Radioactive Man is within the show a long-running superhero comic book series featuring Radioactive Man and his sidekick, Fallout Boy. According to one episode, there are 1000 issues of the comic book. In the real world, Bongo Comics has produced a smaller number of issues of Radioactive Man.
Radioactive Man is one of the four 'premiere' series released by Bongo Comics in late 1993. The series has been released in two volumes, an early run from 1993–1994, and the current run that has been published since 2000. Smaller Radioactive Man stories have also been published in Simpsons Comics. As a tie-in promotion of The Simpsons Movie a special "Radioactive Man Comic Book Edition #711" was sold at 7-Elevens as part of their Kwik-E-Mart promotion.
Within the Bongo Comics, Radioactive Man is secretly Claude Kane III, a millionaire playboy whose personality was well-intentioned, but bumbling and not overly bright. In addition (which became a recurring storyline element), Claude's personality was permanently stuck in a conservative 1950s outlook on everything, no matter what the time era in question was. A running gag is that in order to preserve his secret identity, Claude is constantly wearing various types of hats, in order to conceal the lightning bolt-shaped shrapnel sticking out of his head.
Issue #1 of the Bongo comic differs from Radioactive Man #1 as seen in The Simpsons episode "Three Men and a Comic Book". While featuring a similar scenario and accident (Claude getting his trousers caught on barbed wire just before a mega-bomb explodes is a parody of Bruce Banner getting caught by the Gamma Bomb in the Incredible Hulk#1), the Bongo series' Claude was not wearing tattered clothes. In the comic book, Claude's survival is due in part to a large thunderbolt-shaped shard of metal embedded in his head by the explosion. Claude would attempt to remove the bolt throughout the book series, but each attempt has nasty consequences which results in it being put back in his scalp again. Additionally, the bolt's presence would save his life numerous times in increasingly bizarre ways.
Maintaining the satirical standards of the television show, these comics often parody genre comic books, and the reader can follow the evolution of Radioactive Man from a 1950s irradiated hero through the politically reactionary or radical years of the 1960s and 1970s, and the dark, troubled years of the 1980s and 1990s comic book hero. Indeed, one comic displays a startling similarity to Alan Moore's Watchmen, with Radioactive Man taking the part of state-supported hero Doctor Manhattan. The comics are published as if they were the actual Simpsons universe's Radioactive Man comics; a "1970s"-published comic features a letter written by a ten-year-old Marge Bouvier, for instance. The comic also takes the idea that the title has been running since the 1950s and each issue of the real series is a random issue from that run. So one issue might be issue #357, the next #432 and the next #34, etc.
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