Don Simpson is perhaps best known for the hilarious antics of his Megaton Man creation, but he also created many other characters such as Pteranoman: Dinosaur Fighter!, a guy that dresses up as a dinosaur and...fights dinosaurs?

Pteranoman first appeared in Shell Shock, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anthology released in 1989. Simpson drew a story called “Teen Techno Turtle Trio Plus One!” featuring a "what-if" alternate reality where the turtles are actually just human actors in suits. Splinter sends them to a lost area called Dinosaur Peninsula where they are rescued from hungry dino's by Pteranoman and the Cave Babes.

Pteranoman would later appear in his own issue, where he discovers that dinosaurs have erupted out from under a toxic waste dump after an earthquake hits. The Cave Babes hop into their Pteranocopters and follow Pteranoman to the dump, where they find and battle a ferocious T-Rex. They win, but an evil professor intends to fuse with the molecules of the dead T-Rex in hopes of achieving immortality. But it all goes wrong, and he turns into Tyrannoman.

Pteranoman drops Tyrannoman into a chasm made by the earthquake, and an aftershock closes the fissure, sealing Tyrannoman within. Pteranoman and the Cave Babes would later appear in a few issues of Megaton Man, but that was about it.

Nightmare was a concept created by Alex Nino in the late 80's. It's about a man that has slipped into the darkest corners of his sleeping psyche. In this strange, psychological surreality of slumbering terror, will he become a hero...or a monster? That outcome is critical, because waiting beyond the nightmares is a sleeping beauty. Nino's artwork is top notch, with splash page after splash page of dark dimensions and bizarre emotional storms. It's a pretty unusual yet neat concept that only saw one issue.


The pages were too large to scan so I snapped a few pics, just look at this wild stuff:

Strange Days #1 features an ongoing story called Freakwave, the post-apocalyptic surf-scavenger epic by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. The first arc of Freakwave appeared in the first three issues of Vanguard Illustrated. Freakwave is a story set in an apocalyptic future where the world is entirely submerged in water, and a man called The Drifter must survive by sailing the seas scavenging for trash while avoiding the disease-ridden Water-Rats, a race of undead monsters that were once almost human. The Drifter must also wear a "Fog-Mask" to protect himself from the psychedelic-poisons of the Electric Fog that now swirls within the atmosphere. If that's not bad enough, he must also deal with the Spoilers, a gang of psycho-scavengers led by the insane Captain Roaring, who wrecks havoc in the waters within his giant ship, The Red Herring.

The new Freakwave series in Strange Days #1 introduced new characters, including giant floating heads which act as ships that can fly above and below water. The ships all have interesting and wild designs, such as a three-eyed J.F.K, a yawning Mad Hatter, and a Zombie Football head. The floating heads take center stage this time around, as the Drifter tries to make sense of all he had been through previously with the demented crew of the Red Herring. There is Captain Learning of the three-eyed J.F.K. head, who is the ringmaster of a band of circus-freaks with a bounty on a mutant who is a descendant of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and James Joyce.




That mutant is Captain Cracking of the Mad Hatter head, which is manned by his powder-puff entourage of lunatics. A third head, the Zombie Football, is manned by none other than Captain Roaring, who is planning a new attack to take over the head of three-eyed J.F.K. It only gets crazier from there, as the Drifter winds up on a derelict church perched on a World War II submarine, manned by the strange and mysterious Ol' Man Drivel.

If you can survive the outlandish world of Freakwave, you will be rewarded with some completely amazing Brendan McCarthy artwork.