Foreword to Volume II: North Cass Corridor
When I approached John initially about this project, shortly after the release of Megasomething by my friend Pamela Jointly in the spring of 1986, I naively had in mind for John to conduct a series of interviews with me to get me on the record, and for him to transcribe and collate the information and turn it into a book—with my final approval, of course. After all, John was a professional scribe with plenty of experience covering the extraordinary in his column The Bizarre Files of John Bradford for The Detroit Day off and on since the early 1970s.
Furthermore, I flattered myself to think that whatever I had to say was newsworthy—it set the record straight, at least, on a bestselling book and popular TV series with its caricatural distortions, unconscionable omissions, and outright fabrications concerning the lives of me and my friends—and I thought my story in exchange for his writing services would be a good bargain. (In retrospect, I realize that was more than a bit arrogant.)
When to my surprise John suggested I write down my story myself, I half-suspected he was only trying to get rid of me. After all, I was a total stranger at the time and not a professional writer, nor did I have any literary ambitions of becoming one. But he also sincerely believed my story should be told in my own authentic voice, and that I wouldn’t be happy ceding control of the final outcome to him or to any other author any more than I had been satisfied with the outcome of Megasomething, written by an ostensible friend. John was also, as he later confessed, trying to get rid of me.
When I returned to the Day offices some months later with a completed draft, however, John was surprised, but he was also ultimately receptive and encouraging. Over several long night sessions at his place and mine—inevitably, this entailed a very intense, intimate involvement—he patiently led me through several rounds of revisions, making numerous thoughtful suggestions and contributions along the way. Although I must own the massive shortcomings of that first volume, I was only able to turn it into something readable, if not necessarily immediately publishable, under John’s able, experienced guidance. John proceeded to exploit what few connections he had in the publishing world and begin soliciting interest in the manuscript with agents and publishers.
Although the first volume had not found a home before John’s untimely disappearance, he felt that I had made sufficient progress as a memoirist—and still had a store of experience yet to tap—to warrant undertaking at least a second volume. To my mind, I had said everything I had wanted to say in Volume I about my Ann Arbor days, particularly about my life with the former Megaton Man and See-Through Girl and their darling son Simon, as well as my affair with Yarn Man and association with Kozmik Kat and secretive organization ICHHL. Moreover, I felt I had sufficiently responded to what I had perceived at the time as the blatant misinformation contained in Megasomething, at least to my satisfaction. But John realized I had more of Ms. Megaton Man’s story yet to tell, in her own right as it were. More importantly, he recognized my need to tell that story—a need he recognized long before I did.
“But I don’t think I can tell the story of that period of my life in any kind of order,” I protested. “I certainly didn’t keep notes, and the jumble of recollections and impressions that come to mind would take an enormous effort to sort out.” It was true; I had moved back to Detroit for my senior year of college, enrolling in the downtown extension of Arbor State University for the majority of my classes and cross-registering at nearby Warren Woodward University for the rest. I also continued to fly (bodily, as Ms. Megaton Man) back and forth to Ann Arbor for meetings with academic advisors and occasionally to babysit Simon. Without a break, I plunged ahead into graduate studies at Warren Woodward. All the while I was meeting a number of local and national megaheroes, confronting several megavillains, saving the world and the Multimensions once or twice, and learning that the nature and history of reality is a great deal more complicated than I ever imagined. My life during this post-Ann Arbor period, in short, became even more hectic, and even more of a blur.
“Just write what you can recall as a series of character studies,” was John’s advice. “You’ve known a lot of important megahero personalities,” he said, “some famous, some not so famous. Their stories all deserve to be recorded. And you have a knack—you understand being a megahero from the inside. Like it or not, thanks to Megasomething, there’s an audience that will be hungry for this material. Once you start writing, believe me, more details will come back to you. You can worry about putting it all into some kind of chronological order later.”
I protested there was a lot of private stuff I wouldn’t care to dredge up—personally wrenching material that would make the scandalous Megasomething appear about as antiseptic as a child’s code-approved mainstream comic book. Furthermore, the first thing that came to mind about that period in my life was its wealth of raunchy, debasing sexual experiences and a surplus of emotional turmoil—stuff that would make the first volume appear timid and reticent, even self-censored, by comparison.
“Good,” replied John. “Start with that.”
“But it will be dirty,” I said. “Far dirtier than the first volume”—which had turned out dirtier than the book I had set out to write. If anything, I had envisioned the life and career of Ms. Megaton Man as a series of young adult adventures appropriate for all ages—the kind of reading material grandmas and aunts and uncles would buy for youngsters for their birthdays or middle-school graduation, not compulsively neurotic, erotic confessionals that had to be shelved with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.
“Fine—get it all out of your system in the first draft, and we can worry about toning it down later.”
John was right, of course, and I set about recalling the period after I left Ann Arbor in just that fashion. As soon as I began to write, more details came flooding back. It took some doing, but I believe I’ve cobbled together a reasonable portrait of those days and some of those personalities I met. But I was right, too; it is plenty dirty, and even though I’ve made an effort to tone it down, many readers may still find it distasteful. And the grandmas and aunts-and-uncles market can be ruled out entirely.
Unfortunately, John Bradford went missing before he could ever lay eyes on my second manuscript, let alone my subsequent writings. Despite the considerable contributions John made to the first volume, its massive shortcomings are solely my responsibility. This second volume, which lacks any of his direct input, is even more impoverished without out. Of course, I take full responsibility for the flaws, inaccuracies, inadequacies, and outright self-indulgences in these works, but whatever is coherent and readable in them I’d like to credit to John and his beneficent influence. Wherever you are, Brad, I hope in some small way I’ve done you proud.
—Clarissa James
New York City–Megatropolis and Bayonne, New Jersey, 1994
Note from the Contributing Editor
Some readers of the old Megaton Man comic books that I wrote and drew back in the 1980s (those few that are still around) have complained that Megaton Man—in his proper, megaheroic form— appeared hardly at all in the first volume of the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series. Strictly speaking, this is true; Trent Phloog spent most of the early 1980s trapped in his civilian persona, appearing only briefly—and, as it turns out, inconsequentially—in his more familiar, overly-muscled physique and primary-colored uniform (these moments, occurring early in Volume I, roughly correspond with the comic book mini-series The Return of Megaton Man #1-3, published in 1988). But from another perspective, this isn’t a fair criticism at all, since Megaton Man is really Trent Phloog, and Trent Phloog—in his civilian form, at least—appears throughout Volume I of the Maxi-Series. Furthermore, Trent’s small circle of friends and acquaintances, whom I’ve come to call his Extended Nuclear Family, are featured throughout the writings of Clarissa James, and will certainly exert an influence if not presence in subsequent chronicles of the Megaton Man Megaverse.
However, fans of the comic book Megaton Man, sporadic as that series has been, are hereby warned that the Man of Molecules—except as civilian Trent Phloog—will not appear onstage at all in the present volume, at least in his megaheroic muscles and costume. Although those same readers surely know (and this is certainly no spoiler) that Megs will be back—replete with bronze goggles and in full force later on—whether Trent Phloog likes it or not.
Much of the feedback I’ve received on Volume I, when not perversely complaining outright about the lack of Megaton Man in the first-person story told by Ms. Megaton Man, betrays a general suspicion fans seem to have that I somehow harbor an “agenda” to “retcon” the extant Megaton Man narrative as it was originally told in the 1980s comic books. A retcon, for those not familiar with the jargon, is a “retroactive continuity” alteration, as when a TV show, movie franchise, comic book, paperback series, or other longtime entertainment property is abruptly revised to be something other than what it seemed, such as when it turned out Bobby Ewing never really died on Dallas, rendering the entire previous season in which he was absent as “only a dream.”
Without wishing to seem overly defensive, I’d like to address this issue directly by saying that when I was writing and drawing the original Megaton Man series for Kitchen Sink Press (which included Megaton Man #1-10, the aforementioned Return of Megaton Man #1-3, Megaton Man Meets the Uncategorizable X+Thems #1, and Yarn Man #1—a stack of comics that for reasons of personal vanity I’d have preferred to have called Megaton Man #1-15), I simply did not have access to the same materials—including Clarissa James’ first-person account—that I do now. This is probably because Ms. James may not have yet begun writing her account and certainly not come close to finishing it by 1989, when Yarn Man #1 languished on my drawing board.
In any case, it would be a great many years before I would even become aware of the existence of the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series, let alone be able to get my hands on a set of somewhat grainy photocopies of the manuscript. Instead, I had to rely on other sources that turned out to be incomplete and somewhat contradictory for Yarn Man #1, to say nothing of previous installments in the series. Also, as a young cartoonist who fancied himself a satirist, I was more eager to use the Megaton Man material to mock certain aesthetic aspects of the superhero genre and bludgeon what I perceived as rapacious business practices of the comic book industry than I was to provide a rational continuity—particular preoccupations Clarissa James obviously never shared.
In many ways, I’d like to think Clarissa and I share a certain snarky sensibility and sense of humor. But to be honest, even had I known of it back in the twentieth century, I’m not sure the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series would have made for a good Don Simpson comic book then or now. I certainly wish I had had access to Clarissa’s timeline of events before I assayed Yarn Man #1, an issue that is fondly remembered by my fans but which in terms of chronology alone embarrassingly compresses events rather too severely to be plausible. In fact, the present volume of the Maxi-Series and possibly a third will chronicle several entire years of continuity I inadvertently or carelessly omitted from Yarn Man #1.
If I do say so myself, Clarissa James is a much better writer than she gives herself credit for, and a far better writer than I am—Beta-readers who slogged through my first unpublished attempt at a Megaton Man prose novel can attest to that. Clarissa is certainly a more confident writer, perhaps because she has lived the story she is writing—and her prose has required very little editing on my part. In any case, her psychological insights offer a more fully human portrayal to the Megaton Man cast than the graphic novel form would allow—it would simply take too long to draw the darn thing, for starters—or at least I could muster, and are no doubt best left in prose form. Suffice it to say that any apparent retcons in the Megaton Man Narrative are completely due to my own miserable shortcomings—live and learn—and in now having a available a much improved, higher-resolution set of facts than I did when I was drawing comics, and not to willful creative mischief, least of all on the part of Clarissa James.
The present volume should also go a long way in both making apparent and filling the enormous gaps in Yarn Man #1 and set the stage for the genuine return of Megaton Man that was depicted in the final two-thirds of that comic. By the end of this volume, readers will have some inkling of how the Maxi-Series foreshadows Pteranoman #1 (or what might best be called Megaton Man # from 1990, as well as the seventeen-issue Bizarre Heroes series I published under the Fiasco Comics imprint in the mid-1990s. That’s because—spoiler alert—Clarissa reveals how she met many of the colorful characters in those “later” comic books for the first time.
In terms of the real world (as opposed to the dates of publication of my Kitchen Sink and Fiasco Comics comic books), it should be noted that volume I of the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series covered a period from the summer of 1980 to the spring of 1983; the present volume picks up from there and—depending upon my editing skills—should cover the next eighteen months, to about the end of 1984. Since Clarissa began writing Volume I no earlier than 1987 (by my estimation) and completed a draft of Volume II no earlier than her permanent relocation to New York in the early nineties, and since even more time has passed in the interim, the reader may detect any number of anachronisms of phraseology and slang in the text, particularly in the realm of mass communication and technology. Needless to say, in the three decades that have transpired, fax machines have given way to smartphones, and closed-circuit television has given way to networked social media; many of the megaheroic gizmos the text regards as gosh-wow and cutting-edge have by now become commonplace, even for civilians. Rather than attempt to correct many of these defects, I have left most of them intact, assuming the reader will appreciate them as quaint relics of a tumultuous and rapidly-changing period of time, and as an accurate record of the way Clarissa James chooses to remember it.
—Donald E. Simpson, PhD
Crafton, Pennsylvania, 2019
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| Clarissa James as Ms. Megaton Man; unpublished sketchbook pose. |
All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2019, all rights reserved.
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