Donald David Perlin (/ˈpɜːrlɪn/; August 27, 1929 – May 14, 2024) was an American comic book artist, writer, and editor.

He is best known for Marvel Comics' Werewolf by Night, Moon Knight (a character he co-created), The Defenders, and Ghost Rider.

[2] At 14, he began studying art under Burne Hogarth, who taught small private classes at either his Central Park West apartment[2] or at a rented "loft in a small building up on upper Broadway in Manhattan and on Saturday mornings we had about half a dozen students.

"[3] Credits were not routinely given in most comics until the 1960s, making identification difficult, and Perlin's first confirmed work is penciling and inking the seven-page story, "Ghosts From the Underworld", by an unknown writer, in the publisher Youthful's Captain Science #3 (cover-dated April 1951).

[5] He recalled he spent three weeks as a ghost artist pencilling over Jules Feiffer's layouts on Will Eisner's newspaper-insert comics feature The Spirit.

He, at that time, was in the Army stationed at Governors Island ... and he’d come in on the weekend and write a story, lay it out roughly on the boards.

[7]Doing comics in the evenings after work,[7] he drew Robur the Conqueror, an adaptation of a Jules Verne novel about a power-mad genius and his "flying apparatus", for The Gilberton Company's Classics Illustrated #162,[8] with the first of its three printings cover-dated May 1961.

[9] In 1962 he began an 11-year stint drawing almost exclusively for Charlton, across a variety of genres, from war to romance comics to hot-rod sports stories.

Strange story by writer Gardner Fox in Marvel Premiere #5 (Nov. 1972), inking Sam Kweskin (credited as "Irv Wesley"),[10] and co-penciling two issues of Thor with John Buscema in 1973, among other work, including a smattering for rival DC Comics' supernatural anthologies.

He had continued in commercial art and package design as his primary employment all these years, Perlin recalled, when had an offer to return to comics full-time: I was going for a job interview with another company to do paste-ups and mechanicals.

[7]Perlin drew Werewolf by Night #17–43 (May 1974 – March 1977), a run that introduced the character Moon Knight, co-created with writer Doug Moench.

[5] Perlin and writer Roger McKenzie developed the idea of Captain America running for the office of President of the United States.

[11] Marvel originally rejected the idea but it would be used later by Roger Stern and John Byrne[12] in Captain America #250 (Oct.

[15] In 1980, Perlin began working on Man-Thing with Chris Claremont, beginning with a crossover with Doctor Strange and continuing until the second to last issue of the series in 1981.

[In that job, he would] take three budding young cartoonists, who were a smidgen away from being professionals, pay them minimum wage, no benefits whatsoever, no sick leave or holidays.

[5] In 2012, Perlin pencilled a new Bloodshot story ("The Tablet") for the Bloodshoot: Blood of the Machine Hardcover, written by Kevin VanHook and inked by Bob Wiacek, his original collaborators on the series.