“These are the best printed mylar balloons we’ve made yet!”
Hardcase #14
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (July, 1994)
“Transition”
WRITER: James Hudnall
PENCILER: Steve Carr
INKER: Dan Schaefer
COLORING: Moose Baumann & Foodhammer!
LETTERER: Patrick Owsley
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
Waiting for a movie that is just the three of them.
When you have multiple movies a year, some in theaters at the same time, just go back to television.
Over at The Clutter Reports this week I have the final book report for How To Completely Lose Your Mind. That means this week we’ll introduce the next novel in the Chapter By Chapter series. And we are back to prose novels. And Star Trek. The rest you’ll have to wait for tomorrow.
The daily comic reviews are back to the normal “Yesterday’s” Comic entries, but there is one minor change. Long story short, comic reviews are done at most the day before to make deadline. Golden Age anthologies take time to do because even though they’re short, there’s still a bunch at one shot. Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually when I have the most time to write, so in the hopes of being able to do other things during the day I’m moving the pre-DC comics, currently Quality under other names during the Golden Age where we are, to Wednesdays. That should help balance my time a bit, with the random Golden Age comics still being reviewed on Friday. Everything else is hopefully business as usual.
Have a great week, everyone!
I knew I wanted (and probably needed) to do something to tie in to the release of a Masters Of The Universe movie, but what? Episodes are usually too short. Fanfilms could be an option, but if you already went to the movie would you want another one? Plus I only have one in the coffer and I still need to confirm it works for Saturday Night Showcase. So that was out.
I don’t usually do documentaries on Saturday Night Showcase, but tonight it seemed the best option, especially this one. Power Of Grayskull: The Definitive History Of He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe is a 2017 documentary focusing on the 1980s original period of how the toys, cartoon, and first live-action movie came about. There is a sadly too short section on the 1990s “New Adventures” and the 2003 remake (an example of doing a remake right), and I would love to hear more about how those were made. At least they were acknowledged. There’s also not enough discussion on the Horde and Snake Men and the She-Ra section could have been bigger, but there’s only so much time in the show.
Still, what they have and what they do go through, with a decent amount on how the toys and the lore was created, is still worth a watch, and YouTube has it up free with ads, so if it wasn’t that’s the option I have. Luckily it is interesting and features a couple of faces longtime BW readers might know: James Eatock from Cereal:Geek TV and Val Staples, the latter having worked on the 2003 tie-in comics and the newspaper strip collection. Plus I use He-Man.org for most of the Masters Of The Universe minicomics for Free Comic Inside. So it’s a good choice overall. Enjoy.
Now if I can just avoid spoilers until my broke behind gets to watch it on free streaming despite all the new movie discussions I can’t bet into and apparent divisions….Wait, the documentary is age-restricted? Well, I don’t have time to fix it, so follow the link through or you can catch it on numerous other streaming services. Age restricted. Alan Oppenheimer swears once and there’s one test image of blood on He-Man’s sword before the artist was told He-Man doesn’t kill, and somehow the TV-14 show is age restricted. I don’t understand what’s going on at YouTube.
I was watching an episode of the original Kino’s Journey recently. The episode was part two of “Coliseum”, where Kino ends up in a deathmatch tournament, though surrendering is an option, but the main story isn’t what matters. It’s what happens at the start of the episode. The final four are forced by the mad king behind the event to watch a puppet show about how he ascended to the throne. I won’t go into details, but one of the participants got really angry (because his own story was tied to the events) while another was bored by it and Kino and the other girl were at most apathetic to the whole thing.
I was thinking at first how the reaction to that story helped set up the character’s reveal by the end of the story since it was kind of obvious who he really was. As my brain tends to do with a good story, it went into being a character there myself (or some better variant of myself), confronting the man as Kino would do later, but in my own way. I figured out who he was and why he hated the king from his reaction, noting that stories are a sort of gateway to the soul. Usually we think about that when it comes to the writer, but then I took a different mental path: what does our reaction to stories say about us?
One date idea I’ve had (if I could find a woman to agree to one and time slips further away from me) is a personal double feature. She grabs her favorite movie, I grab mine, we watch both and then we explain to the other why that movie mattered to us. Two people can have the same favorite movie, or book, or episode, or game but for different reasons. At a time when Hollywood’s alleged creatives seem transfixed on telling their story through characters they didn’t create at the expense of those characters’ stories, I kind of wonder what the stories we’re into says about us, because there are so many types out there.
Wait until he finds out what kind of club this actually is.
Science Comics #2
Fox Publications, Inc. (March, 1940)
Back to the Golden Age craziness. The previous issue I was kind of neutral on. Hopefully this issue will provide a more thorough entertaining reading experience…but considering none of these characters are even discussed in the public domain circles I travel (which is admittedly one Facebook group), there has to be a reason they never became popular.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Saturday Article Link> Why Geeks Like Rouges
The rogue, the (usually) dude who causes all the trouble, never quite looks cool doing it, but somehow always manages to be someone’s favorite character for completely good reason. In sci-fi and fantasy he doesn’t get away with everything but what does get away with we wouldn’t, if we even survived the attempt. Writing for Bleeding Fool, contributor M. Ammar Shahid goes over why he believes the Han Solos of the fictional multiverse are so well received by geek culture. I know someone liked Okana from Star Trek. Not me, but someone did.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on June 6, 2026 in Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, Han Solo.
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