Sunday, August 9, 2015

Trent Phloog, Controversial Columnist!

An Unpublished Page and a Half from 1984!

I drew Megaton Man #1 over a 13-month period between early 1983 and early 1984, and promptly sent off photocopies to 15 different publishers (including First Comics, Epic Illustrated, Pacific Comics, and other imprints no longer around). When Kitchen Sink Press asked me to do Megaton Man on a bi-monthly basis, I threw everything but the kitchen sink into the second issue over the summer of 1984, which proved a fiasco! I produced something like 40 pages of senseless material, crammed with lots of ideas, but no structure. I set all that aside, and took a long walk between the Wayne State University campus to the GM Building on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit and back, and came up with the idea that became the published Megaton Man #2, and drew it in six weeks! After that, I cannibalized scenes and sequences from the 40 aborted pages, reworking much of them for issues #3 and #4, and reworking some scenes completely for other issues in the series.


This is a scene that was redrawn later. In it, Trent Phloog is drafted to take over the controversial column in The Manhattan Project left vacant by the departure of Pamela Jointly, only the job requires that Trent Phloog to become the world's harshest critic of Megaton Man! In another scene, Megaton Man is being supplied with talking points by a government agency that wants him to keep his position at the newspaper.









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