Trent Phloog On Patrol!

You really have to be a Megaton Man fan to get that heading.

I love Megaton Man. Don Simpson's wacked-out parody hero is on my all-time fave list. His run at Kitchen Sink in the early 80's is among the finest spoofs of the superhero genre ever, and possibly the last moment to do one since in these post-Crisis days a parody of superheroes seems redundant and unnecessary.

I have pretty much the whole Megaton Man canon, and some of them were very hard to find. I've even had the pleasure of meeting Don Simpson many years ago and getting his autograph on an issue or two. He's a friendly fellow who was inspired by Marvel Comics and his artistic hero John Romita to try his hand at comics and he's been very successful. Along with Megaton Man, he's done a wonderful (at least I think so) King Kong adaptation, a rich science fiction series called Border Worlds, some erotic comics under the name of "Anton Drek" (most of this stuff I don't have and it's pretty expensive) some work for DC'sWasteland series, and more recently various illustration jobs and advertising gigs. Sadly he seems to have given up comics for the most part after his self-publishing gig dwindled away in the middle 90's.

I didn't know it, but he illustrated Al Franken's books (now I've got to get those too) and that burst of notoriety apparently got I Books to issue a reprint of the original Megaton Man stories from Kitchen Sink a few years back. It's a lovely cover, features a few new pages by Simpson starring Al Franken and a few extras, but the core of the book is the first five issues of Megaton Man. Those early issues evoke the late 60's Marvel experience as vividly as any pastiche I've ever come across. The page design, the lettering, the whole thing just screams old Marvel. Simpson's style was really different then, much more about linework and detail and less the more-Romita style he uses now. It's a wonderful send-up, tart but still with charm.

If you're a Marvel fan and you've never sampled Megaton Man, the early stuff in particular, you might like it.

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