September 4, 2026

Free Comic Inside> The Sectaurs Toxic Work Environment

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It’s time to go back to the world of Symbion, where a bunch of scientists accidentally unleash a plague that devastates the world. Totally not relatable, I know. I wonder how their congressional hearings went?

In Symbion’s case, the plague turned humans into bug people and bugs into giants that telepathically bond to human partners. Thus the Sectaurs come to be, fighting over the last vestiges of science because that went so well for them in the past. The heroes of the Shining Realm versus the villains of the Dark Domain, represented with action figures, figurines with action features, and ridable puppets in the original 80s toyline from Coleco.

This minicomic focuses on Skito and Toxcid. Skito is a mercenary in service to the Dark Domain and Toxcid is one of the action figurines. His name is on the comic, but since he’s the bad guy our heroes are the young warrior Zak and his action figurine Bitor. There’s also Princess Belana, who from what I can tell is a media-only character because boys don’t want girls in their toyline or something. From the dialog I can’t tell if she and Zak are an item or not. He keeps calling her “beautiful”, she keeps calling him brave and going about his bravery, but given the speech patterns that could be the usual royal complimenting stuff. Boys don’t want to see guys kiss girls, either, after all.

No credits on these minicomics, which is still a shame. So let’s jump right into the story. You can try to read along with me at Sectaurs.com, a Sectaurs fansite, but the scans are not very good. I could at least figure out what was going on, and by opening the pictures in a new tab I could mostly read what they’re saying.

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Posted by on September 4, 2026 in Free Comic Inside and tagged , , , , , , , , , , .

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September 4, 2026

BW’s Daily Video> Stargate: SG1 Predicted Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

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Posted by on September 4, 2026 in Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , .

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September 3, 2026

Live-Action Gargoyles Canceled–And That’s Fine With Me

Full disclosure so you know whether or not my opinion matters to you: I enjoyed the original series, and I even liked the Saturday Morning Goliath Chronicles. The Marvel comics were too far away from the cartoon, the SLG comics are quite good but I turned away because Brooklyn’s quest for a mate was hitting too close to home, and it turned out that was resolved off-panel due to a trip to Avalon. The fact that he’s my favorite just made it harder. At least one of us found someone (though if I had to choose….). I kind of want to get the issues I missed out on. I have no interest in the current Dynamite series because they’ve already messed up too many of my childhood favorites, so I have no trust in them with something from my teen years. I would like to rewatch the series but it’s on Disney+ and thus not available to me.

I probably lost a log of the fanbase for not hating The Goliath Chronicles. For those of you who are left, thank you for giving me a chance. For the rest of you unfamiliar, Gargoyles was a 90s cartoon technically produced by Disney though clearly not their normal style. It was a Friday replacement for one segment of The Disney Afternoon until it became popular enough to get its own weekday slot and later moved to Saturday morning so Disney could boost their purchase of Capital Cities, ABC and ESPN’s parent company at the time, for their “One Saturday Morning” lineup. If you want to know the plot, watch the above intro. Keith David’s Goliath can explain it much better and cooler than I can.

Anyway, I’ve heard rumblings of a live-action reboot of the series, but word came this week that the project is done, and quite frankly that’s really good news. There are a bunch of reasons why, and I don’t know how excited the fanbase was for it, but they were wrong. This was always going to be a mistake. I’m not even convinced bringing it back in animation would work, but live-action? It’s easy to see how this wasn’t going to match up to the original, and two paragraphs from that article point to exactly why.

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Posted by on September 3, 2026 in Animation Spotlight, Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , , , , .

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September 3, 2026

BW’s Daily Video> Is Cowboy Bebop Still Relevant?

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Posted by on September 3, 2026 in Animation Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , .

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September 2, 2026

Sing Me A Story> Are You On Lorde’s Team?

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Born in New Zealand as Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor (which is giving flashbacks to Schoolhouse Rock back when “pronoun” was just a grammar term), the singer known to the world as Lorde doesn’t sound like my kind of singer, and yet I fully enjoy her music, or at least what I’ve heard on the radio. It’s nice, calming mix of pop and introspective. She’s a feminist but added an “e” to “lord” to make it more feminine as part of her interest in royalty, as you can guess from her first big hit, “Royals”. That song made her the first New Zealander and one of the younger women to hit the Billboard Top 100.

However, we’re looking at her third single release, this one coming from the 2013 album Pure Heroine. “Team” showed up in some reel on Facebook and I got curious what the story was behind it. I heard the song a lot when it came out, as radio stations and stores both aired it. I never really listened to the lyrics before, though. Maybe that’s why I though the song started out by calling out someone named “Nicole Allison”. Sorry, Nicole, but this wasn’t your time to shine.

I had trouble finding out what the song was about, actually. I learned more of the story behind the music video, which of course we ignore in this series in favor of the lyrics. She got the idea from a dream. That’s interesting, but the focus is on the song itself, so let’s hear and read the lyrics first.

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Posted by on September 2, 2026 in Sing Me A Story and tagged , , , .

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September 2, 2026

BW’s Daily Video> Why Hollywood Hates The Source Material

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Posted by on September 2, 2026 in Movie Spotlight, Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , , .

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September 1, 2026

Why We Need To Save Superheroes

I’m starting to see a trend that bothers me, and it’s not just from the usual suspects. I understand where they’re coming from, but in a sense there’s a group of modern media critics in the superhero circles that don’t realize they’re doing the same thing as the Hollywood culture when it comes to superheroes and other cultural icons of fictional heroism like Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker. They’re following the suggestion of Kylo Ren:

Only in their case it’s giving up. The commentary is “the stewards of your nostalgic favorites have culturally ruined these corporately owned characters, so forget them and create new characters”. I’m all for creating new characters. If the current writers, editors, directors, and whomever else gets blamed along the line refuse to do what these characters have come to stand for, then by all means create the characters that do what they used to.

That doesn’t mean we as fans have to completely abandon those characters, many of whom are recognized around the world. That’s why the usual suspects want to change them, either for some sociopolitical agenda or more often their own egos and preferences, using the culture war as a shield for their “improvements”. That’s also what they want. People who don’t follow the patterns of media and storytelling are used to seeing Superman and thinking they know what to expect. If they like that, they’re going to tune in. If not, they’ll go elsewhere and not realize these heroes no longer act heroic because the current creative team doesn’t believe in heroes, or at least doesn’t want you to. (Conspiracy theory goes here.) So they want you to give up, and there’s a very good reason we shouldn’t. The video I posted today is tied into that, so if you missed Real Fake Wizard’s commentary, go watch it now (it should open in a new tab) and come back here while I build off of that and explain why we need to be the ones protecting our heroes this time.

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Posted by on September 1, 2026 in Comic Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight, Video Game Spotlight and tagged , , , .

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