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Meddick himself says he was the wrong choice for a family humor strip. I like his Robotman stories, but with a bit of work, Robotman and his friends, the ones Meddick didn’t use in the strip like Stellar and Oops, could have worked as a comic strip. I actually enjoyed the family years more than the Monty years, though the sci-fi references were of course something I got into. Someday I may attempt to make it work, but I’m kind of busy at the moment.
We return to our rare graphic novel look, which I only keep bringing up for anybody new here not knowing this is normally a prose novel review. That’s how many chapters we have but thus far, including this chapter, it’s around 20-22 pages per chapter and a rather big book for a graphic novel. So this is how I chose to review it.
Last time the tour left area close to where Pocket Vinyl lives, so the fun of finding places to stay comes into play. We have cat people rooming on the couch of a family with dogs. Also not very good at communicating there are guests staying there.
Returning to the theme of “I could never do this”, I don’t do much travelling. We went on vacation to Vermont a couple of times and I took a school field trip to the New York ferry (I live in Connecticut, as does the duo that make up Pocket Vinyl) but anywhere else I’ve stayed has been in my home state. I’ve done a few conventions that required me to stay in a hotel for three or four days, but I’m the kind of guy who likes to sleep in my own bed. So I applaud them just going outside the area they’ve usually performed. We saw that not every venue is going to bring a large crowd, but that they still put the same amount of effort in, which I also applaud. How long that lasted, since this is based on actual events? We’ll found out as we go on. For now, the next chapter.
Admittedly I actually like the 1980s Supergirl movie in spite of the flaws.
No, Jar Jar isn’t suddenly redeemed because of Rei…but he’s not the worst thing in Star Wars anymore.
So this week I’m on a mission to get a series of filler articles, “evergreen” reviews and commentaries I can grab if there’s no topic or something comes up, to keep my writing streak going. If I’m sick, need a day off, or even a week off you’ll still get content, and hopefully GOOD content. I don’t want to post crap just to make a deadline. Stream of consciousness happens enough here as it is. I started yesterday, so this week’s Clutter Report is a short video by the Property Brothers on their clutter maintaining secrets.
To help give me more time to do the filler I won’t be doing comic reviews next week. That should give me a chance to take some kind of breather, prepare for future breathers, and figure out what I’m going to do for Wednesday and Thursday now that I’m caught up with solo article Sonic comic reviews and the Aspen comics previews for Fathom. Racing to meet deadlines is a pain, so I’d like to give myself some relief and maybe some time to improve at other things so I can do more. I don’t want to give up the comics, but I need a good posting formula and, if nothing goes wrong (and we all know it will because history) this should help me get there.
We’ll still have the Chapter By Chapter review of How To Completely Lose Your Mind and the final overall thoughts on CBS’s failed Saturday morning Transformers cartoon, plus whatever happens during the week that I’m hoping doesn’t use up my buffer before I’ve properly formed it. Again. Learning the benefits of having a couple articles in reserve, a bunch not time-sensitive is a great idea. Wish me luck and have a great week, everyone!
Every now and then something comes along that I shouldn’t be into because, as the putzes says these days, it “wasn’t made for me”. Like I care. A good story is where you find it, and if I end up liking something outside my norm, or not liking something despite being “made for me”, so be it. There’s so much media out there everybody gets their own stuff, and they shouldn’t have to take someone else’s stuff just because something’s popular. The “everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd thinks otherwise, but again…like I care.
My Dress-Up Darling is a 2018 manga that completed in 2025. The male protagonist is Gojo Wakana (or maybe the other way around–Japanese and English does the family name in different positions), who as a child found an escape from his parents death in making hina dolls like his grandfather. Unfortunately a girl he was friends with found a boy “playing” with dolls creepy and broke off their friendship. Gojo has no friends who share his interests, and so loses himself in making clothes for the dolls because he has trouble painting the faces. I can totally relate. While I did have friends, nobody in my family shares my interests and the friends I have that do are few. I was that ostracized kid as well, as much self ostracized as by the bullies.
Meanwhile, Marin Kitagawa is one of the popular kids in schools. Her friends put up with her interest in characters from anime, and video games. She also has a secret desire to cosplay as those characters. When she quite literally falls into his world (still not sure how she did that), it takes a few encounters before she learns he can sew, and seeks his help cosplaying as one of her favorite video game characters. And thus the story and the romantic comedy begins.
Tonight we have the first three episodes, because Crunchyroll’s YouTube channel only has the first three even though the first arc is four episodes. And somebody at Crunchyroll is doing something right between the controversial localizing, questionable business practices, and data breaches. The videos use YouTube’s recently added multi audio track (check the settings) so you can use the Japanese or English language track, with the captions as subtitles using the dialog from the sub translation. So your viewing and listening experience is whichever one you prefer without me tracking down a second version. I already saw the first five or so episodes thanks to Crunchyroll’s 24/7 streaming channel and Sling’s 10 hour Freestream DVR, with the rest of season one still needing watching, so I actually had the subtitles on but still watched in English to compare the two. The captions sometimes goof when trying to decide between dialog and translating text, but otherwise it’s a good system. Enjoy.
Why is the Netflix version of One Piece succeeding when all of their other live-actionized anime productions were miserable failures? Geeks & Gamers contributor Alex Gherzo has two articles going over why. One is that they aren’t adapting the anime but the original manga, with good reason. Meanwhile, the creator of that manga is still doing quality control on the story, making sure the adaptation is as accurate as it can be between media formats. That last one might be the more important because it means they can’t just do what they want with it, giving us crap like Cowboy BeBop‘s bad adaptation.
There is no set act placement for the final act in the sample scrip for the second attempt at bringing Transformers to CBS’s Saturday morning lineup, but Soundwave making off with Burt the dog, who ruined their sneak attack on the Autobots, seemed like the right place to stop. It just screamed “commercial break”.
Meanwhile, Jazz with three “z”s (because they somehow had an older name spelling despite, again, they made “More Than Meets The Eye” BEFORE this story), was still injured and near death in the attack. Given that in the first draft the Autobots had a body count of the entirety of the Decepticons, essentially making “Starscream’s Ghost” into a series plot before the movie even killed him off, it’s not unlikely that he could die. Nameless Decepticons have dropped like flies so far. Apparently even in Saturday morning it’s okay to kill robots, even living ones, even when you can’t with humans.
So now we have the question of will Prime Jazzz die? Can they rescue the dog? Will Eddie ever get the egg smell out of his jacket? The answer to two of those questions come up in the final act of “A Robot’s Best Friend Is His Dog”.
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 Daily Video> Hollywood Killed Your Heroes On Purpose
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on April 13, 2026 in Movie Spotlight and tagged aspirational heroes, commentary, Hollywood.
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