Today, we put the spotlight on Don Perlin, the longtime Marvel artist who created Moon Knight with Doug Moench nearly 50 years ago in the pages of Werewolf by Night.
Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.
Right off the bat, let me note that it’s not at all that I think that Doug Moench, the co-creator and LONGTIME writer of Moon Knight, is whatever the opposite of unsung is (sung?). As we’ve seen from the success of two of Moench’s major works at Marvel recently (both Shang-Chi’s hit film, a character Moench wrote for a decade in the pages of Master of Kung Fu, and Moon Knight, who Moench co-created and then wrote as back-up feature and then ongoing for years, and then returned and wrote even more stories about in the late 1990s), Moench, too, does not get nearly the credit he deserves for being such a talented and important comic book writer. That said, Moench is in his early to mid 70s (what is 74? Early 70s or mid 70s?), and did a number of interviews with websites and podcasts over the past five years, so as great as Moench is and as underappreciated as Moench is, Moench is at least out there in relatively recent interviews (although it is interesting to note that I haven’t seen a whole lot of interviews with Moench recently, when you’d expect people to want to hear from him with both Shang-Chi and Moon Knight having their moments).
Perlin, on the other hand, is 92 years old (turning 93 this August) and I haven’t seen an interview with him anywhere for about a decade. I know he was still doing commission pieces as recently as 2020, but that’s all I know about the guy and I imagine that that’s more than most people know about him, which I think is is a shame for a guy who started working in comics in the 1940s and yet is still with us!
HOW DON PERLIN WENT TO MARVEL COMICS
As noted, Perlin was like a lot of artists working in comics in the late 40s/early 50s, just scrounging around for wherever they could get 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.
DON PERLIN’S THOUGHTS ON MOON KNIGHT
Jon B. Cooke interviewed Perlin for TwoMorrows’ Comic Book Artist #13 and they discussed Moon Knight a little (it’s really hard to find anything from Perlin about Moon Knight, really):
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).
DON PERLIN ON VALIANT AND HIS CO-CREATION, BLOODSHOT
My buddy 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.
They discussed Perlin’s hit co-creation, Bloodshot.
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./blockquote>
PERLIN RECENT MOON KNIGHT ARTWORK
As noted, Perlin still did commissions as recently as 2019 and 2020. So here are some of his Moon Knight pieces from that period.
From the collection of Ron Chmiel…
From Huggy’s Sandbox…
From the collection of Jim Brown…
From the collection of Matthew P….
If anyone has suggestions about interesting pieces of comic book history, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com.
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