I drew this six-page Megaton Man story (scroll down for images) in 1983, before embarking on Megaton Man #1. It was something of a trial balloon for the character and an effort to reconcile all the myriad impulses and influences I was experiencing at the time.
For one thing, Megaton Man itself appears as a strip-within-a strip that a cartoonist (someone referred to as "Chuck" but clearly a self-portrait of myself at the time) is trying to sell. He's wondering whether Megaton Man is art, whether it will get him laid, and other psychodramas. The title itself, "8 1/2 x 11," is a play on Fellini 8 1/2, Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical psychodrama starring Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, an Italian filmmaker directing an internationally-financed science fiction magnum opus while beleaguered by critics, mistresses, actresses, and a shrewish wife who wants a divorce.
To offer an example of my pretensions at the time, I actually sent photocopies to Art Spiegelman at Raw magazine; they were sent back to me with the mustache of the underground publisher on the final page (actually a combination of Spiegelman and Denis Kitchen, who I hadn't known at the time but would later become Megaton Man's publisher), with the note, "Art no longer has a mustache."
The strip was never published except as a half-sized photocopied ashcan I put out when I was publishing my own work under the Fiasco Comics Inc. imprint.
Some of the humorous material was redrawn and appeared in Megaton Man #1 (a good example is the gag on page in which Megaton Man's laborious thought cloud prefigures a large object being thrown at him). Other incidental characters, like some of the people on page three, were based on actual persons I knew when I was an undiscovered genius in Detroit. Mr. Metafysik himself, a villain who never appeared in Megaton Man proper, was an idealized and overblown caricature of a cinema buff and critic I knew in Detroit; some of the taunts he throws at Megaton Man paralleled some of the unkind remarks directed at me and my artform, cartooning, by this arthouse snob.
Overall, the story sums up a number of themes and issues that were current in my life: sex, snobbery, social status, and the suspicion that I might be wasting my talents on a pop culture medium that was ephemeral and congenitally juvenile, rather than prestigious "art." It was also a lot a wishful thinking, since I never looked that handsome and at the time certainly never had a sex partner as good looking as the woman I'm showed failing to perform for (although the impotence really happened!).
In the actual Megaton Man series as it was published and unfolded, nearly all of the pop culture, art world, and pseudo-autobiographical themes fell by the wayside, replaced by superhero parody (featuring the Megatropolis Quartet in this early incarnation among other satires of familiar icons) and a nascent, soap-opera world of fictional characters like Stella Starlight and others whose personal dramas came to preoccupy my creative imagination. In certain respects, I've returned to some of those abandoned themes in my current prose project, The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series. "Chuck," in fact, evolved into Chuck Bradford, although he became brown-haired like my brother, and is now referred to as "Chas" in the Maxi-Series.
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Megaton Man™ and all characters, words, and pictures are ™ and © Donald E. Simpson 2021, all rights reserved.
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