I’ve been very fortunate in the past decade not only to be “back in comics” (and at the same time to prematurely qualify for “vintage” status) but also seeing a good deal of my past work from the twentieth century brought back into print in deluxe and/or bookshelf formats. Most of these reprint projects began as someone else’s idea (and I’d like to credit them now).
Even more remarkable is that somehow I managed to hang onto quality source materials—either original art, quality photocopies, or films—that allowed these projects to become realized in print. That is a story in itself—from storage locker to garage to storage locker and from one side of the continent to another (with a marriage and divorce in the interim).
But, without any further ado, let’s review the past decade, shall we?
2017
The current Don Simpson renaissance began in 2017 with a couple of projects that couldn’t be more diverse. I don’t recall the exact order, but I’m going to put Jim Valentino’s Splitting Image 80-Page Giant first.
Jim (or Val, as I called—back in his Aardvark-Vanaheim days, few people knew his first name) contacted me, wanting to reprint The normalman vs. Megaton Man Special #1 (Image Comics, 1995), and asked if I still had any of the art from that or from the two-issue Splitting Image (Image Comics, 1993). Unfortunately, I parted with most of that original art over the years, selling it to collectors—a list of whom was never recorded.
But astonishingly, I had somehow salted away variously-sized photostats and sharp 11” x 17” or legal size photocopies of all the original pages. These were likely created only to take to conventions to show people what I was working on at any given time, after which they would be thrown haphazardly into an old Fedex box with other photocopies of roughs and pencils of various creator-owned and freelance work.
Once I had retrieved and scanned the art, Splitting Image was beautifully recolored by Hilary Jenkins—paid for out of Jim’s own pocket—rectifying one of the longstanding sore points of my career: The original two-issue series, made late (and returnable) by Extreme Studios’ backlog of projects and shortage of coloring workstations, had suffered immensely from sloppy coloring and rushed production.
Now, thanks to Jim, not only was Splitting Image something I could stand to look at, but readers could read it all in one go, along with the normalman vs. Megaton Man Special.
Next, the late Drew Ford contacted me—I think this was before the 80-page giant, but whatever—wanting to reprint Border Worlds in a collection as part of Dover Publications graphic novel line. Dover happened to be one of my favorite publishers—they had reprinted everything from Vitruvius to Bach to Moon Mullins at one time or another, and I probably had more of their editions in my personal library than from any other imprint.
My agent, Denis Kitchen, negotiated a deal (I believe he also loaned Dover a set of comics) and the project was underway. Dover’s team scanned from the original black and white comics (eight issues in all, including Marooned) and even included the color back-ups from Megaton Man, and did a really superb job. The only thing I had to do was draw a new 30-page addendum, which enabled me to finally make use of a sequence I had roughed out in a ring-bound sketchbook in the late 1990s.
I never spoke directly with Drew on the phone until the project was well under way; in fact, only after I had completed the new art. It was the one and only occasion I spoke to him, but it was interrupted—he was called away to a meeting. When he phoned me back, he was shaken—he had been unceremoniously shitcanned and the graphic novel line scuttled, although Peter Lenz came in as editor to wrap up the project. No less a light than old chum Stephen Russell Bissette contributed a fine, glowing afterword.
Subsequently, I got a chance to visit Dover and meet Peter and the graphic designers responsible for the wonderful reproduction and restoration—as well as tour their nigh-scholarly archives of rarities—in Mineola, New York. Peter and I later toured Book Revue in Huntington, further out on Long Island—a beloved and lamented bookstore (i.e., now gone), right around the corner from Menachem Luchins’s Escape Pod Comics, where I did a signing.
Drew Ford, sadly, succumbed to Covid during the pandemic, but among his achievements in too short a life and career was discovering Nick Cagnetti and Pink Lemonade. At Drew’s suggestion, I contributed a 4-page back-up feature in issue #2 (It’s Alive, 2019), collected in 2023 in lavish hardcover and softcover Oni Press editions). If you haven’t heard of this, it should be part of your library, too:
Speaking of Escape Pod Comics, the aforementioned signing (in 2017?) also featured Dave Ryan, who years earlier had contacted me about including Megaton Man in his alternative-indie “Secret Wars” crossover, War of the Independents. Long story short, I went from cameo to back cover to drawing the entirety of issue #4 (Red Anvil Comics, August 2017) from his story and Paul Castiglia’s script. This also appeared in 2017, and settled another score—this time, between Megaton Man and Ben Edlund’s Tick.
If it were only these 2017 publications, it might have been safe to say I was on some sort of comic book comeback trail. But there was more where that came from …
Next: Beyond Pictopia!