If you’re wondering how she knows what “isekai” is…look who she works with.
Over at The Clutter Reports this week, circumstances forced me to break out the video filler as we watched a man declutter his shed so he could use it as a pool room. He’s Scottish, but doesn’t swear nearly as much as the Critical Drinker. This audience will be surprised. There is some good advice in there for declutterers.
Here this week we continue the Chapter By Chapter review of How To Completely Lose Your Mind as well as the second act of the pilot script for CBS Transformers. Whatever else happens this week we’ll find out. Have a great week, everyone!
And so began one of the most underrated shows that aired on ABC Family. The Middleman is based on a series of graphic novels by Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Being a TV creator as well he managed to bring his show to sadly only one season of awesome fun. The comics, which I reviewed an omnibus of, are just as fun as the show, as said show is mostly faithful to the comics, a rarity in Hollywood, but I guess having the comic writer being the show producer helps.
The franchise is told from the perspective of Wendy Watson, an artist who lives in an “illegal” sublet with another artist and their musician next door neighbor. She’s drawn into a secret comic book style world behind the scenes when an explosion at the lab she’s the secretary for ends up creating a monstrosity of some kind. Her coolness around the weirdness earns the respect of The Middleman, a “Men In Black” style crimefighter who doesn’t swear and is squeaky clean outside of the whole killing monsters thing, who works for the Organization Too Top Secret To Know (O2TSTK). He takes Wendy on as a sidekick and trainee, aided by the wisecracking robot Ida, who has taken the form of a grumpy and frumpy older woman. The comic ran for four graphic novels and unlike the show ended on a cliffhanger where the Middleman was presumed dead, and Wendy having to be further trained by his predecessor…spoilers necessary to follow along with tonight’s Showcase…her long lost father! At least that’s what it appeared to be.
Grillo-Marxuach crowdfunded a fifth volume which I sadly have yet to get and read, but considering how much I enjoyed the omnibus of the first one, the comic adaptation of the unaired episode, and the “Tales Of The Middleman” short stories that re-imagined the cast in other genres, I really want to. I decided not to spoil myself by watching this one but it’s been in the coffer way too long so I’m at least sharing it with you. What follows is the cast of the TV show doing a live reading of the fifth volume story, reprising their roles from the show but in the continuity of the comic and continuing after the cliffhanger. What’s next in comic Wendy’s life? I hope to find out someday but you get to find out now, unless you already read volume five or decide to wait as well. Enjoy.
I’ll have to see how that works with other sites, but I still want to put my introductory text in. As you can see, Ryan Gosling, at an event to promote his new and well received movie Project Hail Mary, came out and said something I did a commentary on just recently. Saving your show, comic series, game, or movie isn’t the job of the fans but a job for the creators to make it something we want to support. Instead, the rest of Hollywood blames the fans for not showing up and recognizing their genius and good intentions. Gosling is right, and Hollywood (and other industries that follow the current Hollywood mindset) needs to figure that out fast.
The last of the documentation (as of this writing) found and posted by The Sunbow Marvel Archive we’ll be looking at for this attempt to bring the Transformers cartoon to CBS Saturday morning is something I rarely get to do. It’s a full episode script. They also have the outline for the pilot episode, but I’m going to bypass that and jump right to the full script, to see the actual story. I also won’t be copy/pasting practically the whole script like I did with the pitches. If you want to see either document you can go to their G1 Transformers page and find it just after the documentation for “More Than Meets The Eye”, the three episode miniseries they started with. It just seems a bit much for me to post here.
Instead I’ll summarize what happens in the episode. Oddly they didn’t go with the first listed plot in the second draft, “Rotten To The Core.” Maybe it’s my limited understanding of what goes on behind the scenes, but I would think the first episode would be the pilot. This is the story where the Autobots get help from the legally-distinct Guardian Angels (even named in the summary so you know what they were referencing) to stop Negator from turning a bunch of trains into their Decepticon army. That sounds like a good pilot to me. Instead they went with “A Robot’s Best Friend Is His Dog”, the 11th episode in the list and one that sounds like it would require previous investment in the characters as this focuses on Matt’s Decepticon sniffing dog. Turns out Outback didn’t need a Decepticon Detector, he needed a dog. The episode is written by Jeffrey Scott, who also wrote the pitches, which makes sense because they’re already paying him, but it still seems an odd episode to start with.
I was hoping to get this done in one article, but about partway through summarizing the first act I saw my word count in the 1300s and knew I wasn’t going to get all three in without being a way too long article. So I’ll just make the first act it’s own article, since this includes the summaries and my comments, and see what happens with the other two. Sorry, readers. I tried.
We have another new comic to read. How long we’ll be reading it is up for debate. Going over the summaries on Comic Book Plus I already don’t see anything all that exciting. Still, it’s the first issue and I can go in with an open mind. These are the guys giving us the original Captain Marvel so maybe it’ll work out. Let’s start reading and find out, because there’s a lot of comics to go over since they’re mostly around 4-6 pages each.
When the Atari 2600 first released in 1979, games hadn’t reached today’s graphic level, where everything can look somewhere between cartoons and actual people. Bits were a luxury, but they were still fun. However, they didn’t have much of a story to them. The idea of video games as a form of storytelling was still a long ways off, and that even started as a text based game on the computer. Nowadays we have polygons and 3D and 2D drawings out of the 1940s and everything else. We also have stories told within the game itself as you take the role of the hero and follow his life. Saving the princess is a lot harder and more rewarding than simply completing the game.
That’s not to say we haven’t made stories using the plot of a game. Video game “stories” in 1982 were limited to telling you what the goal was. Everything had to be filled in yourself or through existing storytelling media. We ended up getting shows based on video games, and in previous installments of Free Comic Inside we’ve seen comics based on video games either directly, like the Swordquest comics, or indirectly, like Atari Force. Tonight we look at Yars’ Revenge, released for the Atari 2600. So how does one turn this…
…into a full story? Even the manual doesn’t tell you who or what a Yar is or what they want revenge for. It just says you play one, here’s the target, these are the weapons and enemies, now go. If you were one of those kids who didn’t read the manual, you still had no idea which if anything on the screen a Yar was or why they wanted revenge or if that was a good thing or not. I never had the 2600, but cousins did. I didn’t know it came with a comic, Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum! Produced by Atari themselves rather than DC Comics despite still being a Warner property at the time, we have a story…but is it any good? Was I better off NOT knowing?
It’s just the box art. Not sure how I feel about that.
Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum!
Atari (1982)
CARTRIDGE PROGRAMMER: Howard Scott Warshaw
WRITER: Hope Shafer
ARTISTS: Frank Cirocco, Ray Grant, & Hiro Kimura
ART DIRECTIOR: Steve Hendericks
Warshaw is the only notable name here, responsible for so many of Atari’s well received games. Then he was forced to get the famed ET game out in so little time that the end result was a mess. My old Reviewers Unknown colleague Test Zero made a video “defending” the game, but you won’t find many people behind him. It was confusing but I didn’t think it was close to the worst game out for the 2600 at the time. He became a writer after that. However, this game had a lot of praise, and now we can find out what the heck was going on.
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Saturday Article Link> An Actor Puts The Blame Where It Belongs
Look what I just learned I can do.
I’ll have to see how that works with other sites, but I still want to put my introductory text in. As you can see, Ryan Gosling, at an event to promote his new and well received movie Project Hail Mary, came out and said something I did a commentary on just recently. Saving your show, comic series, game, or movie isn’t the job of the fans but a job for the creators to make it something we want to support. Instead, the rest of Hollywood blames the fans for not showing up and recognizing their genius and good intentions. Gosling is right, and Hollywood (and other industries that follow the current Hollywood mindset) needs to figure that out fast.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on March 28, 2026 in Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, Hollywood, Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling.
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