turn, when the preceding match wrapped up and the winner walked out, with his face a bloody pulp. ‘And, Kevin, dis guy walked out and looked like a pile of bloody meat. An’ he was the winner! So I said, "I think I’m gonna go draw funny books."'”
The “funny books” were definitely the way to go. While most of Perlin’s contemporaries were winding down their careers and looking to retirement, he found himself busier than ever at Valiant as the artist of a best-selling hit series, and traveling around the world to sign books for fans young enough to be his grandchildren.
“When Bloodshot #1 came out and was a big hit, selling around a million copies, Don set up a paid signing appearance at his local comic book store,” VanHook recalled. “I told him I didn’t have to be paid to sign there, since it was his local shop. ‘They’re offering money and they’re gonna pay it! Let’s go do this,’ he said. And we did. Several hours. It was fun. As happy as I was for my own newfound success, I was honestly more happy for the 62-year-old that was an overnight success forty years in the making.
“When we did conventions together, fans were just as excited for his signature as they were for the hot young artists from Image Comics,” VanHook continued. “He was a good guy who loved his family and his friends. His politics leaned more and more away from mine over the years, but he also knew that I just considered him that crazy Uncle that I loved who I never talked politics with.”
After nearly fifty years as a full-time artist, Perlin went into semi-retirement in 1994, when Valiant was sold to Acclaim Entertainment. Three years later, he and Becky, still living in Brooklyn after all this time, moved to Florida, establishing their new home just down the road from Larry Blumenfeld and his family.
“We – my wife, my three kids – we were extremely close with them,” Blumenfeld said. “My kids grew up in their house, you could ride your bike over there, two miles away. They helped shape who my kids are.”
Despite his “retirement," Layton almost immediately coaxed Perlin into illustrating one last mini-series for the Acclaim Comics line. “Later, I asked him to work with me on a silly cartoon series I created called The Bad Eggs,” Layton recalls. “He voiced his absolute dislike for going from serious superhero comics to goofy satirical dinosaurs throwing poop at each other. But, as it turned out, aided by the beautiful embellishment of [inker] Gonzalo Mayo, it slowly became a labor of love for him.
“After Valiant, we both relocated to Florida and stayed in touch,” Layton continued. “We occasionally did a few commissions, charity drawings and Indy covers together, as well as meeting at local Sunshine State conventions. He was a stubborn, opinionated man. But ... he also had a heart of gold. I will miss arguing with him.”
Perlin was very affable and social in person, and enjoyed spending time with his fellow artists at comic book conventions and was very active in the local and national chapters of the National Cartoonists Society. “Don was a great and generous friend to [my wife] Pat and me, and to countless admirers as well,” Jeff Parker said. “He and I served closely together as he, the Chairman, and I, the Secretary/Treasurer of the Florida Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society for a while in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I relished every call and meeting to talk over some NCS event and issue poured forth in his fluent Brooklyn-ese.”
Perlin loved his association with the National Cartoonists Society and the opportunities that it presented to socialize and form lasting friendships with his fellow comics professionals . “One of Don’s proudest nights took place at the Reuben Awards banquet in Pasadena in 1998 when he took home the NCS Reuben Division Award for Best Comic Book Artist,” Parker noted. “He was so pleased to have won this award, given to him by his peers, more than any of his other grand accolades.”
Perlin would take on occasional cover illustrations, short stories, and other freelance assignments, as well as commissioned works over the next three decades, but spent the majority of those “retirement” years enjoying time with his wife, Becky Perlin, and their two daughters, three sons, eight grandchildren, and their great-granddaughter.
That extended family gathered for Perlin’s funeral service on May 17, and in accordance with his wishes, it was a spiritual, fond look back at a life well lived. The memorial commenced with military honors acknowledging his service during the Korean War, and a rabbinical service followed.
“The Jewish faith and Jewish religion were important to him, and he had a Jewish burial,” Larry Blumenfeld noted. “But he saw his work and the world of comic books as something close to a spiritual calling, as well. I read a passage from How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way at his service. He was very active in the Jewish community and in the comic book community, yes, but he was equally as passionate about the brotherhood and faith of the comic book world. There was a certain amount of humanity invested in all of his characters, and I think that’s why so many people related to his stories. It was almost like he was speaking about parables when he would discuss these characters.”
Perlin continued to make friends throughout his entire life, always up for conversation about his family and about his comic book career. “An artist from his nursing home showed up at the funeral, and told us how he and Don had bonded over their artwork, befriended each other," Leslie Blumenfeld said. “In the hospital, one of the nurses there kept coming in to check on Don because he was a huge fan of Don’s, just to be around him. Everybody wanted to be around Don.”
That spirit kept Perlin active and engaged with his friends and the fans who had grown up on his comics. “Don had a dream of being a comic book artist when he was young, and he had a career that lasted well beyond his official retirement,” Blumenfeld said. “People still wrote to him and requested commissions of the characters they loved, and his craft was just as sharp as ever well into his eighties. He even had a drawing board at the nursing home, right up until he died, still drawing right to the end.
“He fought for good, he was a protector, and if someone needed help, he answered the call. He was one of those guys who was famous for superheroes, but off the page, to us, he was a superhero.”
The post Don Perlin, 1929-2024 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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