Over forty years ago, Don Simpson first introduced the world to Megaton Man, his superhero parody series that quickly built out a mythology of its own. And now, thanks to Fantagraphics and Zoop, the hero is back in a massive collection titled Megaton Man: The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s.
“Everyone thought I was spoofing the current comics industry in the mid-1980s, but there were only a handful of jokes that were truly contemporary,” Simpson told Comic Book Club over email. “The trick, I think, is that not much has changed in superhero comics. It’s not really a genre, but a set of tropes.”
To find out more about the volume, keeping parody relevant years later and more, read on.
Comic Book Club: It’s been a couple of decades now. What was it like revisiting Megaton Man after all this time? Or have you never let him go?
Don Simpson: Are you kidding? It’s been forty years since Megaton Man #1! Actually, I’ve been working on all sorts of new material that I’m planning to follow onto the reprint collections. The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume I will collect the 1980s Kitchen Sink Press comics, all sixteen issues and one-shots, and Volume II will collect the 1990s Fiasco Comics Bizarre Heroes, which the Megaton Man cast inevitably took over. And we have a volume or two planned after that …
Superheroes, fiction, media have changed a lot, but reading through these pages, the parody still works here. What’s your one neat trick for crafting comedy that’s timeless?
Everyone thought I was spoofing the current comics industry in the mid-1980s, but there were only a handful of jokes that were truly contemporary. One was a black costume for Megaton Man, which lasted one panel—a Secret Wars reference—and another was an Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Jon Totleben Swamp Thing parody that lasted only a page. Mainly, I was riffing off of the comics I read as a ten-year-old ten years earlier, in the early ‘70s, including a lot of late ‘60s comics from around the neighborhood and reprints of origin stories from even earlier.
The trick, I think, is that not much has changed in superhero comics. It’s not really a genre, but a set of tropes. Anyone can be a “timeless classic” if all you do is recycle the same origin stories, secret identities, teen angst hang-ups, and so on!
Spinning off that you also built a superhero world around Megaton Man. When does something tip from being a parody, to becoming the thing that you are parodying?
I used to worry about that, early on. I thought I had to make fun of superheroes in every single panel, with every single exaggerated drawing. I thought if I relaxed and delved into the characters and the melodrama and the soap opera, readers would think I was taking things seriously. I finally unclenched and let go. My drawing style changed; I found I could draw more realistically proportioned supporting cast, even more realistic costumed characters, instead of giving everyone big heads.
Certain characters retained their exaggerated proportions—Megaton Man, Yarn Man, Liquid Man. But I found they were funnier in contrast to more normally-proportioned, realistic characters. I also found I could explore the characters dramatically and still punctuate it with slapstick humor. Characters like the Phantom Jungle Girl, Ms. Megaton Man, and the Slick, among others, could all function in a dramatic superhero universe. Even Megaton Man, I think, could fit in now—the industry has caught up to my absurd proportions.
Particularly the multiverse aspects, which you hit a lot in Megaton Man, are so hot right now. Why do you think that concept has grabbed people so hard?
Actually, another project I’m working on, besides the reprints of vintage material, is an anthology called Megaton Man: Multimensions. “Multimension” is my branding of a system of alternate realities. Some time ago, I realized the Megaton Man universe was a hybrid; in one universe, the Atomic Soldier was called the Original Golden Age Megaton Man, in the other, Major Meltdown. Their descendants are the Megaton Man we know and the Human Meltdown, member of the Megatropolis Quartet. How those realities got fused together is the subject of the new storyline material I’ve been working on.
In comics, it’s been a way for different creators or companies to explain how their characters all live in America but have never run into characters from other creators or companies when they do cross-company team-ups. (The most famous one, of course, Superman-Spider-Man, never explained why Superman had never visited New York before!) But I think it’s become a metaphor for America itself—half of us seem to live in red America, half in blue America. Completely different universes.
Do you keep up with comics? These are clearly so steeped in specificity about the books of the time, is there anything you’re reading/enjoying/hating right now?
I see new ones at shows and when I occasionally visit a shop, and I can’t help but see stuff online. I don’t seek out new stuff, but I don’t have to—it kind of finds me. I came back from a season of shows with a couple boxes of stuff people were nice enough to give me. Like I said, as far as superheroes are concerned, not much changes—I watched the Dodgers-Yankees World Series this fall, and I don’t when I last sat down and watched a baseball game. I know it’s been years. There were a few new rules changes—the pitching clock and throwing to first base to keep a runner from stealing. But it wasn’t like it was hard to follow or anything. Not much had changed!
Is Megaton Man something you’d ever want to revisit with new comics? Or are you happy with where you left it?
Like I said, there are new Megaton Man comics coming down the pike. And frankly, they’re a lot less about spoofing other comics and more about the characters and relationships between them I’ve built up over the years. I was ready to go in that direction in the late 1980s—I devised a storyline that was more character-driven, about the civilian lives—my term for “secret identities”—of the megaheroes—my term for “superhero.” My editor, the late Dave Schreiner, was all for it; he urged me to ease up on the parody and take my characters more seriously, on their own terms, as characters in their own right. The publisher, however, wanted spoofs and a #1 on every cover, which is why there weren’t twice as many—ten times as many—Kitchen Sink Press Megaton Man comics. I discuss this in detail in the Afterword to Volume I.
What’s amazing is that Trent Phloog (Megaton Man), Stella Starlight (the See-Thru Girl, later the Earth Mother), Pamela Jointly, Preston Percy, all the rest, have become real people to me, in my imagination. And their personalities have remained remarkably true to what I set down in the mid-1980s. They’ve grown, they’ve matured, and so many minor characters have developed and now loom larger—Clarissa James (Ms. Megaton Man), Kozmik Kat, Dr. Braindead—a character that only appeared in two panels in the Kitchen Sink Press run!
I think readers or The Complete Megaton Man Universe will see the narrative in a whole new light, and as more material emerges, people will see I haven’t just been sitting around for forty years! There’s an entire world here that I’m still exploring, and there are more than a few stories yet to be told …
Megaton Man: The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s is crowdfunding on Zoop today.
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