 Megatron Man first appeared on the stands at comic book shops in the late 1984 during the boom of independent and self-published comics that accompanied the rise of the comic book shop. Obviously it was satire of the Silver Age Marvel comics, as you can see just by the look of it. There were plenty of spooks and satire books in the mid 1980s including the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but this book was unique in its sheer quality. It was created written and drawn by Don Simpson. This was really his introduction to the world of comics and it's what made his name. As the series started out the art and the writing were a little bit uneven and he he devoted a lot of space to ragging on Dunesbury for some reason. But you can definitely see the classic Marvel look that he was going for. You can even see early Mad Magazine influence. As the series developed and Megatron Man carried on a relationship with the see-through girl from the Megatropolis Quartet, something that Marvel Comics was not particularly happy about. But as the series went on his style both art and writing got cleaner and the resemblance to the early Mad Magazine work of Wally Wood became more and more evident. The book had a cast of seemingly hundreds of characters and later in the book there were other Megatron Men introduced like the Uncle Megaton, the Golden Age Megaton Man, and the Soviet Megaton Man and his Megaton's arch rival named Simply Bad Guy. And throughout it all there was Megaton Man's characteristic catchphrase which was simply woo. The initial miniseries lasted only 10 issues but a short while later there was a three-issue miniseries sequel and a number of Megaton Man characters got their own one-shots like Yarn Man and Tyrano Man and the characters lived on in the pages of Don Simpson's Bizarre Heroes and Megaton Man had a crossover with Savage Dragon, a book which introduced a number of crucial characters to Eric Larson's Savage Dragon universe and Don Simpson's characters have continued to have the occasional appearance in the Savage Dragon verse. One of the reasons I wanted to introduce this series was because starting with issue number six Don Simpson introduced an unrelated backup series called Border Worlds. It's a straight-up science fiction drama not related to the Megaton Man verse. The no superheroes, no magic, no superpowers that I will cover in a future episode of 30 Seconds Sci-Fi.