2018 Don Simpson Interview

Don Simpson interview from Comic Book Cartoonist, volume 1, number 1 (Comic Art Press, summer 2018), conducted by “Ski” Suharski. © 2018; used without permission.

CBCM: You’re best known as the creator of Megaton Man, a series that basically parodied superheroes, which was what made it so much fun to read. It was like reading Mad magazine with all its parodies of movies and characters that they [did]. So, what made you want to pursue parody, Don?

Don: Megaton Man #1 was originally intended to be a one-shot. I created the character in the late fall of 1982, and he seemed like a vehicle to channel all the fannish influences of my youth. I had grown up reading Marvel and DC comics of the late sixties and early seventies, Warren magazines, Mad magazine, as you mentioned; Al Capp’s L’il Abner was still running as a syndicated strip in The Detroit News at the very end of its run. I thought that with a parody format, I could make fun of all the superhero clichés I had absorbed and make use of all the stylistic [drawing] influences in an exaggerated way at the same time.

I worked on the [first] issue for thirteen months. I thought I would get all that stuff out of my system; then I’d be able to find my own voice. That apparently never happened!

CBCM: For our readers who may not know, can you give them the backstory on Megaton Man and who he is?

Don: Megaton Man is a satricial superhero, an over-muscled goof who doesn’t seem all that bright. But that’s actually a misconception. He’s an earnest, overly-sincere hero who chokes because he’s always trying to live up to what other people expect of him. He is never able to relax and just be himself. He’s surrounded by various other characters, many of whom are quite craven and manipulative, but some who are quite lovely and supportive.

The supporting case has evolved over the years. Yarn Man is sort of a wise-cracking Muppet; Preston Percy is a manipulative Secret Agent; Professor Rex Rigid is the bitter, resentful genius who has a young, beautiful trophy wife, Stella Starlight. Stella is the See-Thru Girl, ostensibly an airhead; she and Megaton Man hook up behind the Professor’s back, which ultimately tears apart the Megatropolis Quartet. She has a son, Simon, the Son of Megaton Man; Simon is the focus of the new material I’m writing. Pamela Jointly is a media personality who has an agenda against megaheroes. Those are the good guys!

And then there are the bad guys such as Bad Guy, who no longer likes to do his own fight scenes. Early on, he became a corrupt New York real estate developer with ties to the military-industrial complex. He was literally something of a parody of Donald Trump before The Apprentice. Whatever became of him?

CBCM: When and how did you come up with the idea of Megaton Man, and who’s drawing style do you think influenced you the most to create such a character?

Don: I came up with the character as a kind of challenge I had with Mike Kazaleh, a cartoonist and animator who went on to draw Ren & Stimpy comics, Captain Jack for Fantagraphics, and many other projects. We wen to junior high school together in suburban Detroit; after [I dropped] out of art school, we were roommates in Midtown Detroit, near the museum and libraries and all that culture! Anyway, we were just a couple of undiscovered geniuses, and our third roommate was a filmmaker who never completed his independent feature film … but I digress.

So Mike, being a humorous cartoonist, and me at the time being a Steranko-influenced serious superhero artiste, had a bet that [each of us] couldn’t do the other kind of cartooning. So, Mike tried superheroes for about a day, and gave up; I tried to do humor, and I stunk at it. But I persisted for weeks and weeks, producing terrible results. I finally drew this over-muscled beach bum with a bunch of bikini-clad bimbos clinging to him like Conan the Barbarian, and it was actually funny …

[Subsequently,] I added the primary-colored costume with the big “M” on the chest. I guess the yellow and blue of the University of Michigan was somewhere in the back of my mind; but I was thinking [of calling the character] Mighty Man or something, initially. Me and the filmmaker tossed around a bunch of possible names, and Megaton just seemed to conjure up that Ronald Reagan – Dr. Strangelove moment of Cold War tension: the Minute Man missile, the neutron bomb, dense-pack warheads, Ground Zero (in Detroit, it was the GM building, that supposedly the Russians would target in case of nuclear attack). Radiation, fallout, thermonuclear war—all of that seemed to tie into Megaton Man, along with the parody of Silver Age superhero clichés!

As far as the art, I had grown up with John Romita, John Buscema, Gil Kane, Jack Kirby, not to mention Marie Severin, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, Murphy Anderson, and every other stalwart of the Silver Age. I absorbed a lot of Mad influence, including Wally Wood, Jack Davis … Al Capp, Frank Frazetta (who ghosted for Al Capp) … you name it, I was influenced by it. Along with a lot of satire and comedy, from Doonesbury to Monty Python to National Lampoon to Saturday Night Live.

CBCM: Megaton Man was first published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1984; they were a fairly well-known and respected publisher of underground comix and reprints of classic strips at the time. So you must have been pleased to have your first comics work published by such a prestigious imprint!

Don: I sent photocopies out to about fifteen different publishers at the time, most of whom are no longer in business. Aardvark-Vanaheim (publisher of Dave Sim’s Cerebus) turned it down, as they had just begun their own parody book, Jim Valentino’s normalman. First Comics turned it down, because they had E-Man, a humorous character by Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton. Joe himself wrote me a rejection letter, regretting that he had to turn it down and wishing me the best. I got a lot of very encouraging rejection letters!

But Denis Kitchen just loved it; he thought it had potential as a color comic. Kitchen Sink was reprinting Will Eisner’s Spirit in color, and Denis was looking for other titles that could succeed in color, and also bring down his unit costs. Eventually Kitchen Sink had a line of color comics that included The Spirit, Death Rattle, and Megaton Man.

So, Denis suggested a bi-monthly series; I didn’t have a single thought in my head beyond the first issue, but I gave it the old college try. I somehow managed ten issues of Megaton Man! It turned out to be the hottest title they had ever published up to that point, but it could never seem to break out of cult status. It was something of a cash cow, cash that got put into a lot of other, more prestigious money-losing projects. The Spirit and Death Rattle actually began to lose money in color; the color line came to an end, and I wrapped up my Megaton Man storyline at ten issues and was eager to try something else.

But yes, it was quite daunting, being published by the publisher of Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon … I lived in Wisconsin for over a year, to be near the publisher, and I saw a lot of great original artwork roll in and out of that place. It was an education. But I never could quite graduate from being the young punk who hadn’t paid his dues, even though Megaton Man was generating a lot of revenue that made other projects possible.

Note: This was an interview for a startup news magazine on comics that was POD and PDF. It seems to have only lasted one issue; I received one print hardcopy as a comp and took the above pictures of it, but have since sold it. The interview may have gone on longer but I failed to archive it properly. What is interesting about it is that it was done prior to the beginning of The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series, the prose series I began writing in 2019. I made this transcription in 2023. –Don.