Don McGregor was born in Providence, Rhode Island,[1] where he worked myriad jobs as a young adult, including as a security guard, at a bank, at a movie theater, and "for my grandfather's company, [which] printed, among other things, the patches the astronauts wore on their flights to the moon.

[5] Through 1975, he wrote more than a dozen stories for those magazines and its sister title Vampirella, drawn by artists including Richard Corben and Reed Crandall.

[4] Of "When Wakes the Dreamer", he explained decades later, "[W]hat held it up was that [artist and Warren art director] Billy Graham was going to draw it and he'd done a spectacular opening page for it, but for one reason or another, it just didn't happen. ...

After a stint with Marvel, McGregor returned to write another 18 stories for those Warren titles as well as The Rook between 1979 and 1983, with artists including Paul Gulacy, Alfredo Alcala, and Val Mayerik.

It was at such a meeting that I learned I would be given [the recently launched feature] 'Killraven' (in Amazing Adventures) and Jungle Action, with the [existing African superhero the] Black Panther ... to write.

Former Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas said in 2007, [T]here was a lot of invention and experimentation going on during that period ... Steve [Gerber] and Don turned out be [writers] who advanced the field. ...

As with the futuristic stories of “Killraven”, McGregor's settings were enough outside the Marvel mainstream that he was able to explore mature themes and adult relationships in a way rare for comics at the time.

"[16] African-American writer-editor Dwayne McDuffie said of the 1970s "Black Panther" series: This overlooked and underrated classic is arguably the most tightly written multi-part superhero epic ever. ...

Three years earlier, McGregor and artist Luis Garcia had already presented the first known interracial kiss in any comics in Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror-comics magazine, Creepy #43 (Jan. 1972), in the story "The Men Who Called Him Monster".

McGregor's finest artistic collaborator on the series was P. Craig Russell, whose sensitive, elaborate artwork, evocative of Art Nouveau illustration, gave the landscape of Killraven's America a nostalgic, pastoral feel, and the Martian architecture the look of futuristic castles.

[22] A Marvel "Bullpen Bulletins" page in 1975 announced McGregor's planned radio drama series, Night Figure, that was to have run on WHBI-FM.

[24] They say that McGregor had a passionate fan base and that his writing style was "overwrought, stretched to the limits of conventional grammar, with a pained, self-analytical edge.

"[25] With artist Paul Gulacy, McGregor created one of the first modern graphic novels, Eclipse Enterprises' Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species, a near-future, dystopian science fiction swashbuckler that introduced the title character.

[27] Also for Eclipse, McGregor wrote Detectives Inc., a pair of graphic novels set in contemporary New York City and starring the interracial private eye team Ted Denning and Bob Rainier.