Don Perlin, Comic Book Artist Who Found Success Late, Dies at 94

Don Perlin, a veteran comic book artist who, after decades in the industry, helped create the popular but nontraditional superheroes Moon Knight and Bloodshot, died on May 14 in Jacksonville, Fla. He was 94.

His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his stepson Leslie Blumenfeld.

Mr. Perlin began working in the comic book industry in the late 1940s, but some of his greatest successes came later — first in the 1970s and later in the ’90s.

In 1974, he was recruited by Roy Thomas, an editor at Marvel, to draw the series Werewolf by Night. The next year, as part of that series, he and the writer Doug Moench created Moon Knight, a mercenary armed with silver weaponry to slay supernatural creatures. In 1976, the creative team introduced the idea that Moon Knight had multiple identities, which would eventually be revealed to be a sign of a dissociative identity disorder. In 2022, Oscar Isaac starred as the character in a six-part series on Disney+.

“He appreciated the idea that these characters that he, his colleagues and his friends had created so long ago endured,” said another stepson, the jazz journalist Larry Blumenfeld.

Another enduring character Mr. Perlin worked on was Bloodshot, a hero powered by nanotechnology. The character, created with the writers Bob Layton and Kevin VanHook, first appeared in 1992 in a comic book published by Valiant. Vin Diesel played the character in a 2020 feature film.