Paul Dini

Recently, the cast of The Middleman, the comic book-based ABC Family show about a secret agent crime fighter and his female sidekick, reunited at Comic-Con for a panel and a table reading of the unreleased final episode of the series, which is soon to be a comic.

Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach talked to Laura Hudson from our sister site Comics Alliance before the panel about how comics gave him the freedom to create Stormtroopers riding missile-equipped kangaroos, whether the show could ever come back to TV, and why Batman: Streets of Gotham writer Paul Dini is the godfather of it all.

We previewed this interview yesterday, but CA has kindly let us reprint the entire interview here. More after the jump.

Paul Dini, a writer who has worked on several animated series, most notably Tiny Toons and Batman: The Animated Series, has a new online interview show on IGN Filmforce featuring himself and a sock monkey named Rashy. The series is called "Monkey Talk" and in the first episode Dini and Rashy interview Mark Hamill, who worked with Dini when he played The Joker on Batman: TAS. The picture quality is extremely poor, but it's worth a few laughs anyway, especially when Rashy the sock monkey pops up to ask Hamill questions about movies he wasn't actually in.

Paul Dini is best known for writing for such animated series as Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Batman: the Animated Series, Krypto the Superdog, He-Man, and many, many others. George Lucas also selected him to pen episodes for his Star Wars cartoons Ewoks and Droids. There's a lot of us who grew up with Dini's work but know very little about him. Since he's one of those "behind the scenes" types you don't hear a lot about him, but the man has quite a hefty and impressive resume. He also has his own Live Journal that is quite entertaining. I especially enjoyed his attempt at trying to get into Mensa. Referring to the corpulent proctor as "Sans-A-Belt" was pure genius.