Convoluted Comics & Stories: Retroactive World-Building the Megaton Man Universe!

My former publisher recently remarked on how I should have ditched my convoluted storylines and just focused on hit-and-run spoofs of industry trends back in the day. That advice comes about forty years too late, since I have since fallen down the rabbit hole of continuity and retroactive world-building.

The following is an excerpt (!) of my Afterword to The Complete Megaton Man Universe, volume I, forthcoming from Fantagraphics Underground in 2024. It delves into my evolving thinking on continuity and world-building:

So, I had this one-shot, Megaton Man #1—the first full-length comic book I ever created, and apart from sample page layouts and some very short pieces, the first thing to amount to a complete story—and a publisher who wanted me to turn it into a series—Kitchen Sink Press. A former underground publisher, now the home of Will Eisner, and a boutique imprint of creator-owned comics, they wanted Megaton Man as an ongoing color series, no less. The first issue, in my estimation, barely held together at all—now they want me to do it again? Denis may as well have asked me to make lightning strike twice.

“Worldbuilding” is a fancy term referring to the creative work science fiction and fantasy authors perform before ever writing a word of prose intended to be read by a reader—game developers do something similar for elaborate immersive computer games before ever a line is coded. I certainly had no notion whatsoever of worldbuilding in the case of Megaton Man #1 and even less concern for it. Megaton Man #1 was a parody of Silver Age superhero comics, and I assumed readers would get the tropes: the ineffectual secret identity, the major metropolitan newspaper newsroom, the team headquarters doubling as a mad scientist’s laboratory, the evil corporation, the arch-villain mastermind behind every machination of the criminal underworld, and so on. It would have seemed ridiculous to me at the time to waste any effort on worldbuilding for Megaton Man #1, even if it were to become an ongoing series.

Today, one can go to a comic book shop or bookstore and buy collections of comic book series—either a few issues or hundreds at a shot—and sit down and study them to get some sense of how to construct a series or multi-issue story arc. I could have done the same thing by reading single issues—I’d have had to borrow a long run of comics from somebody and untape all the bags in order to read them, since I had already dispensed with most of my Marvel Comics—but I could have managed it.

In those days, even though Will Eisner was flogging the term “graphic novel” like he’d trademarked it, there were few examples of stories longer than a few issues. Come to think of it, in all my years of reading Marvel Comics, including new issues as well as the coverless comics I scavenged from the mid-sixties, I can count on my fingers the number of times I ever actually read a complete story from start to finish. Comic book stories didn’t have beginnings, middles, and ending so much as endless and interminable “continued next issues”—which could seldom be located!

Moreover, “continuity,” in my lexicon, was a purely pejorative term. Fans—including the literal-minded writers and editors who rose from the ranks of fandom to seize control of the major comic book publishers (from the generation of professional grownups who’d created the comics I’d read as a kid)—were obsessed with continuity. Letters columns and fanzines were filled with Talmudic attempts to rationalize every inconsistent story element introduced by waves of creative teams over decades into a holistic, rational whole (the quintessential example being the presence or absence of lines on the soles of Flash’s boot as indicative of whether a story took place on Earth I or Earth II) and arguments over real or “imaginary” stories. This seemed to me tantamount to arguments of how many angels can stand on the point of a pin, and worse than futile; this was supposed to be an artform, for Christ’s sake, not a box score from last week’s little league game.

In fact, there were supposedly self-appointed “continuity czars” at both Marvel and DC—editors who took it upon themselves to police storylines throughout the line and forbid any story element that didn’t fit established continuity. It didn’t matter whether a comic book was fun or engaging or even a pleasant reading experience—which no doubt contributed to the dwindling numbers of readers of comic books and its near-disappearance from American life; all that mattered was whether the trite events depicted in otherwise hacked out comic books fit into the continuity or not.

Further, the books and arthouse cinema I was consuming in those days also distrusted narrative. Authors like William S. Burroughs and film directors—to which the term auteur originally applied—were particularly the ones who were in charge of all aspects of a film, up to and including ad-libbing or completely obviating any supplied script, even in the film-factory of Hollywood. The great ones, or so I idealized, didn’t even need a script—Chaplin, Welles, Truffaut, Godard, even Jerry Lewis. Scripts were passé, weak tools for the literal minded who could not embrace the true potential of the artform—which had to do more with submitting to a dreamlike, visionary-ecstatic state than following a rote plot or tired formula.

Besides, why would I want to study long runs of superhero comics anyway? Megaton Man #1 was supposed to be an attack on tired, superhero genre conventions. The obsession with continuity, shared by editors and readers alike, was anathema to my notion of cartooning as an expressive medium; I saw my satire in Megaton Man at least in part as an attempt to “deprogram” cultish superhero fans from such meaningless dogmas.

All this to say that, by ideology and predilection—and my own inexperience—I had a pretty weak sense of story, even for a comic book artist. Witty dialogue, sure—and judging from The Dreamer roughs I once was privileged to behold, a better speller without a dictionary than Will Eisner—but writing words to go over a sequence of pictures isn’t quite the same thing as writing in an authorial sense. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Despite what I fancied to be my postmodern aversion to “continuity,” however, I regarded the experiences and emotional histories of my characters as precious and something of value. Their lives had meaning for me. And, whatever else, they had survived Megaton Man #1—there was no going back, for them or for me.

I was caught between a rock and a hard place. All through the summer of 1984, I struggled with how to do more Megaton Man without simply repeating Megaton Man #1. How was I to top the presumably brilliant deconstruction of the superhero genre I’d accomplished in the first issue? How could I further decimate the notion of “continuity” but at the same time further the lives of my nascent characters without pandering to mere escapism of power fantasies (pejorative terms favored by Comics Journal critics of superhero comics in those days)? What else could I do with this fucking thing called Megaton Man?

“What happens next?”—i.e., making it up as I went along—had gotten me through an entire issue. In some instances, I started drawing a page before I knew what happened in the next panel, let alone the next page—I distinctly recall page 5 of issue #1 as being such a page, for example. Fortunately, it takes longer to draw than to write, and believing in luck, somehow I always managed to come up with that next thing. This, I would later learn, was called “flying by the seat of your pants”—Pete Poplaski was the first person I ever heard use this phrase.

But would “What happens next?” get me very far into a second issue, let alone a series?

Luckily, the publication of Megaton Man #1 was repeatedly delayed as the publisher searched for a different, more affordable color printer. This gave me enough time to spin my wheels and more than enough rope to hang myself. The result was some sixty-four pages of inchoate, disjointed, non-sequitur material, a mish-mash of false starts and aborted strategies: dream sequences of nuclear war; a flash-forward to a landing of aliens in Central Park a là The Day the Earth Stood Still; a side trip down the highways and byways with Pammy and Stella on the road. I even imagined the See-Thru Girl, now pregnant, returning as a malevolent Earth Mother, engineering an attempted assassination of Trent Phloog by the Hordes of Krupp (a nod to my new publisher) resulting in the destruction of a Manhattan skyscraper—fifteen years before 9/11.

Frantic, I sent photocopies of this material, some of it only penciled, off to Wisconsin, asking if there was anything there. Denis and editor Dave Schreiner agreed—none of it made a damn bit of sense. But they assured me they had absolute faith in the artist and were sure I’d think of something.

Later, much of this material would be cannibalized for various set pieces in issues #3 and #4, or extensively reworked or redrawn entirely in #9. A few surviving examples that were not so repurposed have been included in the backmatter of this volume.

But for the time being, I forgot about the whole thing and took a long walk. It was a mild summer day, and my walk led from my apartment, then on West Forest Avenue in the North Cass District of Detroit, up through the Wayne State campus, past the campus of Burroughs (the business machine company started by the namesake grandfather of William S.) and the GM Building, back down Woodward Avenue, then home—some four miles, at least.

By the time I returned to my drawing board, I had it! The See-Thru Girl had left the Megatropolis Quartet and Pamela Jointly had left The Manhattan Project, right? Then Megaton Man would fill the vacancy on the Quartet and become the new controversial columnist—and arch-critic of Megaton Man—for the Project.

This would set a pattern for the series: Things would never return to normal; they would only become more and more screwed up.

O felix culpa[i]—I had already established in my first issue that Megaton Man had fallen out of a timeless stasis into an ongoing history, yet to be determined. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine issues—what of it? The Child’s Garden of Eden was over; I was now on the Road to Perdition. Or, the Yellow Brick Road of continuity. Do as I say, not as I do.

The accompanying graphic, a “family tree” of Simon Phloog, son of Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl, is some of the background world-building work I've been doing since 2015. I’ve also developed timelines, a lexicon of some six hundred names and terms, and other resources for myself that readers will never see in the ongoing prose stories and comics I am creating with the Megaton Man characters.

I've done a complete one-eighty, in other words, when it comes to continuity. Shows what forty years and an over-education (not to mention an early exposure to Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life) will do!

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[i] See Mitchell, Andrew J. “Writing the Fortunate Fall: “O felix culpa!” in Finnegans Wake.” James Joyce Quarterly 47, no. 4 (2010): 589–606.