The long-awaited new Middleman graphic novel that combines the characters and continuity of the television and comic book versions of the short-lived series has finally emerged. We reported almost exactly a year ago about an IndieGoGo campaign to reissue the previous graphic novels and produce the new one. We reported in June about the live table read in Los Angeles at which the entire original cast reunited to perform the script for “The Pan-Universal Parental Reconciliation.”
And now we are happy to report that everything promised in the campaign has now been delivered. Over at the official Middleman website, O2STK (“Organization Too Secret To Know”), you can find not only the complete run of Middleman comics, the DVD box set of the TV series, digital downloads of that same series for XBox and iTunes, but also video of the two live table reads from 2009 (“The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse”) and 2014 (“The Pan-Universal Parental Reconciliation”) for your viewing pleasure.
Just in case you need more convincing, here’s a collection of animated GIFS of all the Doctor Who references they managed to sneak into TV’s Middleman. And here’s a compilation of the Middleman’s many exclamations.
Grillo-Marxuach once described the Middleman by saying “it’s basically a brightly-colored superhero fantasia where good is rewarded with victory and sustaining friendships, where doing the Right Thing results not in burden, compromise and tragedy, but in knowledge, wisdom and renewed optimism, and in which evil is not an unstoppable force without end, but the simple consequence of a lunk-headed refusal to behave with what we shamelessly earnest sentimentalists refer to as ‘simple human decency.’ Those of us who made the show, quite simply, went to work every day with the humble goal of creating a televisual version of the Platonic Ideal of the Fisher Price garage we all had as children: an endlessly playful structure full of bright and shining things all leading to a good time.”
As a life-long comics fan, and as a parent, that sentiment is endlessly appealing to me, which is why I am a Middleman evangelist and insist on continuing to periodically shove this obscure comic and failed TV series at you, and why I urge you once again to venture with all due haste to the Organization Too Secret To Know and enjoy the magic and wonder of the Middleman.
