Of Pot-Shots and Parodies: The Illusion of Critique!

Reproduced here is one of the panels (from Megaton Man #2, Kitchen Sink Press, February 1985) that gave rise to the idea that Megaton Man was parodying the contemporary comic book industry circa 1984-1985. As I've explained elsewhere, this was an erroneous perception.

Panels like this one - pot-shots, really - gave fans (and the publisher) the impression I was making fun of the current comic book market, like Jim Valentino was in normalman. Far from it; I was basically trying to integrate and burn off the influences I had absorbed from reading comics a decade earlier. From Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, February 1985). ™ and © Don Simpson 2018, all rights reserved.

I was parodying the Silver Age comics of the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, the material I grew up reading. I got hooked in the summer of 1972, but there were still comics circulating among older kids in the neighborhood dating back at least five years. The mid-seventies was also the heyday of "Giant-Size" and "Treasury" reprints, Origins of and Son of Origins by Stan Lee, and even monthly reprint series -- all of which looked dupey and blown out (the reproduction was terrible).

However, to the extent that the major companies were still mining the same Lee-Kirby-Ditko veins in the 1980s as they had been for fifteen years, it was possible for Megaton Man to be mistaken as a critique of current comics. Throw in a few pot-shots like this one (of the still-recent Secret Wars) and a few other jabs at current creators and controversies, and it might of seemed I was conducting an aesthetic war on the 1980s industry.

In a sense, I certainly was, but I was seldom seeing more than the covers of any of the books that were coming out of New York; I had outgrown superheroes and really couldn't stomach the work of a bunch of derivative hacks whom I regarded as inferior to industry stalwarts and workhorses (and well-rounded craftsmen) like John Romita, John Buscema, Gil Kane, and Jack Kirby.

I recall an interview in Amazing Heroes in which John Byrne, a fan of Megaton Man #1-2, speculated that perhaps, for all he knew, I was satirizing some of the things he had been doing on his titles, in addition to what Stan and Jack had done. Sorry, no; I never regarded any of the late-70s or early 80s perpetuations of any of the mainstream superhero comics to be anything other than counterfeit.

Kirby monsters meet Steranko, Neal Adams, and Berni Wrightson inking influences, with some Artie Simek lettering (talk about a melting pot!). From Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, February 1985). ™ and © Don Simpson 2018, all rights reserved.

I had outgrown superhero comics by the time I had "turned pro," although I still was trying to rid myself of all the stylistic influences - from Jim Steranko to Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy series of how-to books - in my cartooning. To some extent, I never would accomplish this, and as I look back on my early work from this period, it's pretty clear the superiority complex I suffered from was unearned. My work was just as crude, derivative, hackneyed, deficient, and neurotically overworked as the mainstream work-for-hire work of my contemporaries that I thought I was putting to shame.

What endures for me about this work is not the parody aspects - the overt references to popular icons - so much as my assimilation of technique, and ultimately, the flecks of character and personality that begin to emerge in my cast of characters, even at this early stage. Although diamonds in the rough and encrusted with gratuitous stylistic quirks, Trent Phloog (Megaton Man), Stella, Pammy, Preston, Bing (Yarn Man), Rex Rigid, and even Kozmik Kat seem now to me to be wholly original in personality, even if trapped in the makeshift roles and costuming of parody.

Read my YA prose experiment: The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series!
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Also: Will the Real Megaton Man Please Stand Up? | More on Megaton Man and Why I'm Still Drawing Him!

"Lets Me Do My Thing!": The Mystery of Alyssa G. and Her (Un)Broken English

It's been obvious for a long time that the internet and social media in particular has brought out every form of kook, conspiracy theorist, and beyond-the-fringe nutjob with their own idiotic take on the world. On my Facebook page, for example, fans are thrilled to have located the creator of Megaton Man, a comic book series they enjoyed as a teenager, but their very next post is how I'm a libtard for not caring about John Podesta's emails.

But I wasn't quite aware how far this mass insanity has spread until last week, when I came across one self-styled social commentator bold enough and ignorant enough to have made up his own grammatical rules to fit his conspiratorial world view, one in which evil corporations are not only taking over his personal Matrix but trying to staff fast-food restaurants with grammar-challenged immigrants.

What sparked his ire was a particular job recruitment poster he saw at McDonald's somewhere in the northeastern corridor of the United States. In it, a young girl, presumably of Latino ethnicity named "Alyssa G." and clearly enjoying her day off in a pink tanktop and blue yoga pants (and presumably listening to an NPR podcast on her device), declares, "Today my job let me do my thing."

"Today my job let me do my thing." It's called the past tense. But to Our Social Commentator, it's a conspiracy not only to recruit and exploit minorities, but also a sinister plot to spread "broken English." (Also Spanish, since this version of the poster is bilingual; so much for McDonald's secret scheme to appeal to Latinos, which Our Social Commentator is convinced he has single-handedly uncovered!)

Our social commentator created a video of this, with a very creative three-minute handheld shot of the poster affixed inside the glass door of a busy McDonald's. While we get seasick watching this cinema verite image, he reads the tagline from the poster over and over again, slowly, in a mock-Hispanic cadence, convincing himself that "my job LET me do my thing" is "broken English." Not only is McDonald's Corporation, in his view, intentionally appealing to Latinos from "down south" to come north and work for them for less than a liveable wage (and take away gainful employment from "legal" American citizens, as he repeatedly asserts), but they are also encouraging bad grammar.

Of course, "Today my job let me do my thing" is perfectly correct written English, grammatically speaking. It's called the past tense. "Today my boss let me have the day off; I went for a jog and listened to itunes; I did my thing rather than salt french fries or stand for eight hours at the take-out window. Today my job let me do my thing."

(One could, arguably, insert a comma after "Today." "Today, my job let me do my thing." But why quibble?)

Not only is Our Social Commentator an illiterate stooge, he's also an inept cameraman with no sense of artistic composition. Technology enables such mental mediocrities to seem reasonable and "part of the conversation."

Presumably her job didn't let her do her thing yesterday; maybe tomorrow it won't either. Maybe she'll have to go in to work tonight and perform oral sex on her (white male) boss to get the day off she wants next week (the comments on Our Social Commentator's video posting make even worse misogynistic, racist, and hateful remarks about "Alyssa G.," believe me). But today, her job let her do her thing.

Our social commentator, however, insists that his willful misreading of the phrase amounts to "broken English," and demands for the sake of Civilization that the word "let" be corrected with an "s" on the end, so as to read "lets." "Today my job lets me do my thing" would be his amended phrase.

However, "Today my job lets me do my thing" makes no grammatical sense whatsoever. In the simple present tense, which is what "lets" is, her job would have to let her do her thing every day, not just today. "My job lets me do my thing everyday." In fact, McDonald's already has a variation of this recruitment poster that reads, "My McJob lets me do my thing."

"My McJob lets me do my thing." Since the letting isn't confined to just today, it's also perfectly correct grammar. It's called the simple present tense.

Presumably this applies not only to today but everyday.

The only way "Today my job lets me do my thing" would make grammatical sense is if the person speaking were a senior citizen. "Fifty years ago, I had to work sixteen hours a day in a coal mine. But today my job lets me do my thing. That's because I'm basically retired and sit around all day sipping coffee in a McDonald's." In other words, "today" would have to mean "nowadays." And it is hard to imagine how a young woman going for a job on her day off would be using the word "today" in that sense.

McDonald's also has a recruitment poster with two other imaginary employees. "Join our team," it announces. One employee, a woman in a blazer, chirps, "Today my job got me promoted to general manager." A second, a hardworking student, says, "Today my job got me two credits closer to my degree." The third, our lovely Alyssa G., repeats her familiar tagline, "Today my job let me do my thing."

Which phrase is in broken English? That's a trick question, because all are perfectly grammatically correct. "Today my job past tense." Written communication never ceases to amaze!

Which of those phrases are "broken English"? Answer: none of them! They are all perfectly grammatically correct. It's called the past tense.

I commented on Our Social Commentator's handheld video clip. I wrote, "You're quite the grammarian. The phrase is perfectly correct as is."

His response was, "No it wasn't, asshole."

Now, a phrase is either grammatically correct or it isn't; it's not a question of is or wasn't.

Which leads me to think not only that Our Social Commentator (who is a self-professed Right-Wing bigot, I should mention, in case that wasn't already clear) is inventing "broken English" in commercial messages where none exists to suit his conspiratorial world view; he also seems to have a serious learning disability (possibly dyslexia), which prevents him from recognizing and distinguishing verb tenses in written English.

No doubt, McDonald's knows who they want to appeal to with their recruitment posters. And maybe they do want to staff their counters and drive-through windows with underpaid illegal immigrants just to fuck up my man Commentator's Extra Value Meal order. But I think it's safe to say that McDonald's Corporation, or its advertising creators, at least know the correct usage of present and past tenses.

In a world of ignoramuses with smart phones, subscriber channels, and silo thinking that is impervious even to objective Standard English usage, that is some reassurance at least.

Time was when hate-mongers, crazies, and other morons who shouldn't be let out on their own recognizance had to resort to cutting letters out of magazines (to compose ransom notes), or had to type out their ramblings (chain letters and other documents of their delusion) on portable typewriters, replete with misaligned text and worn-out ribbons. Such communication, on its face, looked amateurish; it was invalidated and dismissed by minds of average intelligence a priori.

Nowadays, slick technology comes with designer fonts, automatic alignments, and reasonably professional results, even if the operator doesn't know how to hold their smartphone still long enough to make their ignorant assertions. To discern the lies and insanity from legitimate communication requires of us, more than ever, critical thinking. That, and a sharp eye for detail. Luckily, the shitheads still give themselves away because the elements of basic grammar will always elude them.

"Leaves me alone and lets me do my thing!" Okay, pal.

You Can't Go Home (or Back to #1) Again: Retroactive World-Building and the Limits of a Parody Vehicle

Since 2015, I've been working on more Megaton Man material, some of which I have posted in some form or another on my various blogs or in Facebook albums. Even more than these sketches, preliminaries, and finished art in certain cases, I've written a large quantity of words in various texts that serve as working documents. I've come to regard this process as a kind of "retroactive world-building," and while I'm not prepared to announce any new publications, I'd like to let you in on how this process is unfolding.

When I originally created Megaton Man #1, in about a 13-month period in 1983-84, I really wasn't planning anything more than a one-shot. I aspired to create a "masterpiece" in the classic sense of a work demonstrating my mastery of the various skills (penciling, inking, lettering, etc.). Part of the reason I chose a humorous vein was because it allowed me to lampoon various artistic styles that had influenced me (at the time I was heavily immersed in Silver Age artists like Jack Kirby and Neal Adams, not the easiest styles to strike a happy medium with, and an overdose of Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy series of books). As a parody, I could exaggerate these affectations to the max, and turn a weakness (my obviously misspent youth studying cartooning styles too closely) into a strength.

In narrative terms, I never bothered to plan out the world in which Megaton Man and other character operated, taking it for granted that readers would recognize the basic genre tropes (the newsroom of a metropolitan daily, the headquarters of a Megahero team, the secret laboratory of a mad scientist, the orbiting killer satellite, etc.). It never occurred to me to map out exactly where these assets might be located other than a generic east coast Megatropolis (which was interchangeably identified as New York City). Being from the Midwest, I probably couldn't have located Long Island in relation to New Jersey in those days, anyway.

In terms of relationships, family trees, and timelines, I also made things up as I went along. If a character had to make reference to their age, where they worked, where they went to school, or other data, it was improvised on a need-to-know basis, and hopefully I would remember to look up the back issue if such information were required again.

I proceeded this way through ten issues of Megaton Man in this fashion, rarely sketching a costume design before a new character appeared on the Bristol board page, and only working from the sketchiest of written (sometimes by hand, sometimes typed) plot outlines. I worked in what was widely dubbed the "Marvel Style," after the fashion of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, where the picture track came first and the scripted text was lettered onto the boards later, before inking. I worked somewhat differently on Border Worlds, often writing more thorough texts before drawing, and over the next three decades, I've employed every variation from completely improvised thumbnail sketches to completely tight, descriptive scripts.

But it wasn't until 2015 that I began to look back over my previous Megaton Man and Bizarre Heroes comics (including various Megaton Man mini-series and one-shots) that I began to wonder how the Megaverse, for lack of a better term, worked, both temporally and geographically.

Again, I'm not prepared to give anything away at this time, but suffice it to say that I have been compiling notes, background stories, family trees, timelines, and the like ever since, in such profusion as to belie my earlier reputation as a satirist who scoffed at all those fanboy "continuity freaks." I suppose when it comes to the history of my own characters, and what they've lived through, it has great value to me in retrospect. In other words, I'm a big, fat, hypocrite.

I've already discussed elsewhere on this blog how Megaton Man #11-#14, at the publisher's insistence, became The Return of Megaton Man #1-#3, and how this was a traumatic moment for me in many ways. Part of this is because of the still-present desire to be able look back over the past thirty years, despite the infrequency of Megaton Man appearances, and be able to count up all the issues simply by looking at the last one (instead, I have to always use a pencil - to make a long story short, some 37 issues between Megaton Man and Bizarre Heroes that take place in the Megaverse).

But the renumbering, which after all I did agree to and now cannot but fully own, was only half the story. The more fundamental issue was that, with the planned issues #11-#14, I had placed the characters on what I thought was a more sound footing that would allow me to go forward. I felt that I had gained a second wind and now saw the characters and situations more objectively, as having value in their own right, rather than as vehicles to parody other icons.

Whereas the first ten issues of Megaton Man took place largely in Megatropolis/New York, #11 showed the entire core cast of character (Trent Phloog without his Megaton Man powers, a pregnant Stella Starlight, Pammy Jointly, Preston Percy, and housemate Clarissa James) in their Civilian (non-Megahero) guises, all in a kind of Doonebury or Big Chill-style communal off-campus house in Ann Arbor.

A sampling of the Ann Arbor trajectory that remained intact in Return of Megaton Man #1 (Kitchen Sink Press, 1988).

This setting, especially with Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl's love-child on the way, gave a whole new wrinkle to the continuity I had created. The wild days of Megaheroics in the Big City were now in the past; character-driven stories in a counter-cultural milieu would be the new tone going forward. At least this was what I had in mind, whether I could completely articulate it or not.

What was remarkable about this subtle transformation was that it emerged organically out of the previous storyline (Stella and Pammy left Megatropolis at the end of Megaton Man #1 and met Clarissa in Ann Arbor in issue #4, and Megaton Man lost his Megapowers at the end of issue #10), and I though it also fit in with the gestalt of Kitchen Sink Press (a legacy Underground publisher) and the tenor of the times (the late 80s). And as I said, I had my second wind, and felt I could produce a lot more stories in this vein.

In any case, my fans and publisher had wanted more Megaton Man, and this was what more Megaton Man looked like. I thought there would have been some appreciation.

In the end, what was most hurtful about the disagreement that ensued between me and my publisher over renumbering the series was not the so much the new and intentionally deceptive, confusing, and meaningless #1 itself (which I considered at the time to be outright prostitution - and still do), or even that in principle that the publisher had already tacitly accepted Megaton Man #11-14 for publication and was now subsequently reneging, and blaming me for all kinds of character shortcomings in the bargain.

You figure it out: a collection of Megaton Man covers over the decades.

What was really at issue was that, while gimmicky renumbering may have been more easily accommodated in the earlier, more parodic Megaton Man (still with some difficulty), it was even more out of tune with where I was taking the character(s) and storyline in this new iteration.

In other words, asking me to masquerade each new issue of Megaton Man as one-shot #1 targeting the whatever hot trend was going on in comics at the moment revealed that the publisher still saw Megaton Man merely as a parody vehicle (whereas the editor, the late Dave Schreiner, was in fact encouraging me to see the narrative as an ensemble of characters that were original and valuable in their own right).

 The most common misunderstanding about Megaton Man is that it was a parody of current comics, circa 1985. It was not; it never was. I was accessing the comics that I had read largely ten years earlier - the Silver Age comics, the Treasury-sized and Giant Sized reprints, Origins ..., Son of Origins ..., Bring on the Bad Guys, all that stuff. What was going on in the current mainstream titles, beyond being counterfeit perpetuations, didn't interest me in the slightest. The parody of the month - that's what Valentino was doing in normalman, lampooning a different industry imprint or genre each month. Sure, I gave Megaton Man a black costume for a panel in issue #1, a clear reference to Secret Wars; but beyond one-off potshots like that - the endless mutants, the grim and gritty alcoholic suicidal protagonists, all that stuff - I pretty much ignored. I was mainly interested in fusing together my pastiche of influences and integrating it into something organic of my own, if that were possible. What the industry was doing for the most part couldn't have been of less interest to me one way or another.
 
Lampooning the latest movie or company-wide crossover was not beyond my capabilities, mind you. In fact, the most "pure" parody I ever created, in a Not Brand Echh! sense, was the two-issue Splitting Image I created for Jim Valentino and Rob Liefeld at Image Comics in 1993.

From Return of Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1988).

But what I wanted to do with Megaton Man #11-14 and subsequent issues, which I had shown the editor and publisher in plot form, was more character-driven - still with some lampooning of superhero cliches, but not to the extent the publisher was now demanding.

In other words, the publisher just wanted to publish Megaton Man #1 over and over again, with different current pop-culture references, whereas what I had come up with was a Megaton Man narrative that would actually grow. What a self-indulgent primadonna was me!

The angst of Megaton Man #11 aside, when I came to review the extant material in 2015, I continually returned the one-shots of the late 1980s (and particularly Yarn Man #1 of October 1989) as the point that I began to completely lose any focus on the Megaton Man cast.

Yarn Man #1 is still a fondly-remembered issue by a lot of fans, and others tell me later Megaton Man adventures are equally favorites. But the impetus I had when I plotted Megaton Man #11-14 just two years earlier, by the time of Yarn Man #1, was completely lost. The folowing installment, Pteranoman #1, was an anthology of three short stories, only one of which featured the Megaton Man cast. After that, I gave up trying to advance any kind of coherent, character-driven narrative by means of the onerous #1 one-shots.

Some of this impetus reasserted itself in the following series, Bizarre Heroes, initially about more "straight" superhero characters I had created in junior high school and since. But the Megaton Man cast somehow subconsciously wrote themselves back into the strip, and by the end of the seventeen-issue run, completely dominated it once again.

I'm recounting all this to say that there is still a considerable amount of material from that communal house in Ann Arbor that has been left untold, and after several years of "retroactive world-building," one of many projects and stories that I have identified as needing still to be told is about a five-year chunk of the 1980s in which those Civilian characters are at the forefront.

If and when these tales ever see the light of day, I can't claim that it is possible now to reconstruct what I may have had in mind at the time I plotted Megaton Man #11-14 with any faithfulness. Moreover, I have gained a considerable amount of life experience, and at the same time insight into the characters, that I simply didn't have three decades ago. And yet that era still captures my imagination, at least as much as later time periods in the History of the Megaverse, which have been steadily coming into view.
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Comics Bait: Why Hate Has Erupted in the Superhero Mainstream

Certainly one of the most unwelcome developments in the world of cartooning in 2018 has been the emergence of a fascistic Far-Right Wing among comic book creators – calling for not only that certain well-known corporate-own trademarks be “restored” to their original straight-white-male secret identity orientation (this will surely make America great again – but don’t call me Shirley) – but also for boycotts and even acts of violence against those they see as corrupting their “hobby” by fighting for social justice (usually hapless editors and publishers with the thankless task of trying to widen comics readership in a dwindling digital age).

Elsewhere I have discussed the many ways the Comics Haters’ “reasoning” makes little sense, and how their political attributions are merely misplaced frustration at having been through the mainstream fuck mill and dumped out, obsolete and useless, on the other side.

What has gone unremarked, as far as I can tell – and perhaps isn’t even all that remarkable – is that these reactionary hate-mongers (one hesitates to use the term “creators”) were all work-for-hire labor (again, one hesitates to use the term “talent”) employed by big mainstream superhero publishers in the 90s and 2000s.

When you think about it, it’s not all that surprising that a Far-Right Comics Hate movement would emerge among work-for-hire superhero has-beens. After all, as freelancers, their minds have necessarily been preoccupied with decades of continuity in the two major superhero universes – not to mention pockets of comics and pop-culture history like Fiction House's Jungle Comics, Lev Gleason-Charles Biro Crime Does Not Pay comics, hardboiled detective fiction, pulps, and the like – leaving little room for nuanced thought.

Comics Haters who decry mainstream comics’ “sudden lurch to the Left” appear blithely ignorant of the rich Leftist orientation of mainstream comics, including this masterpiece: Bernie Krigstein and Al Feldstein’s “Master Race,” from Impact #1 (EC Comics, April 1955).

Much of this material may be viewed as socially regressive (I’ve long maintained it requires a generous sense of humor if not a bit of Philip José Farmer-esque schizophrenia to properly enjoy it), but that’s not my point. Rather, these freelancers have had no choice but to study this material religiously, since making pitches to the Big Publishers for new spins over well-trod ground depends on being knowledgeable about which kinds of soles belong on which boots in which multiverse.

Being immersed in such continuity trivia means these Comics Haters have had little time to read The Nation or The New York Review of Books, let alone listen to NPR or watch the PBS Newshour. By the same token, their lucrative employment allows them to subscribe to cable, and mainstream creators can be forgiven for confusing leggy blondes on Roger Ailes’ Fox News with actual journalists. (Alternative cartoonists, as I can attest, can only afford free, and therefore liberal, broadcast media.)

It also goes without saying that none of the Comics Haters seems to have come from the ranks of alternative comics. The comic book Left – if I can employ such an over-simplified term – traces its lineage back to EC Comics (perhaps the most left-leaning, socially progressive comic book imprint in the history of newsstand comics) and blatantly counter-cultural1960s Undergrounds.

Significantly, neither EC nor the Undergrounds ever generated much in the way of identifiable trademarks to rival the major corporate-owned superhero properties, or for that matter ongoing comic book series or continuing characters. Rather, the Left has always seemed to specialize in one-off short stories (particularly in the case of EC, Harvey Kurtzman's anti-war Frontline Combat and irreverent Mad, and Ray Bradbury adaptations and proto-Rod Serling Twilight Zone black-outs in Shock SuspenStories), and only sporadically-recurring characters such as Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural or Frank Stack’s New Adventures of Jesus. The most notable exception would be Mad Magazine itself, which has since devolved into more of a brand than a property, and Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the closest thing the Underground ever came to launching a licensable commodity.

[Crumb himself, so paranoid about selling out and so revolted by Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation, famously killed off Fritz the Cat, just as the character was on the brink of becoming a household word.]

That’s not to say that Comics Haters are completely ignorant of EC or the UGs; it just that this rich tradition of Leftist comics and comix material has never been on the mainstream freelancer’s required reading list. That’s because the bread and butter of your average hapless freelancer consists of putting together pitches to revamp forgotten Silver Age superheroes and hoping to convince Big Company editors to hire them for the script and art chores. Who would you pitch a spin-off to Bernie Krigstein’s Master Race to, anyway?

As I’ve said before, the “social justice warriors” that Comics Haters see as having taken over mainstream comics have always existed; indeed, nearly all of the characters that are the subject of contention and condemnation for being rebooted as female, LGBTQ, African-American, or asexual by Comics Hate were created by a generation of Left-leaning, socially conscious, and – mostly – Jewish creators, who, if alive today and aware of the controversy, would steadfastly condemn the Comics Haters as the regressive, white-supremacist, Apartheid-mongering pigs that they are.

If the Far Right Comics Hate is more or less ignorant of or willfully oblivious to the Leftist origins of the American comic book and the history of the frankly Leftist EC-UG-Alternative comix lineage, Leftists often display an equivalent ignorance and/or bias against the superhero genre. Those who work in the Leftist tradition tend to have an innate abhorrence for mainstream superheroes (one thinks of Daniel Clowes’ Dan Pussey stories, the constant use of pejoratives like “muscle-boy comics” by Alternative cartoonists, or the bias comics scholars demonstrate for autobiographical, nominally “realist” memoir comics over other genres). Too often, this has resulted in drawing that appears completely ignorant of human anatomy and art history and writing that seldom if ever rises above Beatnik nihilism.

Whether the superhero genre is latently conservative, regressive, or fascistic – as Leftist cartoonists have always feared – even in its most liberal manifestations (one thinks of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams “finding America” riff on Stirling Silliphant’s Route 66 in Green Lantern-Green Arrow), it is curious that mainstream comics have tended to favor continuing series and marketable trademarks while the Left has tended to concentrate on self-contained short stories (come to think of it, Route 66 – in which Buz Murdock and and Tod Stiles tooled across the country in a silver Corvette – has been described as an anthology TV series masquerading as an episodic continuity). Perhaps there is something fractured and discontuous in the Leftist worldview that mitigates against serialized (and therefore capitalist) entertainment.

To finish this essay by making it all about myself – and to place myself as morally superior to all sides in the current controversy – let me just point out that I have always occupied a no-man’s land, thanks to Megaton Man. Ostensibly a parody of Silver Age superhero clichés but initially published by a legacy Underground publisher (Kitchen Sink Press), Megaton Man was neither a mainstream success nor a critical darling; both the Left and the Right found something to hate in it. For the Fantagraphics snobs (for whom I would later make a tidy sum of money with King Kong and the Anton Drek Eros Comix), Megaton Man was obviously a “muscle-boy” comic; for the mainstream, or at least a large swath of those employed by the Big Companies in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a frontal assault on the precious trademarks that represented their livelihoods.

No doubt this is why raising a child out of wedlock, a female-and-black incarnation of the title character (Ms. Megaton Man), an obviously-but-never-outed gay character (Preston Percy), and other “Social Justice Warrior” transgressions in my 1980s storylines flew under the radar.

Neither tribe was paying particular attention.