Chat over calamari with Megaton Man creator Don Simpson as we discuss why he splurged on a special issue of <em>Captain Marvel</em> at the Baltimore Comic-Con, how the business practices of comics affect the artistic side, the way two early visits with artist Keith Pollard taught him he didn't want to be a Marvel Comics penciller after all, where he feels the Silver Age ended and the Bronze Age truly began, how classic cinema and the auteur theory influenced his creative choices, the lessons he learned from the first few issues of <em>Love & Rockets</em> vs. the unfortunate expectations set up by the first few issues of <em>Megaton Man</em>, how working on DC's anthology title <em>Wasteland</em> caused him to reinvent himself, what path his publishing life would have taken had <em>Megaton Man</em> been only a one-shot as originally planned, the career differences between Basil Wolverton and Will Eisner, why he's able to let others play with his characters without feeling proprietary, the alternate universe in which he would have been a Crusty Bunker or one of Romita's Raiders, how 9/11 caused him to head back to school for a PhD, why he wrote a <em>Ms. Megaton Man</em> prose novel, whether he already knows the final chapter to his comics universe, and much more.
