Ed Brubaker (/ˈbruːbeɪkər/; born November 17, 1966) is an American comic book writer, cartoonist and screenwriter who works primarily in the crime fiction genre. He began his career with the semi-autobiographical series Lowlife and a number of serials in the Dark Horse Presents anthology, before achieving industry-wide acclaim with the Vertigo series Scene of the Crime and moving to the superhero comics such as Batman, Catwoman, The Authority, Captain America, Daredevil and Uncanny X-Men. Brubaker is best known for his long-standing collaboration with British artist Sean Phillips, starting with their Elseworlds one-shot Batman: Gotham Noir in 2001 and continuing with a number of creator-owned series such as Criminal, Incognito, Fatale, The Fade Out, and Kill or Be Killed.

He is also known for co-creating the Winter Soldier identity of Bucky Barnes with Steve Epting.

Brubaker has won numerous awards for his comics work, including seven Eisner Awards, two Harvey Awards, an Ignatz Award, and a GLAAD Media Award. In addition to his work in comics, Brubaker served as the executive producer and co-writer of the 2019 Amazon series Too Old to Die Young, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Brubaker was the child of a Navy intelligence officer, and spent much of his childhood in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. From childhood he read comics that included Captain America and his sidekick Bucky Barnes, which were seminal in the storyline he would one day write when creating the Winter Soldier. Describing his affinity for Captain America's sidekick thus, he has stated, "I was a Navy brat, and he was an Army brat." As Bucky had been killed off before Brubaker began reading comics, he assumed that the character had met his demise in an elaborate, dramatic story, only to find that he had been unceremoniously killed in a single page of The Avengers #4, which Brubaker saw as an injustice, commenting, "I was a 9-year-old kid, and I was horrified." His uncle was screenwriter John Paxton.

Brubaker began his career in comics as a cartoonist, writing and drawing Pajama Chronicles for Blackthorne Publishing, Purgatory U.S.A. for Slave Labor Graphics and several short stories for various small-press anthologies. His most well-known work of the period is Lowlife, a semi-autobiographical series first published by Caliber and later moved to Aeon Press. For Caliber, Brubaker also co-edited an anthology publication titled Monkey Wrench.

In 1991, Brubaker wrote one of his earliest crime stories for the Dark Horse anthology series Dark Horse Presents, which he would continue to contribute to intermittently throughout the decade. Among those contributions were the three-part serial "An Accidental Death", a collaboration between Brubaker and artist Eric Shanower which garnered the two an Eisner Award nomination in 1993, a Godzilla short story and another tale under the "Lowlife" title, this time a romantic triangle explored through three stories with each depicting a different participant's point-of-view. The latter story was collected by Alternative Comics into a standalone publication titled At the Seams, which in turn was nominated for Outstanding Graphic Novel or Collection at the 1997 Ignatz Awards. His other work for Alternative Comics, the humorous and experimental Detour #1, was to be the first issue of a series, though only one issue was published. Detour was nominated for the "Best New Series" Harvey Award in 1998.

Brubaker's last work for Dark Horse Presents was "The Fall", a five-part story illustrated by Berlin creator Jason Lutes about a convenience store clerk who gets involved in a ten-year-old murder mystery after he uses a stolen credit card. In 2001, all five parts were collected into a one-shot by Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. In 2004, IDW Publishing announced the first creator-owned project by Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips, a pirate-themed series titled Black Sails. The creators eventually decided to shelve the series in favor of Criminal (published under Marvel's Icon imprint), and "The Fall" remained Brubaker's last independent comics work until his move to Image in 2012.

In 1995, Brubaker was contacted by DC Comics to write a story about Prez for its "mature readers" imprint Vertigo, after being recommended to the editors by his "An Accidental Death" collaborator Eric Shanower (who was already attached to the project as the artist). The result—Brubaker's first work for one of the two major American comic book publishers—was a one-shot titled Vertigo Visions: Prez, a broad political satire revamping the obscure 1970s Joe Simon creation. Brubaker continued to pitch various ideas to Vertigo but kept getting rejected until Shelly Roeberg asked him to pitch "something [he] didn't think Vertigo would publish", which ended up being Scene of the Crime. The 1999 series marked Brubaker's first collaboration with two artists who would frequently work with him in later years: Michael Lark and Sean Phillips (who joined the project as the inker for issues #2–4). A slacker detective story set in San Francisco, Scene of the Crime was critically acclaimed and brought Brubaker to the attention of Hollywood producers for the first time.