Don Simpson, industry veteran and longstanding luminary of superhero satire, sits down with Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, to discuss the Megaton Man: The Complete Megaton Man Universe Volume One: The 1980s, available through Zoop until Dec. 12th.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Don, it is a distinct honor to have you stop by the Yeti Cave to discuss your collected retrospective first volume of your long-running, genre-bending superhero parody, Megaton Man. How is everything going around Pittsburgh as winter approaches?
DON SIMPSON: I’m not as close to Pittsburgh as I was a year ago. I’m closer to the West Virginia northern panhandle now, very rural. I can almost walk to Steubenville, Ohio now. In fact, it’s my favorite place for coffee and writing. But I’m not there now. I work on prose stories about my Megaton Man characters there!
CBY: Ah, I haven’t been to Steubenville in about fifteen years – you’re in Deer Hunter territory now! You currently have all your published Megaton Man material between 1983-1990 raising funds with Zoop for a release through Fantagraphics. It looks like it is faring well, as you’re currently at around 300% of your goal. Can you share a bit about how you decided to work with Fantagraphics and Zoop on this release amidst other potential publishing avenues that may have been appealing?
DS: Megaton Man was published in 1984. The 1983 material is an unpublished short story we’re including for the first time; it was turned down by Raw magazine and Art Spiegelman himself, that’s how far back it goes. That I was able to imagine Megaton Man in Raw shows how pretentious I was at the time, and how unrealistic were my expectations! (Laughter.) I sent portions of Megaton Man #1 to Gary Groth at Fantagraphics at the time, too; I got rejected twice! I was turned down by a lot of publishers who no longer exist—Eclipse, First, Pacific, Comico, you name it.
After Kitchen Sink Press picked it up, Gary and I worked on several things. I illustrated Alan Moore’s short story, “In Fictopia” for Anything Goes, the fundraiser to help defray their legal bills. I changed the title to “In Pictopia,” since comics is a visual medium. I drew a wraparound cover for The Comics Journal #115, which was all about the Michael Fleischer lawsuit, in which the writer of Jonah Hex claimed Harlan Ellison had libelled him in an interview.
In fact, I think a couple of the premiums offered with the Zoop exclusive hardcover of The Complete Megaton Man Volume I are the Fantagraphics Underground reprint of “In Pictopia” we did two or three years ago, as well as a giclée print of the Comics Journal cover—both are really beautiful items. Later I adapted King Kong and of course I created Wendy Whitebread and Forbidden Frankenstein for Fantagraphics under the Monster Comics and Eros Comix imprints. So I ended up working with Gary a lot in the eighties!
I guess Gary wanted to rectify his error in turning down Megaton Man forty years ago! (Laugher.) The crowdfunding idea followed onto that—I’ve never done one before. Both Fantagraphics and I are crowdfunding virgins!
CBY: You’ve just set the stage with an immense amount of context I hope we can dig into further. Predating Ben Edlund’s The Tick by a few years, and The Simpsons character, Radioactive Man, by over a decade (with Bill Morrison providing an introduction to this edition) – it’s clear how you’ve inspired those who have followed in the wake of Megaton Man. With your early work finding its home at Kitchen Sink Press – where parody comics master, Harvey Kurtzman, also published comics, you started in good company. Can you tell our readers a bit about your inspirations and mentors as a young comic reader and artist?
DS: Jim Valentino’s normalman came out from Aardvark-Vanaheim while I was still working on the first issue of Megaton Man—it took me thirteen months—and I was crestfallen, because he scooped me on Silver-Age parody. I think we both drew from Not Brand Echh and early Mad magazine, “Superduperman” by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood, Wonder Warthog by Gilbert Shelton. I trace it back to “Casey at the Bat”—the poem about the batsman for the Mudville Nine who strikes out with the bases loaded. Dudley Do-Right, I think, contributed the chin! (Laughter.) The over-confident male is a traditional figure of ridicule in our culture.
The early eighties seemed especially so at the time. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and the Cold War with the Soviet Union was heating up again. There was an arms race—who had the most warheads to bomb civilization out of existence? Terms like “megaton” were commonplace—a million tons of TNT. A garden-variety thermonuclear warhead had a payload of twenty megatons—enough to wipe out the Eastern Seaboard of the United States in one blast. I lived in Detroit at the time, still considered an industrial target. The General Motors building was considered “ground zero”—bull’s eye for Russian missiles in case of a first strike.
All of that fed into the comics I was making, along with my studies of comic books and newspaper cartooning, fine art, and arthouse cinema. I was trying to break into comics professionally and when I came up with Megaton Man, I knew I was onto something. But it took some trial and error to get that first issue together! Unfortunately, we seem to be in a post-pandemic period darker than the early eighties. Who knows, perhaps The Complete Megaton Man Universe will speak to a new generation of cartoonists in these troubled times! (Laughter.)
CBY: You mentioning centrality (and tangibility) of the Cold War as a product of being in Detroit, and that definitely provides a substantiating case of what I’ve been discussing with colleagues around ‘positional value’ and attributes of place-based identity in the formation of artistic insight. I know the current looming fascism in the United States and existential climate crisis shapes my narrative direction in a massive way. Also, concerning your creative influences, after you mentioned Not Brand Echh, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on Forbush Man and Snafu magazine – the humor comic canon is always deeper than I realize.
On the topic of shaping young minds, when not creating comics, you’ve spent many years of your career instructing at the collegiate level in a variety of art and design subjects, obtaining a PhD in Art & Architectural History. I understand the solitude involved between an artist and the page when working on comics, and the amount of social engagement and expectations associated with a teaching course load. How does your professional approach and application of discipline differ between focusing on your own creative process and teaching others to engage in their own process?
DS: In simplest terms, I never had the comics career I expected, and it was pretty frustrating. I discuss this in the Afterword; it began with the publisher. But the truth is I never succeeded in penetrating professional comics beyond a certain periphery—doing satire, science fiction, oddball genre stuff like Wasteland for DC and the occasional Harvey Pekar one-pager. I was either ahead of my time or behind the time. Long story short, I pursued other interests, which eventually led me back to school. Now, I’m an over-educated has-been! (Laughter.) But the irony is that I still own Megaton Man and all my IP, and maybe the world is more ready for it this time around.
There is a decided difference between sitting at the drawing board, putting your imagination down on paper, and teaching in front of a classroom. I took one of those personality tests long ago, and I tested way on the introverted side of the spectrum. Years later, after having taught for about a decade, I tested again; I was so far on the extroverted side of the ledger it wasn’t even funny. It’s been an adjustment, realizing I’m supposed to be the grownup in the room, rather than the kid in the back sketching Spider-Man on the back of my math worksheets! (Laughter.)
I think life is about growing and growing up, and developing areas where you are weaker. Writing, drawing, lettering, inking—those are all skills I’ve gotten better at. Had I specialized, I might have developed faster. Trying to do everything no doubt slowed my development generally. But I’ve always wanted another challenge. I self-published Bizarre Heroes—which will comprise The Complete Megaton Man Universe, Volume Two. Later, I went back to school.
I’ll tell you, I’ve employed some of those classroom skills in another project I’m working on—Megaton Man: Multimensions. It’s a crossover-team-up-collaboration with some thirty or more independent creators. Some are teaming up their IP with mine; others are just riffing on my creations. I’ll have more to say about that soon. But it’s like keeping a classroom of rowdy, rambunctious little Don Simpsons under control—they’d rather be drawing their own stuff than doing their homework—and I’m not having much luck keeping them on-task! (Laughter.) The results are really wonderful and surprising. And at times exasperating. I guess it’s karmic payback!
CBY: Now that I’m amidst my (irreducibly cross-disciplinary) doctoral research and have reached a Reed Richards-level of grey in my hair, I am starting to get expectant looks from people under the age of 30 that I’m meant to know what I’m talking about—I think I understand a bit of what you’ve described. You’ve additionally maintained an active critical voice outside your creative and academic work, working as a journalist for many years. I also spend much of my time switching between voices as I write for different audiences, so I am curious how you parse your stylistic approach (which goes beyond the already complicated task of delivering in accordance with the editorial expectations of comic publishers at all scales). What sort of conventions or practices do you keep in mind; in both your writing and your art, when do you choose to adhere to, and when do you break from, learned from?
DS: I’m not sure I approach it with much calculation. I’ve always sent letters to the editor of The Comics Buyers Guide, and whatever feud is going on in comics, I’m there! (Laughter.) Now, on social media, that’s all there ever seems to be. It’s gotten quite toxic. I’ve been outspoken on the topic of Ed Piskor, whom I knew before he broke into comics. His loss is the single greatest tragedy in the history of cartooning, and those that recklessly contributed to it have a lot to answer for. They have to live with their own consciences.
I just try to say what I think honestly. I try to support my arguments with the available evidence. One thing they teach you in grad school is “close reading,” really dissecting the words that are written and spoken. I do that at length in my Afterword, going back to correspondence I had with my editor and publisher at Kitchen Sink Press. It’s something I’ve done rather instinctively. My parents argued quite a lot while I was growing up, and it was always, “You said this,” and “You promised that.” Very in-the-weeds kinds of dissections of statements.
Today, people dash off tweets on their phones without spellchecking or revising, let alone reconsideration. This was something I always preached to my college students, because ironically I ended up teaching a business communication class at a certain college a number of times. So there’s a lot out there one can be critical of—it can drive you crazy. But it also means my particular brand of satire will never go out of style!
CBY: I wasn’t going to bring up Ed’s untimely passing unprompted, in case it was a sore spot you didn’t want to discuss while talking about this retrospective of your work, but I was introduced to his work by Clarence Dass, and he and I had discussed with Ed and Jim the idea of getting together a comic creators workshop in Fiji once the COVID pandemic was over, but then the Cartoonist Kayfabe snowball had started really rolling, and it was an absolute shock to lose him in the circumstances we did. We at Comic Book Yeti have worked hard to foster an inclusive, supportive form of comics coverage where we spend time covering content we appreciate – we’re not after “gotcha!” moments and avoid sensationalism. I do not want to speak out of turn (as I know my understanding of the situation is limited, and I have editorial responsibilities), but from what I observed in the pile-on by the most accusatory members of the community, Ed’s persona and his private life were conflated by a subsection of the comics community in a terminally detrimental manner. The vitriol was alarming, and to prevent this sort of self-inflicted tragedy by the comics community, the enduring need for due diligence will never go out of style, either.
In between installments of Megaton Man, you also wrote a few titles for mature audiences only under the pseudonym ‘Anton Drek.’ Akin to my question on selecting the appropriate voicing for your audience and format, when catering to a specifically adult audience with content, where do you draw the line between story elements for a broader market and that content which you preserve for a select segment of your fandom? Do you find there’s been historic overlap in your broader fandom picking up the ‘Anton Drek’ material or do you find completely different audiences for your various types of publications?
DS: First, I never expected the pseudonym “Anton Drek” to fool anyone. Everyone in the know recognized my drawing style and lettering right away. It was such an absurd name; I considered it a value-add. But it was clearly for an adult audience. The sad part is that comics by that point had become an adult audience—mostly middle-aged men rather than the kids who read comics mid-century.
Kitchen Sink Press was instrumental in creating the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and I was an early contributor to a benefit portfolio. It was important because at the time comics were still considered for kids although most of the buyers were over the age of eighteen. (Laughter.) My portfolio plate is in volume one, come to think of it.
But on Multdimensions, I had to draw the line; there were a few creators who wanted to interpret the Anton Drek characters but if they had, they’d have to wear clothes. (Laughter.) One has to be clear on any given project whom the audience is. I had Forbidden Frankenstein fight Megaton Man at the end of the Bizarre Heroes run; with clothes on, he’s just the Frankenstein monster! (Laughter.)
In terms of my audience, I supposed I’ve splintered it somewhat over the years. But when I do shows now, I have fans who bring up copies of nearly everything I’ve done—Archie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, DC Flash or the Rogue’s Gallery, Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. There’s a constituency for everything. For someone out there, some freelance gig I’ve completely forgotten about was their first exposure to my work. I can’t disown any of it.
CBY: The range of avenues into discovering your body of work is definitely about as broad as they get in this industry, even for fellow creators of your tenure in the field. Don, to that point, with over forty years of engagement across multiple fields, what advice might you have for those in the audience who don’t want to pigeonhole themselves, who have diverse interests, and want to explore more than one path in their professional journey? How do you find the time to carry each disparate interest forward and make space for each area of professional practice in consideration of the others?
DS: Well, sticking to one IP makes the most business sense. Which means I have very little business sense. (Laughter.) I wanted to try different things; I never considered Megaton Man my 300-issue Cerebus, like Dave Sim. I wanted to try science fiction, undergrounds, all sorts of idea. I had a vicious row with Megaton Man’s publisher in 1987, which made working for them at all really distasteful to me—again, I discuss some of this in the Afterword. The irony is there could have been a great deal more Megaton Man at Kitchen Sink Press. And I’m still working out many of those ideas in new material even now.
The question early on was whether I could say everything I wanted to say through one title character. At the time, I found that impossible. Hence Bizarre Heroes, which was an attempt to broaden the universe in which Megaton Man and cast operated—but then, they ended up taking over the title anyway! Hence, The Complete … Volume Two. It’s like Berkeley Breathed and all of his strips that really end up being Bloom County. (Laughter.)
The irony is, there’s hardly an idea I have now that I can’t think of belonging under the Megaton Man logo. I really feel like my conception of the character and the cast and his universe has broadened in such a way that I can really address almost any topic that is important to me. And I have a long list!
CBY: Entirely understandable after such a multifaceted career, and the Berkeley Breathed analogy seems apt. 40 years on from Megaton Man’s debut during the Cold War, we’re closer to midnight on the doomsday clock than we’ve ever been. You mentioned this briefly earlier, but to further explore how Megaton Man’s nameis derived indirectly from the US nuclear legacy (the first megaton explosion was the Ivy Mike test at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1st, 1952), despite the confluence of superpower origins for your hero, what was the rationale behind the name? He’s referred to as, “the Nuclear Wonder” and a “walking H-bomb,” so I’m curious – what elements of both atomic age comics and the 1980’s zeitgeist were you most directly lampooning when you introduced Megaton Man?
DS: Well, as I said, it was just the newspaper and the radio, NPR and TV news. It was everywhere in the 1980s. The Nuclear Freeze movement was happening in Europe; positioning nukes in West Germany got folks riled up—wonder why. It’s history now but it was front-page news and top of mind for every thinking person, and even most non-thinking persons. It was possible to title a comic book Megaton Man and everyone understood; need I say more?
The early Marvel comics all featured characters who were radioactive—the Hulk, Spider-Man, the Cosmic Rays of the Fantastic Four. The idea we would be given fabulous superpowers by accident was an escapist way of dealing with the anxiety. “Sure, we’ll be turned into useless, hideous freaks, but it will be fun!” (Laughter.) I’m not sure I did much more than take it a step further, because at the time, Marvel had stopped being the radical agitator and had become the Establishment.
Minute Man missiles, “dense-pack” clusters of warheads—I recount some of this in the Afterword. Reagan had a plan to move missiles around on railroad tracks across North America—it was absurd. Then there was the Star Wars missile defense system—it never stopped. And we’re even in a more absurd place with the Space Force these days. I’m not sure a satirist can even exaggerate the situation any more, beyond what it already is.
CBY: Speaking of satirists examining threats within the political sphere, you worked with Al Franken on his hit 2003 book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. I have seen Al’s work since his SNL days when I was growing up, and he was always one of the policy voices in the US Senate that I actually didn’t mind hearing speak. I can think of few more egregious examples of the double-standard in the American political discourse than the resignation of Franken over an act of perceived disrespect when there has emerged an entire political class priding themselves on their ruthless lack of scruples and shame. We don’t have to venture any farther down the political avenue than you’d like, or take too much attention from The Complete Megaton Man Universe – Volume One: The 1980s (available on Zoop through Dec. 12th!) but would you be willing to speak a bit about Franken in your capacity working with him?
DS: Saturday Night Live was an influence on my sensibility, after Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe (which existed only on LP when I was a teenager). It was another of those freelance assignments I wouldn’t have necessarily gone after, it just came to me. I guess all the editorial cartoonists were busy! (Laughter.) It was far and away the largest audience for my work I’ve ever had—millions of those books were in print. Although I don’t get too many Al Franken fans seeking out my other work. Al stopped replying to my emails long before he became a U.S. senator. (Laughter.)
CBY: Despite the end of the engagement with Franken following the project, in other work you have taken the opportunity to spoof countless figures from comics and pop culture more broadly. You’ve introduced characters not far removed from long-running superhero teams, and with examples like your initial depiction of the US president sharing more than a passing resemblance to a latter-day Orson Welles, you have not played coy with your spoofing. What sort of figures from fact or fiction are your favorite to illustrate either in earnest or in parody, and are there any characters you have yet to work with as subjects that remain on your wish list?
DS: Well, I’m working my way down the list; hopefully, you’ll see that material soon, if this Zoop thing works out! (Laughter.) I am less concerned with satirizing superheroes or comics per se and more concerned with commenting on modern life in general. But I’ve always had pretensions and delusions of grandeur! In fact, the row with Megaton Man’s erstwhile publisher centered on that very issue—the editor backed me in the direction I was going, which was more character-driven, centering on the “civilian” secret identities rather than the costumes and fight scenes. The publisher wanted parodies of The Punisher movie—seriously—and big #1s on the cover. It was unsustainable.
As I said, I was influenced by Beyond the Fringe—Jonathan Miller went on to become a Shakespearean director, Alan Bennett a serious dramatist. I was also influenced by Woody Allen’s movies, which gravitated to Ingmar Bergman by the 1980s. A lot of the television s-called comedy I grew up with, including M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which spawned Lou Grant, an hour-long drama, tended to blur the lines between tragedy and comedy. I think Megaton Man had elements of this early on, and I’m certainly working in that space with the new material I’m working up.
CBY: In over all my interviews thus far, that’s the first Lou Grant reference I’ve gotten!
It also brings us to our customary closing question; with our interviews, we always offer creators a chance to share with our audience any other work they’ve been enjoying unrelated to their own projects. What comics, films, music, literature, etc., have been catching your attention lately? What shouldn’t our readers let slip past them once they pick up Megaton Man?
DS: I’ve always tended to read more nonfiction. I’m interested in early Christianity. I’ve always been interested in what is referred to as Gnosticism, although that’s an imprecise term applied to all sorts of worldviews neither orthodox Christian, Jewish, or pagan. One scholar suggested “biblical demiurgical traditions” as a term, soteriological eschatology outside of a strictly old school evangelical tradition. I have no intention of contributing to that scholarship, but I’ve always been fascinated by that, comparative mythology like Otto Rank and Joseph Campbell, that sort of thing. How stories get transformed into legends and ideologies and belief systems. I keep returning to that.
And, since the pandemic, I’ve tried to learn me some Bach on the guitar! (Laughter.)
CBY: Don, it is our distinct pleasure to have you regale us with some of your insights after the 40 years since Megaton Man hit the page. You’ve provided an immense amount of insight on topics we don’t always get to cover in such depth here. We’ve amply linked your Zoop campaign, but if you’ve got other links you’d like to share, we are happy to include them here. Thanks for joining us today!
DS: I can be found on Facebook and I blog quite frequently. It’s not hard to see what I’m up to with a reasonably-accurate Google search. Thanks!
