The Summer of '85 and the Megaton Man Reprints That Never Happened

By the summer of 1985, it was clear that Megaton Man was the hottest title Kitchen Sink Press had ever published to that point. Issues #1 and #2 (from December 1984 and February 1985, respectively) had sold out print runs of about 17,000 and 19,000, respectively; sales had peaked with #3 at something like 23,000. Attending cons in Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego, I heard from fans and dealers all summer begging that we reprint the sold-out issues so they could be bought at cover price, instead of the $12 and $9, respectively, they were going for on the after-market.

This for a series that really was only accepted for publication because a superhero parody seemed viable in the Direct Sales Market as a color comic, and since the publisher needed at least one or more additional titles to negotiate a unit-cost price break on the exorbitantly expensive (and eventually money-losing) color Spirit.

Denis flatly refused to consider going back to press, or even pricing it second printings. He gave as his reason the prohibitive expense of going back to press on a color comic; black-and-white was also out the question for Megaton Man, since to him it would have represented a downgrade. Paradoxically, he insisted that out-of-print collector’s items would fuel reader interest in the series over the long term. I believed this to be wrong-headed at the time, and I still believe it was a fatal move in terms of Megaton Man’s long-term prospects.

Keeping issues in print, even going back to press for relatively tiny print runs, had already proven to be key to the success of TMNT as it later would for Bone, and already had proven on a more modest level on “ground-level” titles Elfquest and First Kingdom—all of which were black-and-white comics. Even if profit margins were small or nonexistent on incremental print runs of 1,500 or 3000 at a time, it built the readership—readers who knew they were not getting a first printing but actually wanted to read the whole series from the beginning.

 

Kitchen finally reprinted Megaton Man #1 in 1989, but the ten-issue series and three-issue Return of Megaton Man mini-series were already in the past, completely negating any possible readership-building function.

Reading the entirety of Megaton Man became an impossibility for readers who arrived late; not surprisingly, readership never grew past the third issue. By the summer of 1985, with a publisher adamantly refusing to do his job (that being to publish and build a readership), I began contemplating an endgame for the Megaton Man series, which had only been intended as a one-shot in the first place, and moving on to other projects. Shortly thereafter, I began Border Worlds as a back-up feature in Megaton Man with issue #6; in an Amazing Heroes Preview issue not long after that, we announced that the series would end with #12 (in fact because the The Spirit and Death Rattle were hemorrhaging money in color, the color line came to an end before the spring of 1986, and #10 became the last issue of Megaton Man.

To this day, I am convinced that had issues #1 and #2 been kept in print in some form—even if the publisher lost a few hundred bucks per printing, this still would have been the cheapest way to boost readership for the title in the long run and increase sales on subsequent issues—the profits of which would have more than offset any losses on reprints. Had sales on Megaton Man kept climbing as we rolled into 1986—instead of languishing at a level at which I was making less than the colorists—I’m sure my imagination would have followed, and I’d have been thinking of storylines to extend the series, not exit strategies to move on from a parody the publisher considered an ephemeral, passing fad.

Related: How the Return of Megaton Man Signaled the Beginning of the End
___________
Read the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series! New prose chapter every Friday!

If you’re on Facebook, please consider joining the Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series Prose Readers group! See exclusive artwork, read advance previews, and enjoy other special stuff.

___________

All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2022, all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.