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.

X-Amount of Reader Mail!!

Letters, oh, we get letters … this one from no less a personage than former major domo at Cartoon Books and Monroeville manager of Half-Price Books (and splitting image of X-Ray Boy) Andries Mulder!

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.

New Megaton Man Logos and the Stories They Will Tell

Recently, I have been working on several new vector art logo designs for upcoming Megaton Man projects; preliminary concepts appear below. Since fans almost immediately ask, "When can I order this? When is this coming out?" I thought this would be as good a time as any to discuss what I plan for 2024 and beyond (if all goes according to plan!).

Megaton Man and the Doom Defiers: This Is the New Stuff!

This seems as good a time as any to explain what I’m up to with the current work-in-progress. The working title is Megaton Man and the Doom Defiers; to date, I’ve completely drawn and lettered some fourteen pages which you can read (below). Although Megaton Man himself has yet to appear (soon!), it concerns all of his supporting cast and particularly Clarissa (Ms. Megaton Man), Simon (his son), and the teams of megaheroes that are now arrayed around New York City a.k.a. Megatropolis.

Unsolicited Submissions and Inappropriate Suggestions

 Please Don't Pester the Cartoonist (unless you’ve got the cash up front)!

As an artist since the age of five and later as a published cartoonist, I’ve always gotten suggestions from fans and friends. Many are thoughtful and well-meaning, and every once in a while, some comment or remark will spark a useful idea somewhere down the road. But rarely are they directly inspirational.

X-AMOUNT of COMICS [the 1963: WhenElse?! Annual] FAQ (SPOILER ALERT)

As followers on my social media know, I’ve been working on my satirical “ending” to 1963 all year (the working title has been the 1963: WhenElse?! Annual; now, it has been rechristened X-Amount of Comics). As of this writing (mid-December, 2022), I’ve penciled and lettered all of some 71 pages of the story and inked more than 30 of them. I am planning a wraparound cover (the original “cover” features profanity I’d rather not censor), and I may yet add certain pinups and shorter one-page strips, along with notes and text, at the end, rounding it out to an 80-page project. Follow me on Facebook for updates.

1998 Interview with Don Simpson on the Megaton Man Web Comic and Print

The following is the text for a Comics Journal column by Jeremy Pinkham from 1998 that never ran; I believe it was to be the first in a series of columns cover web comics. It was based on a brief interview with me; I suppose since it was largely about my now-defunct MEGATONMAN.com website, it was canceled, since the Journal (also now defunct) was in denial about the impact of the internet on printed comics). It is presented here for historical purposes only.

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.

What Makes GApds - Golden Age Public Domain (Costumed) Characters - So Different, So Appealing?

What is the appeal of Golden Age public domain characters?        Fans may rightly ask, and I certainly ask this myself: Why am I wasting time drawing Golden Age public domain characters, especially when I have so many creator-owned characters under IP (intellectual property, i.e., creator-owned projects like Megaton Man and Border Worlds) going begging?

Pretensions on the Edge of Forever: New Age Comics #1

“Megaton Man artist … Donald Simpson,” from New Age Comics #1, 1985:

With Megaton Man #4, artist-writer Don Simpson began to add depth to his cast of madcap characters.

Why the 1963: WhenElse?! Annual—and Why Not

As followers of my Facebook page may know, I’ve recently opened a can-of-worms project with the working title 1963: WhenElse? Annual. What they may be asking is: What triggered this? Why now?

1989: A Transition Year for Drawing Clarissa

This is a sketch of Clarissa James in 1989, and one of the very first sketches putting her in the Ms. Megaton Man uniform that would become her trademark. Originally a minor character from the ten-issue Megaton Man comic book series (issue #4, to be exact), Clarissa became a core cast member with #11 (otherwise known as The Return of Megaton Man #1). After that three-issue series ended, she gained Megapowers of her own in Megaton Man Meets the Uncategorizable X+Thems #1. This sketch was a tryout of sorts to see if her transition to megahero, and specifically a female version of Megaton Man, would work.

Clarissa at #100

The Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series at the Two-Year Mark 

The Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series is fast coming upon episode #100, as well as the two-year mark of my posting of a 3000-4000-word chapter online every Friday. I’d like to take moment to reflect on what I’ve learned from the experience so far.

Eroticism in Don Simpson’s Comics, Part I of II:

Megaton Man, Border Worlds, and The Return of Megaton Man

           Proceed to Part II: The Megaton Man One-Shots, Anton Drek Comix, and Bizarre Heroes

          Note: A gallery of 22 archival covers and comic book pages appears below, following the text.

Megaton Man #1-10 (Kitchen Sink Press, December 1984–June 1986)

Eroticism was always a prominent subtext in the Megaton Man comics from the very first Kitchen Sink Press issue in December, 1984. The cover of #1 set the tone for the series: On it, a sexy Pamela Jointly, reporter’s notepad in hand, kneels barefoot next to a spread-eagle Megaton Man, draped only in a torn, red dress that threatens to fall from her bare shoulders. Although she’s fixated on what she’s writing and not his diminutive crotch, a bulge, nearly lost in the stretchy wrinkles of his trunks, is clearly in evidence.

Eroticism in Don Simpson’s Comics, Part II of II:

The Megaton Man One-Shots, Anton Drek Comix, and Bizarre Heroes

          Go Back to Part I: Megaton Man, Border Worlds, and The Return of Megaton Man

          Note: A gallery of 42 archival covers and comic book pages appears below, following the text. 

Whereas the ten-issue Megaton Man and three-issue Return of Megaton Man series both appeared in color, the next three Megaton Man comics appeared as black-and-white one-shots. In the economic and production-cost syntax of the time, color printing tended to be reserved for a wider, younger, more mainstream audience of superhero comics readers, and therefore necessarily hewed to G-rated or PG content. If Megaton Man was allowed to push those boundaries with illegitimate pregnancy, bulging male crotches and protruding female nipples it did so in the context of a humorous parody of superhero conventions, and the fact that it’s publisher has been a pioneer of adults-only undergrounds.

Comics Hate Group “Cancels” Ms. Megaton Man!

megatropolis, n.y.—Don Simpson’s controversial new Ms. MegatonMan Maxi-Series has the comic book hate group FRFB (Far-Right Fanboys) calling for a boycott, citing the work’s alleged “Social Justice Warrior agenda” that threatens their insecure, toxic-masculine “hobby.”

My Latest False Start, or, Why the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series, Anyway?

As of this writing, I have composed eight chapters of what I call my "YA prose experiment," the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series. Four chapters have dropped, to use the modern parlance, on my Ms. Megaton Man Blog, and one is scheduled to drop over the next four Fridays at 8:30 pm EDT. And there's plenty more where that came from.

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!
First Chapter | All Chapters | Latest Chapter  

Also: Will the Real Megaton Man Please Stand Up? | More on Megaton Man and Why I'm Still Drawing Him!

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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