Kind of a Drag
What I Say Now You May Not Like
I was a bit surprised when I recently reread, in a previous post, Dave Schreiner’s synopsis of The Return of Megaton. Dave was my editor at Kitchen Sink Press and the author of Kitchen Sink Press: The First 25 Years, 1969-1994.
He wrote, “Donald Simpson, who had moved from Princeton [Wisconsin] to Los Angeles, returned to Kitchen Sink with The Return of Megaton Man, a three-issue series which satirized the latest merchandising madness in the comics business.”
I probably hadn’t read that passage in a great many years; now, it struck me as a bit reductionist. The plot, in a nutshell, is that Megaton Man is brought back—civilian Trent Phloog is unwillingly injected with Megasoldier syrup—but doesn’t know why. The mystery leads him to the bullpen of the Gamble Comics Group in New Jersey, where he finds Bart Gamble, Bad Guy, who has a contract with the government to exploit Megaton Man’s likeness in comics, in toys, and on T-shirts.
I say “a bit reductionist,” because for a long time, I thought of the importance of that story arc was that I had moved my characters from Megatropolis (New York City) to a Midwestern college town, where I could explore the characters’ civilian secret identities. For quite some time, I’ve looked back on that moment, rich in story possibilities—Stella about to give birth to Megaton Man’s love-child, the countercultural, academic milieu, the mix of housemates, UFOs, secret agents, Pentagon-funded university laboratory experiments—and regretted only scratching the surface.
Did Dave really think the point of The Return of Megaton Man was just to send up character licensing run amok? Well, I suppose it was.
In another post, I share Dave’s reaction to the four-page plot outline for Megaton Man #11, the story arc that was eventually published as The Return of Megaton Man #1, #2, and #3. The relevant passages are,
Megaton Man: I’m glad you’re thinking seriously about bringing him back. What I say now you may not like, but I think it’s about time you stopped viewing the character as merely your vehicle to boff on the comics biz, and you should also stop viewing him as simply the comic relief with his “silly fight scenes.”
And
With that out of the way, let’s get on to the series itself. You have always been strong on plot, Don; in fact, sometimes too much plot. The breakdown you’ve offered in the first letter has some pretty hot stuff in it. The only time I felt the thing flagged is when Megaton Man enters Gamble’s bullpen, then talks to Gamble about some hot writer-artist taking over Megaton Man’s title. This, of course, is where the specific parodies of the biz come in, and maybe it’s obligatory, I suppose, but it’s kind of a drag.
Now, I don’t know how I read Dave’s remarks back in early 1987, and I have no recollection of what may have said over the phone—Dave’s notes suggest, “we’re going to talk about Wednesday, and when you get this, it’ll be like déjà vu time.” In other words, we would have already discussed his reaction to my Megaton Man #11 plot outline over the phone by the time I received his notes in the mail.
At the time, the priority was still Border Worlds, the bimonthly black-and-white series I was writing and drawing for Kitchen Sink Press—I would have been somewhere between issues #4 and #5 in early 1987, and my thought was that Megaton Man #11, a 64-page special, could somehow be fit into the schedule.
This was no doubt wishful thinking. At one point, during the first ten issues of Megaton Man, I thought I could somehow fit in a two-issue Yarn Man mini-series that addressed the Forbidden Future storyline.
In terms of sheer time, it was a cockamamie notion—in each case, I would be adding 64 pages or the equivalent of two issues to an annual schedule where six bimonthly 32-page issues was already a full-time job I could barely keep up with.
Needless to say, the Yarn Man mini-series never happened (and the Forbidden Future story remains still untold).
As 1987 progressed, sales of Border Worlds dropped to the point that its royalties could no longer cover my living expenses; I took on freelance work, namely Wasteland for DC Comics, and suspended Border Worlds, not wanting to rush it or ruin it by catch-as-catch-can sporadic issues that lost the thread of the story.
Megaton Man #11, being a story that by this time was already thumbnailed, was no longer a “special” or “annual” in my plans, but regular issues of Megaton Man—#11, #12, #13, and possibly #14—as I informed the publisher in November of 1987.
Since at least the mid-teens of this century, after various life experiences, particularly a sojourn in grad school and a PhD in art and architectural history, the Megaton Man narrative began taking over my imagination after a long remission.
I rediscovered Dave Schreiner’s notes from 1987 and regarded them as something of a time capsule—a sleeper agent, if you will—left behind for me, encouraging me in a narrative direction that got shortchanged in the later 1980s, as rancor with my publisher crowded out character-driven narrative concerns.
After I transcribed Dave’s notes on Megaton Man #11 and posted them recently, it occurred to me that I have been slightly misinterpreting them all along.
The first passage above, “I think it’s about time you stopped viewing the character as merely your vehicle to boff on the comics biz,” I always read as a reference to Megaton Man #1 through #10. But why had he prefaced this with, “What I say now you may not like”?
I always read this passage as flattering—he seemed to be saying that Megaton Man didn’t need to rely on parody and spoofing industry trends, that the characters were strong and compelling on their own. The supporting cast could be made more likeable—perhaps he thought I would find this analysis insulting. But I had read his notes overall as congratulating me on a kind of breakthrough with Megaton Man #11.
Then, he seems to turn to the plot of Megaton Man #11, or “the series itself.” While there is some “hot stuff” in it, he finds the climactic moment, where Megaton Man discovers why he is brought back, disappointing, anticlimactic, a letdown. Or, as Dave put it, “This, of course, is where the specific parodies of the biz come in, and maybe it’s obligatory, I suppose, but it’s kind of a drag.”
What if, instead of praising me for devising a character-driven breakthrough by moving my characters to Ann Arbor, his entire letter was critical that I had once again taken a dive, sold out my characters, and made the whole point of the story arc a dumb, lame inside joke—only to make the cynical point that Megaton Man had only been brought back by Bad Guy for crass, commercial considerations—in other words, to “boff on the comics biz”?
That is exactly what I think Dave was trying to say.
Maybe I’m being a bit unfair in claiming the ol’ country newspaper editor buried his lead, but you have to hit me over the head with a two-by-four if you want your point to sink in. The publisher understood at least this much about me.
Dave, with his “kind of a drag” expression, was in fact urging me to cut even more of the superhero parody from Megaton Man #11 to concentrate more on the personal lives of the characters.
I’d like to this something like this was what I had in mind by considering an issue #14, or fourth issue, for what became a three-issue mini-series. And, by the same token, it’s what got cut when the plot for Megaton Man #11 was reduced to The Return of Megaton Man #1, #2, and #3.
This would have little importance if I had inches of file folders of correspondence from Dave Schreiner—as I do from the publisher, for example. But Dave did most of his editing on photocopies of typescript and rough comic book pages, with necessary changes usually relayed over the phone, as I recall, and I never saw much. His letters, as he remarked, were truly “deathless and timeless.”
In any case, I only have a few precious sheets of his feedback, and I no longer have Dave to ask himself.
If this new interpretation is correct, not only was there a cognitive dissonance between my editor and my publisher—Dave Schreiner applauding my new character-driven storyline and Denis Kitchen urging me to reduce Megaton Man to hit-and-run #1 one-shots based on the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie and the like—they were even at more polar extremes than I realized before.
It was worse than I thought.
Dave, unlike Denis, was never a Silver Age Marvel fan secretly influenced by Stan Lee Denis owned several Ditko Spidey originals, while Dave, in Kitchen Sink Press: The First 25 Years (page 7), recalls, “I had always regarded superhero comics as idiotic.”
Dave would have preferred that I cut the Gamble Comics Corporation bullpen scene altogether—at least minimize it substantially—and concentrate instead on “humaniz[ing my] subsidiary characters.”
For all I know, Dave might have been happy had I eschewed the capes and muscles altogether, and focused on ordinary civilians Trent, Stella, Pammy, Clarissa, Preston, and baby Simon all living in an off-campus communal house on Ann Street (not identified at the time), like the lost Kevin Costner flashback from The Big Chill.
It’s not clear what Dave had in mind, but it probably meant less spending less story time with the characters in their megahero costumes and more with them in street clothes around the kitchen table, doing homework and discussing the baby’s pending birth and so on—the scenes that are most precious to me, in retrospect, from The Return of Megaton Man and which I expand upon much later in The Ms. Megaton Maxi-Series.
I’m not sure what such a Megaton Man might have been like in the later 1980s—perhaps more like Love & Rockets or Strangers in Paradise—or Omaha, the Cat Dancer with just the soap-opera elements and no explicit sex. Maybe the costumes or how the characters were dressed wasn’t so much the issue—Jaime Hernandez, Terry Moore, and Reed Waller all tended to draw a lot of fit, young women in rather tight-fighting attire (if wearing anything at all) not significantly less revealing than the megahero leotards or off-campus outfits I gave to Stella, Pammy, and Clarissa to wear around the house.
This new reading of my old editor’s notes, at any rate, is not substantially different from my previous understanding—it’s only moreso. The Megaton Man #11 Dave seemed to be urging me toward would have been even less parodic—and presumably less commercial.
It would have also worked much better as a post-underground series of sporadic black-and-white issues that would come out, catch-as-catch-can, between my rent-paying freelance assignments for other publishers—without all the ballyhoo of a new #1 ever Goddamned time.
This would have made Megaton Man even more of an arty series and less of a cash cow—which would have aggravated the publisher even more. Which is precisely why I find it so appealing to contemplate now.
How would that have worked? Penciling, inking, and lettering scripts for mainstream publishers and drawing Megaton Man without Megaton Man for Kitchen Sink Press? It appeals to my sense of humor, at any rate.
In any case, it’s clear to me that my editor and my publisher were pulling even harder in completely opposite directions than I thought—even more than I understood at the time.
And I really wish I had listened to the editor more.