The following is an interview with comics creator Don Simpson regarding the recent launch of a Zoop crowdfunding campaign for the first-ever collected omnibus of Megaton Man: The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s in collaboration with Fantagraphics. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Simpson about his experience in revisiting the series in preparation for the collected edition, the incredible backer rewards that will be available to readers, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congratulations on the launch of your Zoop crowdfunding campaign for Megaton Man: The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s! As you look ahead to the collected edition, what has been your experience in revisiting the world and characters and preparing it for new audiences to discover?
Don Simpson: I scanned all of the work in the summer of 2022 with an eye toward publishing it myself when Gary Groth, of all people, offered to step in. Somewhat ironic, since he had turned down Megaton Man #1—twice—some forty years earlier, although he would later have me adapt King Kong and would publish my Anton Drek erotic comics (Wendy Whitebread, Forbidden Frankenstein, et al). I had most of the original art and what few pages I didn’t own anymore I had film positives and sharp photocopies as sources. A few people – fellow pros and owners of pieces – offered scans. In the case of two or three pages, I had to print out in blue and ink them again, or extensively touch up printouts.
I had reread most of the printed comics in 2015 and made notes as I prepared to write new prose stories and comics taking place in the Megaton Man universe. But handling all of that artwork again was instructive; I hadn’t looked closely at that work in a long time. Before I knew what I was doing and what could be reproduced, I drew in an insanely detailed style, far beyond what came across in the printed comics. Later, I learned to be judicious and concentrate on structure and simplicity—my name is Simpson, after all. But that early work was more than a bit neurotic; I was compensating for my insecurities starting out.
I’ve written a twenty-page afterword that may be the first honest, historical overview of my six years at Kitchen Sink Press. On paper, they should have been the perfect publisher for Megaton Man, and I offer readers an account why it ended too soon. This is in addition to an introduction by Bill Morrison (The Simpsons, Bongo Comics) and a foreword by Chris Ecker (Knight Watchmen, Big Bang Comics) and another twenty pages of unpublished art from the era. I think readers from the ‘80s and ‘90s who thought they knew these comics will be able to see them and appreciate them in a whole new light, and it might be startling.
BD: Likewise, in revisiting the series, was there anything new or intriguing that you took away from the issues and short stories that you hadn’t anticipated when originally creating them?
DS: Revisiting those early characters and storylines was also enlightening. In many respects, I am still working out the narrative in the Megaton Man universe, and the surprising thing is that those early, primitive characterizations are still salient. Trent (Megaton Man), Stella, Preston, Pammy, Clarissa (Ms. Megaton Man), Bing (Yarn Man), and Rex have all grown deeper—I’m on a first-name basis with my characters now—but they haven’t substantially changed in terms of my conceptualization of them. They’ve grown more complex, and I understand them differently in many cases, but it’s startling to see that my first conception of them, from their very first appearances, have for the most part remained true.
Other characters, like Kozmik Kat and the Megaton Mice, were always undeveloped, minor characters, but in recent work I’m doing they’ve grown substantially. The same is true of Chuck (the Human Meltdown) and Felicia (Distortia)—the latter isn’t even named in Megaton Man #2, but she’s Yarn Man’s girlfriend who appears in a few panels—are all now important characters in the new comics I’ve been generating. There were a lot of throwaway gags and running jokes like the Cosmic Cue-Ball that have taken on a great importance since. Dr. Braindead, who literally only appears in two panels in issue #8, is now a terribly important character in new stories I’ve been writing and drawing.
I wish I could say I had it all planned out from the beginning, but I was making it up as I went along, issue by issue, in the 1980s. I’ve since been doing what I call “retroactive world-building,” and readers will get a chance to see some of that in the new work I plan to release in the wake of The Complete Megaton Man Universe and other volumes Fantagraphics will be producing.
BD: What do you feel is the inherent value of parody in storytelling and especially the sequential art medium?
DS: Well, I can’t take comics completely seriously. They are called comic books, after all. Harvey Kurtzman was a master of parody, humor, satire (He created MAD.); he was also a tremendous dramatist in the EC war books. One can say serious things in comics; Border Worlds began in the pages of Megaton Man. (It will not be included in the Complete omni since Dover Publications did a collection in 2017.)
I’ve written prose stories of the Megaton Man characters, and there’s a certain kind of humor I have found that I can utilize in prose. But there’s something surreal that is possible in comics that can’t be accomplished in any other medium, which I think is why I’m compelled to use it in comics. To my way of thinking, there is an improvisational element to cartooning that lends itself to humor, to satire.
Somehow, in order to be serious in comics, one almost has to call attention to the absurdity of the incongruous juxtapositions, of the inherent limitations of the medium. It’s such a simple form, really; you can’t lard it with too much text, or it stops being comics; you can’t overdo the art, or it stops being cartooning. I’m constantly testing those limits, of course, railing against them, which takes the form of humor. To my way of thinking, it’s the only way to use cartooning intelligently is to show how simplistic it is. It’s the ultimate cheater’s medium—if the pictures don’t get the point across, one resorts to words; if the words don’t communicate, the pictures help out. You have to be crassly obvious, polemical. It calls for a sense of humor, seems to me.
I should mention that there has always been a darker aspect to Megaton Man. A megaton is a million tons of TNT, or the equivalent explosive force thereof. It’s the unit of measurement for nuclear weapons; I think the average warhead is twenty megatons, enough to flatten New York City or London or Paris or Moscow. Megaton Man was the product of the Cold War, but in case you haven’t noticed, that Cold War with the Soviet Union is currently heating up as a hot ware between Russia and the West. We still live under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation. Megaton Man has questioned the stupidity and foolishness of that predicament, along with the toxic masculinity of conventional superheroics. We’ve enjoyed a few quiet decades, but all of that, unfortunately, has been making a comeback in recent years and is still very timely in 2025. No better time to put out The Complete Megaton Man Universe.
BD: Are there any specific backer rewards that you’re most excited about with the campaign?
DS: I’ll be doing autographed plates, as well as pen-and-ink drawings, that I think will be something of a bargain compared to what I charge at shows. We’re also doing a fine-art print of the wraparound cover to The Comics Journal #115, which was the issue containing the transcripts from the Michael Fleischer lawsuit against the Journal. It’s a panoply of characters from comics history and a snapshot of the industry in 1987—undergrounds, alternative, mainstream comics, classic characters. There’s everyone from Spider-Man to Swamp Thing to Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb in a crowd scene that took me days to draw. I still have the colored blueline, as well as the original art, so I was able to scan and remaster it in high resolution. It will be “suitable for framing,” to say the least.
BD: Are there any other upcoming projects—past or current—that you would like to highlight for our readers?
DS: Megaton Man and the Doom Defiers is the project I alluded to before. Trent, Stella, and everyone have moved back to Megatropolis and most of the characters have formed a new team, the Doom Defiers, from the ashes of the old Devenger. There’s a new Quartet and another team located on the Potomac in Washington, D.C. It’s something of a sequel to X-Amount of Comics: 1963 (WhenElse?) Annual that Fantagraphics published in 2023. There’s also an entire unpublished graphic novel, Megaton Man: Return to Megatropolis, that will precede it. I’ve posted glimpses of this work on my social media. I also created a team of Golden Age public domain characters called Victory Folks in 2023.
The other project I’m very excited about is Megaton Man: Multimensions, a collaboration with more than two dozen indie comics creators who interpret my IP including Bizarre Heroes and Border Worlds, as well as crossing over their IP. There are team-ups with Captain Action, Mr. Monster, the Knight Watchman from Big Bang Comics, and several other characters from the 1980s to the present—even a few Golden Age public domain characters. I won’t even start dropping names of all the talent I’m working with because I’ll leave somebody out, but the past several weeks alone have been astonishing as finished work has come in. We will be launching a crowdfunder early in 2025.
BD: Lastly, what would you like to tell fans who want to learn more about Megaton Man: The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s and your other work?
DS: If you’ve never heard of Megaton Man, or your only recollection is The Savage Dragon vs. the Savage Megaton Man thirty years ago, The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s is the place to start and get in on the ground floor. There will be a lot more where that came from very soon. I believe fans who’ve stuck with me and have been clamoring for more all these years will be thrilled and will get a new look at a series they thought they knew. I’m also hopeful that a new generation of readers will be able to discover this work for the very first time, because off and on I’ve put a great deal of time and thought into it!
