EP.123 Post Decepte-Con Catch Up – A Review of Comic-Con 2026 News

There are two kinds of Comic‑Con recaps. The first is a tidy little rundown of panels, cosplay, merch, and celebrity sightings. The second is whatever Ken and Pat delivered to Kareem the moment he logged on for this week’s episode of Tangential Giants.

Kareem missed their panel on the end of billionaire heroes in comics, so naturally he expected a straightforward summary. Instead, he got a victory lap, a confession, and a mild indictment. Pat swears the panel was a masterclass. Ken swears they were one tangent away from being escorted out. The truth, as usual, lives somewhere in the overlap.

Once the panel talk wraps, the trio immediately swerves into the kind of pop‑culture rabbit hole that should probably require a permit. They attempt to answer the eternal question: why do Transformers transform? Not in the lore sense, but in the “who decided turning into a semi‑truck was the optimal tactical choice” sense.

Then comes the debate over whether “Decepticons” is a name that has aged like milk. If your brand identity hinges on announcing you’re deceptive, maybe it’s time for a refresh.

And because no Tangential Giants episode is complete without a cinematic universe pitch that would make studio executives sweat, the guys try to fuse G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Fast and Furious into one mega‑franchise. The result is part fever dream, part marketing deck, and part international incident.

It’s a post‑Comic‑Con catch‑up that mutates into a dissertation on toy‑based geopolitics, automotive philosophy, and franchise physics. In other words, a normal week.

Show Notes

Comic‑Con Panel: The End of Billionaires in Comics Ken and Pat recap their talk on why comic book billionaires are losing cultural steam. Relevant reading:

History of billionaire superheroes: https://www.marvel.com
Comic‑Con official site: https://www.comic-con.org

Why Transformers Transform A deep dive into the logic, lore, and questionable vehicle choices of Cybertron’s finest.

Transformers franchise overview: https://transformers.hasbro.com (transformers.hasbro.com in Bing)
Behind the scenes of the original cartoon: https://tfwiki.net

Is “Decepticons” a Dead Name? The crew debates whether the branding needs a refresh or a full retirement.

Character history and naming origins: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Decepticon

The G.I. Joe x Transformers x Fast & Furious Cinematic Universe Pitch A crossover idea that absolutely should not work, yet somehow does.

G.I. Joe franchise info: https://www.hasbro.com/en-us/brands/gi_joe (hasbro.com in Bing)
Fast & Furious series guide: https://www.fastandfurious.com

The Collapse of The Billionaire Hero – A 2026 Comic-Con Panel Discussion – Tangential Giants Podcast

Ken and Pat brought Tangential Giants to Comic-Con 2026 to talk about money, which is a strange thing to do in a building full of people who just spent their rent on variant covers.The panel gets into the simple observation: Absolute Batman and Absolute Green Arrow are both doing huge numbers, and both are books that make the billionaire part of the hero feel a lot less like a given. So is that readers getting tired of the rich guy in the cape, or are we reading too much into two good comics? We didn’t fully settle it, but we got somewhere interesting.Kareem couldn’t make it, but he sent over a video intro as the CEO of an evil corporation that is, as he puts it, about to go private. It’s the best thing that happens in the first five minutes, and we’re not even a little bit sorry.Marina Sharpe has a stretch in the middle that’s worth the whole video on its own. She breaks down how power gets shown through female characters when men are the ones writing them, and why it so often gets misunderstood by readers and sometimes by the writers themselves. It changes how you read the money question, because power and wealth are not the same thing even though comics love to treat them that way.Then Ray-Anthony Height asks the one that stuck with everybody: who is Batman without the money? Nobody had a quick answer, which tells you something.If you’ve got your own answer, leave it in the comments. We’ll be reading them, and probably arguing with each other about them later.#TangentialGiants #ComicCon2026 #SDCC2026 #AbsoluteBatman #AbsoluteGreenArrow #ComicsPodcast #BillionaireHeroes #DCComics #ComicBooks