The Hunter from Bloodborne is flanked by Liara from WildStar and Zasalamel from Soul Calibur IV.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I went to C2E2 and took photos! Part one was the twelve winners of the Costume Contest. Presented here are the other remarkable contestants whose efforts likewise deserved recognition for their skills, efforts, and imagination.

Diva Plavalaguna from The Fifth Element.

Mr. Freeze will compete wherever he must if only someone will bring back his beloved Nora.

The current comics version of Thor, whose identity should be revealed any day now. My guess: Gwen Stacy.

Izabel the Horror babysitter from Vaughan and Staples’ Saga, ghostly entrails and all.

Ronan the Accuser hanging out with Captain America and wishing for revenge on those accursed Guardians.

Iron Man!

Takuto Tsunashi from the anime Star Driver, sharing the stage with the Valkyrie and the Khorne Marauder from Warhammer 40K. At far right: he is Groot.

Sasha Braus from Attack on Titan and the preening, posturing Thranduil from The Hobbit.

Xibalba. from the recent animated film Book of Life, was gigantic and wouldn’t stop moving.

Nightmare Moon from My Little Pony.

King Sombra, also from MLP.

The Tech-priest concludes our salute to Warhammer 40K.

Minako Arisoto from the PSP game Persona 3 Portable.

The Dragon Rider was the winner of the Eastern Championships of Cosplay at last October’s New York Comic Con 2014. Part of his prize was an invitation to come compete at the Crown Championships of Cosplay at C2E2 2015. That thing I mentioned in Part 1 about the Championships going global? This is a step in that action plan. P.S.: He didn’t win again.

Loki posed for a bit outside the room after the Costume Contest.

We encountered Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy near the show floor hours before, then saw her later in the Contest. You’ll note the costume required her to walk on her knees. Imagine spending a day walking that way everywhere. This is true dedication to playing a part.

For our Star Wars fans: a variant Boba Fett with ten times the personality of the original.

To be continued! Other chapters in the series:

Part 1: Costume Contest Winners
Part 3: Edge of Deadpoolverse
Part 4: Might Marvel Costumes
Part 5: More Comics Costumes
Part 6: Mystery Science Costume Theater 3000
Part 7: Last Call for Costumes
Part 8: Stars of Comics and Screens
Part 9: Random Acts of C2E2ing

[Updated 4/29/2015, with special thanks to my son for recognizing The Hunter.]

My wife and I enjoying ten seconds of proximity with Hayley Atwell, winning star of Marvel’s Agent Carter, Marvel’s Agent Carter: the Winter Soldier, and Marvel’s Agents of C.A.R.T.E.R.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I went to C2E2 and took photos! Other chapters in the series:

Part 1: Costume Contest Winners
Part 2: The Rest of the Costume Contest
Part 3: Edge of Deadpoolverse
Part 4: Might Marvel Costumes
Part 5: More Comics Costumes
Part 6: Mystery Science Costume Theater 3000
Part 7: Last Call for Costumes
Part 9: Random Acts of C2E2ing

Today’s feature: the writers, artists, and renowned actors we encountered on Friday and Saturday. The photo op with Hayley Atwell, a.k.a. Peggy Carter, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., was the weekend’s finale to a long line of nifty creative types in the house.

Before the exhibit hall opened Friday, I knew where stop #1 would be: the autograph table of actor Chad Coleman. Most recently known as Tyreese on AMC’s The Walking Dead, to me he’ll always be Cutty from The Wire.

Our longest autograph wait at this show wasn’t for a TV star. Meet Dan Slott, the Marvel writer in charge of Amazing Spider-Man over the past several years. His inspired version of Silver Surfer, with artist Michael Allred, is a blatant, welcome, delightful homage to Doctor Who, which makes sense since he’s an unabashed Whovian supreme.

I’d been trying to narrow down what I wanted to say when it was my turn, but all that got tossed out the window when he saw my wife’s Doctor Who shirt, lit up, and began showing us phone pics of Who stars he’s met at other recent cons. I had no problem stepping back and enjoying this fun treat, especially since we’re both jealous that he got to meet David Tennant and we haven’t. Yet.

We wandered over half the exhibit hall before making our way to Artists Alley and meeting lots of cool folks making cool books. Among those we met:

Writer, professor, and comic shop owner Christy Blanch! We saw her moderate two panels at this year’s Indiana Comic Con, and on my last birthday we visited a Muncie comic shop she co-owns with husband/writer Mark Waid. I understand the already impressive store has relocated into even larger digs, so now we have to revisit Muncie sometime.

I first saw Gene Ha in person at a DC panel at Wizard World Chicago 1999 (my very first road trip with Anne!), but never met him till now. He’s illustrated many praiseworthy things (tip of the iceberg includes Alan Moore’s Top 10 and a Shade miniseries for DC) and has launched a Kickstarter for his new graphic novel, Mae.

Speaking of WWC 1999: at that show, writer James Robinson signed my copy of Firearm #1, one of the best Malibu Ultraverse titles that everyone but a few of us oldsters has now forgotten. Sixteen years later I brought that same copy for cosigning by artist Cully Hamner, because that’s how highly I thought of it. Non-comics fans may recognize the Bruce Willis/Helen Mirren/Morgan Freeman/John Malkovich action comedy RED, which was very lightly based on a three-issue miniseries he co-created with Warren Ellis, so hopefully the filmmakers sent him some monies.

David A. Rodriguez isn’t a household name yet, but I remembered reading a sample of his book Finding Gossamyr when it was a decent Free Comic Book Day 2012 offering. Three years and some dollars later, I’m looking forward to reading more of that story in spiffy hardcover.

Speaking of things ordinary people might not remember: Matthew Rosenberg was selling copies of his new Black Mask project We Can Never Go Home, but we’d first seen him at a C2E2 2013 panel about music in comics. I’m still really sorry about those pics.

Speaking of not-ordinary people: we first met writer Brian K. Morris (the one in the fez) at Gen Con 2012, where he cosplayed as the world’s finest version of Uncle Dudley, a.k.a. Uncle Marvel of the SHAZAM! Family. Since then he’s written one novel for Amazon Worlds based on Valiant Comics’ Bloodshot, and one starring his own creation called Santastein. By his side is the fezless Sean Dulaney, from whom I bought a copy of his comic F. Stein, Consulting Detective, also available on comiXology. That’s two — TWO Steins for the price of two!

The first I knew of Jason Howard was Super Dinosaur, his Image Comics title with Robert Kirkman. Lately he’s been killing it on Warren Ellis’ Trees.

When Marvel announced they were launching a new Hawkeye series, I thought it was too soon and it shouldn’t be done. Two issues into All-New Hawkeye, the art of Ramon Perez — alternating pen-and-ink present-day Hawkeyes’ derring-do with painted flashbacks of the Barton boys’ runaway childhood — has shown up my worries as 100% misplaced.

(NOT PICTURED ABOVE: animator Stephen Franck, who’s transitioning to comics with the promising-looking Silver; and writer/lawyer Charles Soule, whom I already met at the last two C2E2s, and even saw at that same music/comics panel with Matthew Rosenberg. A third photo seemed beside the point, but I had to stop by his table because every year he keeps thinking up new stuff for me to buy.)

By the end of Friday, my autograph/swag haul looked roughly like so, give or take a book:

Saturday, we had a few modest objectives, but wound up with far more than expected. In addition to the aforementioned Hayley Atwell, we also had the pleasure of meeting Ming Na-Wen, a.k.a. Melinda May, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. I’m old enough to remember when she was in a few early-season episodes of E.R., but now I know her as the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who gets all the best fight scenes and many of the best overall scenes.

(I nearly cropped myself out of the photo. I know I smiled, but it must’ve been during some other, totally uncaptured second.)

In the afternoon we caught one of several Marvel Comics panels about this summer’s Secret Wars crossover event, this one focusing on the various “Battleworld” chapters. Pictured left to right: editor Nick Lowe as our jolly MC; writers James Robinson, Jonathan Hickman, Charles Soule, and Joshua Williamson; and editors Jon Moisan and Jake Thomas.

After Na-Wen’s line, we attended a panel screening of the first episode of the new Yahoo! Screen sci-fi sitcom Other Space, which is like Star Trek Voyager meets The Office. This was my best chance to see any of the series for now, since, as previously discussed, our PC hates hates hates Yahoo! Screen. My overall impression: I was happier and better amused whenever the pilot sounded less like everyday Twitter quotes and more like surprising punchlines that would never occur to me. There was enough of the latter that I thought it was a great start, impishly directed by Academy Award Winner Luke Matheny (the funny-sweet live-action short “God of Love”), and I hope it makes tons of money for all involved so I can someday watch the rest of season 1 on DVD or on a platform that’s Chromecast-compatible.

The Q&A afterward featured four of the show’s stars and its creator. We’ve met one of those folks before: Joel Hodgson, legendary creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, who was at last year’s Indy Pop Con. His newest role is an engineering burnout who’s only occasionally connected to reality and every so often isn’t a lackadaisical danger to the rest of the crew. He’s pictured here at the Q&A with costar Milana Vayntrub.

Here’s a much, much better pic of Milana Vayntrub with more lighting and not from fifteen rows away. Americans know her best as the happy AT&T helper from that series of commercials where she plays one of that corporation’s most knowledgeable employees of all time. I understand she’s also appeared in several College Humor videos.

Karan Soni (Safety Not Guaranteed) may or may not be a future superstar thanks to his role in this fall’s Goosebumps movie, but until then he’s Other Space‘s quasi-fearless ship’s captain. His optimism, book-smarts, and problem-solving skills sometimes help compensate for his leadership deficiencies and his crew’s grudges against him.

My number one reason for showing up: he was Dr. Clayton Forrester. He was the voice of Crow T. Robot. He was one of the few main MST3K cast members I hadn’t yet met. And now, at long last, I faced Trace Beaulieu like a man and proudly didn’t squeal like a preteen groupie. On Other Space he’s the voice of Joel Hodgson’s incidental robot A.R.T., who is also cool, but on the other hand DR. CLAYTON FORRESTER. “Big deal” is an understatement.

[happy shrieking deleted]

Seated at his right is a man I had no absolutely idea would be at C2E2. I wish I’d known.

Other Space creator Paul Feig:

He created the cult classic Freaks and Geeks. He wrote and directed many episodes of The Office. He’s responsible for comedies such as Bridesmaids and the upcoming Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy. He’s the man in charge of the much-discussed Ghostbusters reboot. And now here he was at C2E2, right in front of us, and instead of asking him fifty questions all I could do was shake his hand and thank him while my brain short-circuited and let me down. THANKS, BRAIN.

…

…and those are the people that were. To be concluded!

Even those dastardly Bat-Villains love Free Comic Book Day because it’s the one day of the year they can have nice new things without resorting to theft or deathtraps.

Happy Free Comic Book Day! The fourteenth annual celebration of graphic storytelling narratives and/or floppy funnybooks was a rousing success, far as we could tell from our single stop at Indianapolis’ own Downtown Comics North. In years past I’ve made road trips to visit multiple stores for the occasion, but our schedule was too packed with other obligations and joys. Regardless, ’twas a morning well spent, money well spent for a few items, and an experience fully enjoyed.

The shop opened at 11 a.m. EDT. We arrived at 9:45 to claim our place in the long line outside, where reps from geek-related endeavors hung out with us and added some valuable community spirit, not to mention free posters, prize drawings, and snacks.

See? Wasn’t kidding. One caveat: the donuts were from the Meijer bakery, not from Krispy Kreme. They were great anyway.

The doors opened two minutes early. Poison Ivy minded the front door for crowd management purposes, letting a few of us in at a time so we wouldn’t all stampede inside and crush each other. Reading is fundamental but difficult if you’ve been trampled.

As fans waited their turn on this lovely May morning, cosplayers stood by and provided entertainment, security, and inspirational opportunities for the many kids who showed up and brought their parents as guests. Special thanks are owed to the heroes and villains who brightened everyone’s day:

Spider-Woman and Dr. Strange represent for Marvel’s Avengers while waiting their turn to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Kid Flash lives! Take THAT, DC New 52.

The little kid inside me squealed a little at the sight of Plastic Man.

Cable is ready to headline an X-Men movie any day now, Fox.

Spider-Woman negotiated a cease-fire between Penguin ’66 and the Beast, thus closing the harsh divides between Marvel and DC, the Silver Age and the Modern Age, TV and movies, good and evil, and birds and mammals.

Just as I did last year, I kept my free acquisitions somewhat modest and grabbed copies of less than half the available titles. I was excited in advance about a few of these, but I also picked up a few untested items as random experiments because sometimes I like surprises. (I should have capsule reviews posted within the next day or two.)

Not pictured: the stuff I bought with money as a thank-you to my local comic shop owners, including collected volumes of The Sixth Gun and Kieron Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men run, plus an issue of Monster Motors I was missing.

And that’s the FCBD that was. See you next year! Time to dive into the reading pile.

Valeria Richards addresses her troops in Secret Wars #0. Art by Paul Renaud.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I observed Free Comic Book Day 2015 this past Saturday. Readers of multiple demographics, thankfully including lots of youngsters, flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and dozens of indie publishers. As an incentive for the younger recruits, the shop we visited split the all-ages material apart from the rest and put up “KIDS ONLY” signs discouraging greedy adults from hoarding everything and leaving nothing behind in their wake.

I never grab copies of everything, and this year I took even fewer items than usual because I don’t really have the time or inclination to be the guy who thinks he’s obligated to read and respond to everything. I came away with a dozen comics of varying interest levels and finished reading the last of them the next morning. In my mind, each issue ought to be a satisfying experience for any new reader who opens the cover without any foreknowledge. Historically, each publisher’s offerings tend to fall into one of six story levels, ranked here in order from “Best Possible Display of Generosity and Salesmanship” to “Had to Slap SOMETHING Together, So Whatever”:

1. New, complete, done-in-one story
2. Complete story reprinted from existing material
3. A complete chapter of a new story with a proper chapter ending
4. Partial excerpt from an upcoming issue that will also contain all these same pages
5. No story, just random pinups or art samples
6. Disposable ad flyer shaped like a comic

The twelve comics in my FCBD 2015 reading pile came out as follows, from least favorite to definite favorite:

12. Legendary Comics Preview (Legendary Comics) — This new IP-generating publishing offshoot of Legendary Pictures boasts a committed lineup of top talents — Mark Waid, Chris Roberson, Steven Grant, Pete Woods, Fiona Staples, Matt Wagner, Simon Bisley, Judd Winick, et al. — but for now all we’re given are three unlettered pages from a Pacific Rim sequel, three more from another title, one or zero teaser images from several other projects in early development stages, and ads for a couple of previous books now on sale. The company seems promising, but there’s no real reading here except a few marketing blurbs.

11. Captain Canuck #0 (Chapterhouse Comics) — Canada’s most famous Canadian comics hero (as opposed to Wolverine, America’s most famous Canadian comics hero) is receiving his next reboot written and drawn by Kalman Andrasofszky (X-23, NYX), and with retro backups by Ed Brisson and classic Cap artist George Freeman (Elric of Melnibone, Marvel’s long-ago Jack of Hearts). The four-page reboot excerpt is enough to show Cap is a hero who can negotiate a high-altitude drop, and that’s all there is. The six-page backup is a caption-heavy backstory recap for newcomers like me who know zip about him. I’d rather read a Cap story than read about other Cap stories, but I appreciate the attempted introduction. The back half is filled out with light Official Handbook entries for the supporting players, which I would’ve liked more when I was a young fan of Marvel’s OHOTMU and DC’s Who’s Who.

10. Secret Wars #0 (Marvel Comics) — A ten-page prologue to this summer’s major Marvel crossover event stars Franklin and Valeria Richards, Alex from Power Pack, a talking Dragon Man, and several unnamed underage strangers whose big plan for the upcoming catastrophe is to run and hide. Valeria recaps some relevant Illuminati shenanigans, but I disliked being reminded that these same never-named, unexplained strangers are the reason I couldn’t get into Jonathan Hickman’s FF in the first place. Irrelevant extra: an eight-page excerpt from a Marvel Heroes/Attack on Titan crossover previously released only in Japan. At least I assume it’s an excerpt and not the complete saga. Famous Marvel good guys punch oversize monsters that I kinda recognize thanks to cosplayers, and then more Marvel good guys show up and THE END. Yay fight scenes? I guess?

9. Tales of Honor #0 (Top Cow/Image Comics) — A done-in-one follow-up to a previous miniseries I’d never heard of, which in turn was based on a series of David Weber novels I’ve never read. For rookies like me, there’s a page-long intro crawl twice as long as any Star Wars movie infodump, followed by a two-page mini-encyclopedia cataloging the dozens of planets, chronology of major events, their military rank system, and various other in-depth social-studies aspects of this vast universe, all in near-microscopic magnifying-glass font. I sloughed through the scroll, skipped pages two and three, and still got the gist of their space-skirmish tale, which was a few pages of action plus several pages of exposition, about the same content as an average Star Trek: the Next Generation episode. I imagine this is much cooler for Weber fans than it was for me, but at least it had a beginning and an end.

8. The Phantom (Hermes Press) — I’ve never been a fan of the original comic strip, but I’ve dabbled in a few comics starring the Ghost Who Walks, depending on the talents involved. Two short stories are reprinted from comics that came before my time, but one of them features art by a young Jim Aparo, who would later become the definitive Batman artist of my childhood. His style wasn’t yet solidified, but I can see glimpses of the swashbuckling excitement and the distinctive lettering that would follow in The Brave and the Bold and The Outsiders. So this was kind of an unexpected treasure.

Lucifer goes on his next road trip in “The Ride: The Devil Don’t Sing No Blues”. Art by Tomm Coker.

7. I.C.E.: Bayou Blackout (12-Gauge Comics) — Credit where due: a Jason Pearson cover is a surefire way to lure me to your comic. Inside is chapter one of the third arc in a gung-ho action-cop series I’ve never heard of, which has one interesting cop-bonding scene bookended by a pair of shootouts, but writer Doug Wagner (The Ride, assorted Batman comics) knows there’s more to comics than explosions, and knows how to set up a cliffhanger ending, even though it would mean a bit more if this weren’t my first exposure to them. Anyone who likes old Stallone films or Miami Vice could dig this. Even more to my liking is the backup, a not-for-kids tale of “The Ride” by writer/artist Tomm Coker (DC/Vertigo’s Blood & Water) that loosely connects a fast car, the legend of bluesman Robert Johnson, and soul-selling devil-trickery, all rendered in the kind of intricate black-and-white linework rarely seen in today’s computer-coloring dominion.

6. Terrible Lizard #1 (Oni Press) — Imagine a rebooted Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy, except Devil is an orange (not red) T-Rex and Moon Boy has been fired and replaced with a lonely teenage girl. A time-travel experiment brings the dinosaur king to the world of today, the two isolated outsiders bond, add some outlandish monsters, and the rest sells itself. Props go to Marvel writer Cullen Bunn and artist Drew Moss for some inspired all-ages Godzillaesque fun.

5. Hip Hop Family Tree Three-in-One (Fantagraphics) — Excerpts from Ed Piskor’s cartoon history of old-school rap seem to start and stop at random points, but if you’re interested in detailed biographies of larger-than-life personalities like Kool Moe Dee, Def Jam founders Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, NWA’s DJ Yella, the actor formerly rapping as LL Cool J, and tons more where those came from, skip these out-of-context samples and go buy Piskor’s books today. You won’t regret it. Also in this hefty 56-page giveaway is a short story from Dash Shaw’s Cosplayers — neat comics about people who love comics — in which an odd shop owner relays his theory linking various unexplained phenomena to Jack Kirby’s 2001 sequel. It’s as trippy as it sounds, and I think I’d like to see more.

Even warrior-school teachers need a spring break, in the Avatar: the Last Airbender story “Sisters”. Art by Carla Speed McNeil and Jenn Manley Lee.

4. Avatar: the Last Airbender (Dark Horse Comics) — I’ve never seen a single episode of the popular animated series, but my past notes show this as Airbender‘s fourth consecutive thumbs-up FCBD entry, this time teaming Gene Luen Yang with Finder creator Carla Speed McNeil. Ty Lee goes home, reconnects with her sisters, foils circus evil, and learns that individuality and group membership each have their benefits and aren’t always mutually exclusive. Of the two backup stories, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover’s “Bandette”, about a whimsical young thief, is the more charming of the two; the other, based on the game Plants vs. Zombies, I so didn’t get at all, enough that it knocked the book a couple of spots down the list. I guess you had to be there.

3. All-New, All-Different Avengers (Marvel Comics) — I have high expectations for anything with Mark Waid’s name on it, and for the most part those standards are upheld in this self-contained sneak preview of the post-Secret Wars Avengers starring Ms. Marvel, young Nova, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, the current versions of Thor and Captain America, same old Iron Man, and Marvel’s newest big-screen sensation, the Vision. It’s funny and thrilling and at some point Mahmud Asrar turned into a top-notch artist when I wasn’t looking, but it bugs me that, in the same universe where the old Avengers were constantly knocking and grounding the Young Avengers for their inexperience, now we have an A-team staffed by three rookies whose front-line positions are a triumph of zeitgeist over historical consistency. And this is coming from a reader who really likes Ms. Marvel’s series and has three Ultimate Comics Spider-Man trades in his reading pile. The book’s other half is an Inhumans done-in-one by Charles Soule and Brandon Peterson that’s professional in every way, and does a much better job than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has of making the Inhumans not-boring. I still rebuke Marvel’s insistence that I have to like them, but at least the story held my attention from start to finish, unlike some S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes.

2. Doctor Who (Titan Comics) — Three new stories starring the three most recent Doctors! Twelve’s is a not-bad science lesson about the chemistry of quartz that could be a decent insert in a kids’ educational magazine. Ten and his comics-only companion Gabby Gonzalez limit themselves to a quiet night in the TARDIS laundry room but still run afoul of an exotic presence, so that’s a silly treat. The winner is Eleven and his own comics-only companions Alice and Jones in the most meta of all FCBD titles, about a fiendish alien invasion spread entirely through free books. It’s a gutsy move to make reading a weapon of the enemy on this special reading holiday, but cowriters Al Ewing and Rob Williams clearly enjoy playing with narrative in more ways than one.

“The Death of Kevin” somehow fails to be a 75-part crossover event with limited-edition gatefold die-cut holofoil hologram IMAX 3-D scented edible variant covers. Art by Faith Erin Hicks and Noreen Rana.

1. Comics Festival 2015 (Beguiling Books/Toronto Comic Arts Festival) — The best comic in the stack is a non-licensed indie anthology of creative coolness from a crowd that includes Kate Beaton, Mariko Tamaki, Gillian Goerz, Svetlana Chmakova, the Cory Doctorow, Jen Wang, and, best-of-show in a tough competition, Faith Erin Hicks taking an overdone superhero trope and its corporate implementers to task in a new Superhero Girl short called “The Death of Kevin” that needs a few awards heaped on it. But really, the entire one-shot is an A-plus grab bag.

And that’s the free reading pile that was, which I’ll admit has given me a few spending ideas. See you next year!

In Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1, our hero prepares to juggle her super-hero life with her big move to college. With the support of friends like Tippy, she’ll be fine as long as she doesn’t sign up for too many credit-hours.

Meet Squirrel Girl. Unless you’ve already met. Either way: Squirrel Girl!

Squirrel Girl was the joint invention of Spider-Man’s co-creator Steve Ditko and author Will Murray, who previously ghost-wrote dozens of Destroyer novels but this one time in the ’90s had an itch to do something different. That plan came together and Squirrel Girl is unquestionably different from Remo Williams. In 2015 someone wise at Marvel Comics promoted her to the front lines and she now stars in her own ongoing series, the optimistically named Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

The premise: Doreen Green is a young lady with the powers of both a squirrel and a girl. This includes squirrel communication, which allows her and no one else to understand her crimefighting ally Tippy-Toe, who’s mostly a normal squirrel except for all the impressive lifesaving stunts she can organize with other squirrels. After traipsing through various corners of the Marvel Universe over the past several years, Doreen is now living on campus at Empire State University (Peter Parker’s alma mater), majoring in Computer Science, living in a dorm with her roommate Nancy, and continuing to punch evil in the face on the side. In five issues she’s fought three different longtime Marvel villains, touched base with other heroes, saved the lives of everyone on Earth without expecting any gratitude, and refused to let any challenges ruin her chipper attitude.

In Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #2, Our Hero infiltrates Tony Stark’s armory to save the Earth. At first Tony can’t be bothered to show up in person because he’s afraid she’ll show him up, so he sends his empty pre-programmed Iron Goons instead because some billionaire chumps don’t recognize talent when it’s standing in front of them and trying to steal their stuff.

For a time Squirrel Girl was a member of the Great Lakes Avengers, a branch of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes that never receives any respect because they’re all goofy. Squirrel Girl may or may not be goofy, but she’s now one of several Marvel super-heroines — along with Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel — to earn a solo series. Squirrel Girl lacks the marketing advantage of a legacy built on someone else’s super-hero name. She’s put herself out on a limb by wearing a costume made of browns rather than primary colors. To readers who only want Serious Heroes who do Serious Maiming with Serious Grimness to Serious Psychos in their Serious Leotards, she is the enemy of all they hold dear and a threat to the fabric of graphic storytelling itself.

In Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #3 Our Hero and her partner must weigh heavy issues of morality, priorities, and squirrel wartime strategy systems.

I’m pretty cool with that kind of joyful subversion. Unbeatable Squirrel Girl keeps rising to the top of my reading pile every month thanks to writer Ryan North, artist Erica Henderson, colorist Rico Renzi, her modest supporting cast, surprising performances by super-villains we know and hate, and, of course, Squirrel Girl herself.

In Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #4 Our Hero meets her fiercest foe yet: GALACTUS! The most dangerous being in the Marvel Universe is so bold, he announces his intentions on social media and gives us all the time in the world to prepare for his arrival and our collective destruction. Because the big baby thrives on world energy and on attention.

The latest issue, #5, is a variation on a classic Batman: the Animated Series episode called “Legends of the Dark Knight”, in which the story isn’t about the hero so much as it’s about other people’s interpretations of the hero. Through this and the preceding issues, Squirrel Girl’s greatest traits shine through: idealistic verve, unflappable persistence, imaginative resourcefulness, unique powers, the loyalty of squirrels who’ll do anything she asks, and a moral compass as big as her heart. Once she’s a little older and more established and headlining her own Marvel motion picture, she’ll grow to become the kind of upstanding citizen who has no problem being a role model and inspiring a whole new generation of Squirrel Girls to follow in her footsteps, though they’ll hopefully develop their own powers and motifs instead of stealing her intellectual property, because that would be wrong.

Mostly Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #5 is about her roommate Nancy listening to a room full of trapped Squirrel Girl fans describe their skewed memories in the styles of other artists. Meanwhile, this heavyweight team-up is a scene that totally happens.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is an unpredictable 21st-century all-ages joy that deserves to be much, much, much higher in the sales charts. If words like “fun” and “heroism” and “positivity” mean anything to you — I mean, really mean things deep down — then Squirrel Girl’s picture needs to be next to the definitions of those words in the dictionary inside your head. If those words aren’t in your dictionary, then you should fire your mind palace’s curator.

Sample helmets and display collectibles courtesy of the 501st Legion.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

For the last few years, my wife and I have spent our respective birthdays together finding some new place or attraction to visit as a one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on this most wondrous day, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. My 2015 birthday destination of choice: the city of Fort Wayne, some 100+ miles northeast of here. It’s home to several manufacturing concerns, one major insurance company, a selection of buildings with historical importance to the locals, and a small comic book convention I’d never heard of before this year. We checked out the area, we found ways to enjoy ourselves, we got some much-needed exercise, and we took photos.

Fort Wayne’s fourth annual Appleseed Comic Con happened to fall on the same weekend as my 43rd birthday. With this lucky timing, this unknown con rose quickly to the top of my birthday-weekend brainstorming list and easily won out over clothes shopping, Netflix marathon, and “go someplace my wife wants to see”.

The name “Appleseed” is taken from one of Fort Wayne’s biggest claims to fame, the burial site of the real Johnny Appleseed. His ostensible grave marker is located in Johnny Appleseed Park, where the Johnny Appleseed Festival is a big deal every September. It’s not named after Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed, but it would be an impressive manga-geek victory if it were. Their third annual shindig was made possible by a successful Kickstarter campaign, but they seemed on solid ground without crowdfunding this time around.

Appleseed is small yet proud of its focus on the comics medium, no actors, celebs, or YouTube users are invited as guests. The biggest names in the program were strictly writers, artists, and creators in the realm of the illustrated printed page. I don’t think I’d been to that kind of comics show since high school. I could feel a tinge of nostalgia in a few moments as we wandered from booth to booth.

Even before we entered the exhibit hall, its location was a sightseeing treat in itself. Convention centers aren’t all that common in our state outside Indianapolis (we saw one in Muncie last year), but Fort Wayne’s Grand Wayne Convention Center is ideally located for northern Indiana companies and our neighbors in Michigan and Ohio. Judging by its appearance, I’m guessing they attract decent business.

Grand Wayne’s north side is the modern face of over 75,000 square feet of exhibit halls, conference rooms, ballrooms, and meeting spaces. It’s surrounded by several convenient restaurants, which is a massive tactical advantage over every Chicago con ever.

We parked in a garage connected by a skybridge to a Hilton conjoined with the Center’s east side. Our walk to the exhibit hall was pretty, spacious, and well lit even though the weather outside was cloudy with a light chance of soaking wet misery.

Random chandelier we passed on our way through the Hilton. Fancy!

Artwork near the Grand Wayne escalators. Yes, I realize this has next to nothing to do with Appleseed, but it was a photo I took while in the Convention Center and therefore of tangential relevance. Don’t give me that look. No, YOU’RE padding a blog entry with photos no one searched to find.

I’m sure we passed several Appleseed banners on our way into town from I-69, but somehow I didn’t notice them till later while we wandered downtown for fun. The con is a big deal to many locals, one of whom told us it’s been getting bigger every year.

Indianapolis hangs similar banners when Gen Con comes to town, but I’ve seen none of these for the comic cons that cropped up in the last two years. Maybe someday one of them will earn this respectable privilege.

Anyway: the con! There were writers, artists, cartoonists, webcomics creators, and enthusiasts in a few different modes. People we met and paid for reading matter included:

* Christopher Mitten, illustrator/co-creator of Image Comics’ Umbral, which I’m looking forward to delving into even though I’m sadly late for the party.

* Writer Ben Avery, who helped adapt George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones prequel novella “The Hedge Knight” into comics for Marvel, teams up frequently with artist/writer Mike S. Miller (Image’s The Imaginaries), and has works available through a few Christian comics publishers. I picked up one, The Book of God, illustrated by ’90s Ghost Rider artist Javier Saltares.

* Brian Bradley of Kingdom Comics, another Christian publisher we’ve seen at Chicago cons.

* Artist Hilary Barta, whom I’ve met twice before at C2E2 (including last year’s), but I’m more than happy to hand him my money whenever I can. My excuse this time was also the overall niftiest thing I picked up at Appleseed: original art from Power Pack #43 — inks by Barta, pencils by Sal Velluto. I have the first fifty-five issues of the team’s original series, but until I set eyes on this page, I’d totally forgotten they had an enemy called the Boogeyman. Oh, the sweet, faded memories.

I love the mutated Chrysler Building at left. Barta reexamined parts of the page, nitpicked a few flaws, and suspects it may have been a weekend rush job. If so, that’s a heck of a turnaround under the circumstances.

Two comics dealers lined the rear of the hall with back issues and discount graphic novels. A handful of others alternated with toy vendors on the right side. I limited my browsing of their wares because I still have a backlog of reading matter from our last few cons, but I couldn’t resist picking up two items of note: a ten-dollar copy of DC’s thirty-dollar compilation of the obscure series Chase, which featured art by a then-unknown JH Williams III who later became a contemporary powerhouse; and a worn copy of X-Men Annual #5 (1981), one of the few vintage Chris Claremont X-stories I’d never read way back when, and never knew existed. I don’t recall ever seeing a reprint of its contents, a double-length team-up with the Fantastic Four against the alien invaders known as the Badoon, illustrated by Astro City‘s Brent Anderson and New Mutants co-creator Bob McLeod. This to me was like finding a lost treasure, despite the odd romantic subplot between Storm and Arkon the Imperion.

Forgotten moment in Marvel history: that time Kitty Pryde, age 13, tried designing her own X-Men costume. And lo, men shall call her…the Bedazzler!

Also in the exhibit hall: this booth! For some reason!

Because some companies just really love conventions.

Best non-food items on display were found at the table of Sweets So Geek, local purveyors of chocolate candies shaped like famous icons and objects of geek culture.

They also do mail order!

The foil wrappers ruin part of the magic, so here’s the Dalek freed from its prison as an example of the handiwork involved.

It’s made of CHOC-O-LATE! CHOC-O-LATE! CHOC-O-LATE! CHOC-O-LATE! CHOC-O-LATE!

(Reviews so far: we had a hard time detecting the bacon in the Bat-Symbol, but it was yummy anyway. My sriracha-tinged Dalek was rich, creamy, and burning. We haven’t gotten to the other two yet.)

Officially the guy at the Sweets So Geek table couldn’t sell food without a vending license or else invite the convention center’s wrath. However, he had an accomplice representing for the company at the pop-up boutique I mentioned in the last entry. She was willing and able to hook us up, and had a few of the guy’s geek cakes on display. They also do super-hero cookies.

A fellow shopper gave a glowing review of the Yoda cake they made for his son’s birthday. Did I mention the mail-order option?

…and that’s pretty much the sum of our ninety-minute Appleseed Comic Con experience. The exhibit hall was three aisles total, plus one room hosting panels all day about toys, Jack Kirby, gender in comics, comics how-to tutorials, and so on. The show’s biggest headliner was Jaime Hernandez, co-creator of the groundbreaking Love and Rockets, some of which I’d read from library copies during high school. Unfortunately, the first time we passed his table, I overlooked him and my wife didn’t mention it till I said something and we were further down the next aisle. The second time, he was AWOL. During his 2:00 Q&A we were several blocks away touring another Fort Wayne establishment. When we returned late in the afternoon for one last pass through the three aisles, he appeared to be packing up for the day, and that’s not something I feel right about interrupting. My loss, I know.

I’d love to share a vast selection of cosplay pics, but this wasn’t that kind of turnout. We saw one Harley Quinn, two Batmen, and four or five Star Wars baddies who were probably all 501st Legion reps. End of cosplayer list. As a token of our remorse for this lack of photographic results, please instead accept this photo of my wife with R2D2 in front of a Death Star backdrop.

Anne is fluent in over two different forms of communication!

The important takeaway here: we met new people and bought cool stuff. Primary objectives were largely met, and pleasingly so.

That’s not all we saw while we were in Fort Wayne, though. To be continued!

This month in Star Wars #6: Boba Fett tries to prove he’s not a loser by going after Luke Skywalker. “Go big or go home,” I guess. (Art by John Cassaday and Laura Martin.)

Marvel’s takeover of the Star Wars comics license from Dark Horse is nearly halfway through its first year, having published a combined eighteen issues to date between three ongoing series and one miniseries thus far. In our household I’m the one with the lifelong comics habit, while my wife is the dedicated Star Wars fan. I have dozens of longboxes; she has a six-foot shelf overflowing with hundreds of Expanded Universe novels. Strictly speaking, Star Wars comics are among those few releases that hold potential interest for both of us. Her enjoyment of Dark Horse’s output outlasted mine by a wide margin, but we’re in a new era and a new universe now, with different creators, different priorities, and different results.

Fair warning for context: I’ve seen all six films multiple times (a couple of them way too many times), but Star Wars is not one of my primary geek specialties as it is for her. My perceptions of George Lucas’ favorite galaxy are skewed because I experienced the original film trilogy in the following order:

1. Heard about the original Star Wars from friends while my mom went to see it without me
2. Bought and read the Empire Strikes Back novelization from a school book fair
3. Saw Return of the Jedi twice in theaters, then read the Goodwin/Williamson comics adaptation
4. Years later, saw Star Wars
5. A decade or so after that, possibly after high school, saw ESB

Despite several attempts at reading random issues, I never got into Marvel’s original 114-issue Star Wars series, not even for Jax the giant green bunny. I read a smattering of Dark Horse works and liked a few things here and there, but I mostly bought them for my wife until and unless she told me to drop titles at her discretion. When I heard about Marvel’s acquisition and reboot using several of their top creators, I think I was more excited than she was. Then again, I’m not the one who just had thirty-odd years’ worth of treasured, memorized, extensively researched Expanded Universe history and intricacies tossed into a garbage chute by Lucasfilm Marketing. (Been there, done that, felt that pain. Welcome to my life as a fortysomething comics fan.)

In my skewed opinion as an old guy who likes comics more than Star Wars, Marvel’s current titles rank as follows from least best to definite best.

4. Star Wars

My wife says this one’s her favorite of the lot, and I think I understand why. Writer Jason Aaron has captured the voices of the Big Three characters and found exciting things for them to do that weren’t already done in the original trilogy. Or maybe I’m misinterpreting and I’ll hear all about it when she gets around to reading this. I can understand how a hardcore SW fan might be fine with stories focusing on Luke, Leia, and Han above all others. My problem is, in all my life from childhood onward, I have never ever ever ever cared about Luke. I get that Luke’s Force-fueled deeds and his glowy super-sword make him the obvious hero of the bunch, but since I never saw his initial whiny reluctance evolve into compassionate swashbuckler in chronological order, to me he’s always been the least interesting member of the ensemble.

So far the series has been mixing and matching pieces for varied effects — Han and Leia on a wild AT-AT ride, a Luke/Vader first meeting that predates ESB, C-3PO babysitting the Millennium Falcon, Boba Fett popping in ahead of schedule for his fan club, and so on. The art by John Cassaday has its energetic moments that work best whenever his facial expressions appear freehand and natural and not traced from photos or stills. But since the Big Three are immune to permanent consequence, it feels like they’re shuffling and reshuffling the same old deck without adding any new cards to it. Even the controversial surprise ending to #6 bounced right off me because I know there’ll be either a logical explanation or a swift elimination forthcoming. Such awareness tends to nullify dramatic effect, a common issue with “midquel” stories that are bookended by fixed points in time.

Princess Leia #4 aces the Bechdel Test as Her Majesty continues to role-model for her subjects despite the destruction of their homeworld. (Art Terry & Rachel Dodson and Jordie Bellaire.)

3. Princess Leia

Of all the Mark Waid comics I’ve ever read, this may be the least Mark Waid-iest. Usually the hero has first-person narrative captions and a clever sense of humor, but Waid is staying outside Leia’s head and faithfully portraying her in stately royalty mode as she pulls rank for the sake of rescuing the scattered remnants of Alderaanian civilization from death and obscurity. It’s kind of interesting to see her in an adventure interacting with other women for a change, but without Han to get under her skin, she lacks a sparring partner who’s anywhere near her equal. The action sequences in #3 livened things up thanks to a wild assist from R2-D2, her noble actions in #4 are the best evidence yet of why anyone still looks up to her, and I’m assuming #5’s finale will surprise me as much as any great issue of his Daredevil run.

Until then, I’ve felt like this miniseries ultimately hasn’t been aimed at me, which is fine and understandable. Oddly, though, it’s also my wife’s least favorite of the four. Neither of us is sure what to make of that.

In Darth Vader #6, Our Villain is aggravated because his evil boss is making him share HIS comic with HIS name on it with other evil upstarts. (Art by Salvador Larroca and Edgar Delgado.)

2. Darth Vader

They had me at “Kieron Gillen”. In his quest for revenge upon the anonymous pilot who shot his TIE Fighter out from under him, Vader is regal and menacing and frustrated and conniving all at once. He’s also outnumbered by a supporting cast of malcontents that won’t stop growing. He’s assembled his own covert-ops team that includes an amoral female Indiana Jones and unrepentant evil-twin versions of Artoo and Threepio, nicknamed BT and Triple-Zero, who may be the most disturbing Star Wars characters I’ve ever seen. The last two issues threw yet another batch of players at us, summoned by Emperor Palpatine to bolster the Sith ranks, upend millennia of Sith standards, and probably annoy a lot of fans who are now being told the sacred “Rule of Two” is more of a guideline than a rule.

Gillen usually writes with a long game in mind, so I’m curious to see where this influx of personalities is eventually headed, as I expect it won’t be long before casualties start mounting due to backstabbing. While I appreciate that lots of new faces increase the odds of actual drama and tension occurring, Vader is in danger of becoming a second-stringer in his own title. I trust he won’t let that come to pass.

“…but no one ever taught me how to survive.” Thus the young fugitive in Kanan: the Last Padawan #2 struggles with a new reality in the wake of Order 66. (Art by Pepe Larraz and David Curiel.)

1. Kanan: the Last Padawan

In which Greg Weisman, one of the minds behind Disney’s Gargoyles and a onetime co-writer of DC’s Captain Atom during my teen years, creates an origin story for one of the main characters from the hit animated series that we quit watching after a handful of episodes. On Star Wars Rebels, Kanan is a former Jedi who still has his connection to the Force, a working lightsaber, a strange idea of what “former” means, and glowering postures that marked him as the strong, silent, bitter type. I never read the prequel-to-a-midquel novel A New Dawn that was supposed to make Rebels mean something to me, and so none of it never did, Kanan included.

His comic is the exact opposite. Commencing partway through Revenge of the Sith, Kanan’s tale follows the loyal trainee through the last days of the Jedi Order and watches helplessly as Order 66 immediately and irrevocably turns his entire world upside-down. Friends become enemies, order becomes chaos, and life becomes a nightmare as the lonely young survivor finds himself on the run from Clonetroopers who were secretly, genetically bred to end him and his kind. The first issue established such a strong connection between our hero and his master, Depa Billaba (with some of her previous history retconned away), that the ending of #1 was rather suspenseful even though it technically wasn’t a surprise. #2 sees Kanan on the run, torn between warm memories and imminent threats, navigating military traps and survival ethics alike.

Kanan the frightened teen fugitive is in such a different place from Kanan the older, disenfranchised sourpuss that beyond this point we truly have no idea what’ll happen next. In this seemingly narrow time frame between Revenge of the Sith and ESB, Kanan’s future is wider open than the futures of the Big Three. More to the point, the groundwork laid in #1 gave us a proper emotional underpinning so we have reason to care about his circumstances and fear for his fate. That’s what drama feels like, and for my money that’s why Kanan: the Last Padawan is the best Star Wars series of the moment.

(Opinion subject to change after the first issue of the Charles Soule/Alex Maleev Lando miniseries hits stores in July. Updates as they occur.)

Except where noted, all art in this entry is by Sal Buscema, Dave Simons, and George Roussos.

Behold the big save-the-day rallying moment from What If? (vol. 1) #44, cover-dated April 1984, which left an indelible impression on me when I was eleven. Three decades later you can take this dramatic splash page totally out of context and pretend it’s symbolic of you as the one true arbiter of What America Is Really All About, Spider-Man and alt-universe Sam Wilson’s army are your friends who agree with you on everything as far as you know, and the other Captain America is everyone whose idea of America is the exact opposite of yours, thus making them evil impostors who must be crushed. With all those Zip-a-Tone layers giving it more lighting depth than any other page in the issue, I have no idea why no one ever turned this into a poster.

Painted cover art by Bill Sienkiewicz.

Then the real Cap wakes up. Heroism ensues. Cap and the surviving heroes have to go take back America. Some old What If? stories had pessimistic endings where everyone died and the villains won and the moral of the story was, “Be very grateful the original stories didn’t go like this.” But this wasn’t one of those one-shot nihilist funnybook stories. Big surprise: Cap and his amazing friends save the day, and then it’s up to the guy dressed in flag regalia to deliver the big speech that reverses the damage, because we all know Spidey would mess it up, the cops would probably start shooting at him, and J. Jonah Jameson would write another nasty editorial about it while cackling uncontrollably.

So it’s up to Cap to assure Americans things are swell again and none of this ever happened. That’s what his disillusioned audience is expecting, anyway. Cap veers off-message and goes in a much firmer direction. And when words fail a duly chastised America, the convocation ends the only way it possibly could: with a song.

…and that’s where the story ends.

Cap’s speech is a little harder for me to read today than it was in sixth grade. At the time, to me this was unlike anything I’d ever encountered. I doubt this story will ever be reprinted, and there’s no way it could withstand a 21st-century reboot. I haven’t collected a Cap series in years, so I couldn’t tell you the last time Marvel printed a Cap story whose main message was “America rules!” or “I love America!” or “America is kind of not-terrible! Yay!” For all I know maybe the new Cap’s whole America motif is purely vestigial and the days of a sincerely patriotic Cap are gone. Or maybe the opposite. Couldn’t tell you.

It’s weird revisiting artifacts from a point in history when citizens didn’t spend the entire week of July 4th brainstorming reasons why America sucks — i.e, not too different from how they spend the other 51 weeks, except for July 4th they redouble their lists because it’s all one big competition to see who can become the greatest Independence Day Grinch of them all. Yes, we get it, America’s not perfect, terrible inexcusable things happen all the time that shouldn’t, someone should pass a “No Child Happy to Live Here” law, things would be so much better if Canada conquered us and paid for all our medicine and forced us to watch all their low-budget sci-fi shows.

But there are things America gets right and does well. No, I’m not listing them for you. Today’s a holiday and I’m off the clock. Because freedom to celebrate, freedom to type and post, freedom not to type and post.

Happy July 4th to our American readers, stay safe, enjoy your weekend, and if a guy in a Captain America costume asks you if you’d be okay with some martial law, chances are he’s not Chris Evans and you can legally sock him in the jaw.

It’s that time of year again! Anne and I are at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we’re so far having a blast even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after two days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things. This year marks our first time splurging on VIP passes for a con as an experiment, and the first time in ten years that we’re attending three full days. We normally make a point of skipping Sundays, but we had multiple reasons for going overboard this once.

Pictured above: my haul so far from their Artists Alley, always an interesting place to scout out new comics and graphic novels. I’m annoying to a lot of folks in there that I tend to avoid prints, posters, sketches-while-I-wait, prose novels, zombies, erotica, amateur manga, and jewelry, but within my annoyingly rigorous shopping guidelines, I can usually find a few items to catch my eye.

WWC is always held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. Spacious accommodations, lousy concessions, pretty landscaping. In a rare move, WWC reserved the entire convention center this year rather than risk sharing it with other incongruous crowds like antique coin collector clubs or dental hygiene seminars or whatever.

Taking photos of projection screens always looks tacky, but that doesn’t always stop me. I’ve attended a few panels so far, including Saturday’s 3 p.m. Firefly Q&A with special guests Summer Glau (who also costarred in the equally criminally truncated Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles), Adam Baldwin (who helped scar my young psyche in Full Metal Jacket), and THE Nathan Fillion, costar of Much Ado About Nothing. They clearly enjoyed each other’s company, the crowd loved them, and over half my Saturday was spent waiting in their respective lines.

I also met someone from The Wire, which in itself means this was an A-plus weekend, and we’re not even done yet.

At dinner Friday our waiter was a comics fan who planned to attend sometime this weekend. After we ordered, we spent a few minutes chatting about Marvel’s Secret Wars, and at the end of our meal he sketched on our receipt, no charge. For the sketch, I mean, not the food. If only.

The perks with my VIP admission included this trading card for which I have zero use. I haven’t collected geek trading cards in about twenty years, it has no sports or gaming stats on it, there’s no original painted art anywhere on it by some top comics artist, and it’s not numbered as part of a special series. If anyone’s interested in owning this rare gem, I’m asking eleventy billion dollars OBO.

Each of our passes also came with two free copies of The Walking Dead #1 with completely different variant covers from the last hundred free copies of The Walking Dead #1 they gave us at previous Wizard World shows. We have no idea what to do with four more copies of the comics equivalent of Malibu Stacy With New Hat, but they’re ours to keep or turn into cool paper airplanes.

Once we’ve finished attending the final day, returned home, recuperated and regenerated any lost limbs, rest assured as always we’ll be sharing the results and photos later this week on MCC — costumes, actors, anecdotes, and more!

* * * * *

UPDATED 9/3/2015: Follow along with our pics and stories in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Team Cosplay
Part 2: Marvel Cosplay
Part 3: DC vs. Star Wars Cosplay
Part 4: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 5: Actors We Met
Part 6: Cars and Other Objects
Part 7: Why We Convention

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time of year again! Anne and I are at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we’re so far having a blast even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after two days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things…

My wife and I took an okay number of photos over the course of our three-day stay and will once again be sharing the most usable over the next several entries.

Tonight’s episode: the miniseries finale! The panels we saw! The comics pros I met! The winners of the Annual “Convince Me to Spend Money in Artists Alley” contest! The troubles with conventioning while old! And more!

…

…okay, everyone, they’re gone now!

Inevitably these convention photo galleries see a groundswell of cosplayers and other attendees surfing by to find themselves or see what they missed, but after a week they vanish and we’re back to normal traffic levels, by which I mean I think we’re all alone again. So hey, there, regular reader! Have I told you how awesome you are? Well, you are. Thought you should know.

Anne and I were pleased with the overall takeaways from our Wizard World Chicago three-day weekend, but in between the highlights and moments of awesomeness you’ve seen over the past six entries, so many challenges hit us from so many directions that I’ve spent the past week struggling to regain my mental balance. This weekend was all about decompressing and napping far more than usual. Conventioning is fun, but it’s rarely easy. The most important lesson from all of this is I remember why we stopped doing Sundays.

Fair warning: all of this makes more sense if you’ve read part 5 and the prologue first. As it goes along, you’ll see where the actors and other experiences fell into the timeline, but I’m not retelling all those bits from scratch. But all the pieces matter.

How we conventioned:

Friday, August 21st:

Indianapolis to Chicago used to be a three-hour straight shot northwest, up I-65 to either I-90 or I-94, depending on which Illinois interstate had the mildest construction interruptions. Two weeks before WWC, a thirty-mile stretch of northbound I-65 from Lebanon to Lafayette was shut down by emergency order because some surveyor noticed a long-failing bridge had downgraded to super-failing status. The state government eventually worked out an official detour for tens of thousands of drivers to take every day until the crisis is resolved in mid-September, but most of the detour involved farmland back roads barely meant to accommodate hundreds per day. On the official detour’s first few days in operation, drive times for the Indy-to-Chicago trip ran something like six to ten hours on average. Frankly, we had no time to humor this joke on our very special WWC weekend.

Instead I took us on a four-hour alternate route through country highways along the Illinois/Indiana border. This could’ve been even shorter if speeding were fully legalized, if a railroad crossing in Dyer hadn’t malfunctioned and kept us gridlocked for fifteen minutes, and if we hadn’t spent some thirty-odd miles trapped behind a fleet of police cars escorting an oversize flatbed truck hauling a windmill blade. This was not my favorite morning commute ever, but it still beat the official detour for suckers.

We arrived in Rosemont shortly before 1:00 CDT. The exhibit hall opened at noon. Rather than report immediately for geek fun duty, first we stopped for lunch at a nearby Quiznos (I refused to have convention center grub for lunch) and then headed over, got our badges, and let the conventioning begin.

Friday we took care of one of my primary objectives: I wanted to see panels. I’m terrible about keeping panel schedules in mind, but with three days at our disposal, I had no excuse for missing out. First up was the oddly titled “Joined at the Hipness: Comics and Pop Culture!” The intended theme was artists with works in multiple media.

Left to right: Dean Haspiel, who’s done numerous comics for Archie, the Big Two, Harvey Pekar, other indies and his own creator-owned label, but who also designed the opening credits to HBO’s Bored to Death and a Warehouse 13 motion comic for Syfy; Good Charlotte guitarist/keyboardist Billy Martin, who’s now multi-tasking as an artist for IDW’s series based on the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; and animator J.J. Sedelmaier, best known in our house for SNL’s animated “TV Funhouse” segments of yore. Much of the discussion concerned “What’s it like working in this field versus this field” along with a slideshow of sample works and videos.

Later in the day came another comics panel called “Superstar Artists Tell All!” comprising several guests at varying levels of fame and fulfillment.

Left to right: Mikey Babinski, a Marvel inker; Bill Reinhold, who drew all my favorite issues of First Comics’ The Badger and a fair amount of Punisher; Art Baltazar, Tiny Titans mastermind and a Chicago con mainstay; longtime Archie artist Dan Parent; and Joyce Chin, frequent cover artist for Marvel, Dynamite, and other companies.

Unfortunately, so many artists were scheduled for the same panel that they crowded poor Ken Lashley offstage. He talked openly about his 20-year career with Marvel and DC, at length in particular about ridiculous editorial deadlines, from the audience front row. Again, there was a slideshow of sample art from all participants.

Everyone had a chance to speak on projects past and present, though they were tough to hear over another larger, louder event happening on the other side of their back wall.

Before and between the panels, we walked the exhibit hall as much as we could. I picked up a few collections of Kieron Gillen Uncanny X-Men stuff for cheap, we looked at tons of toys that didn’t interest us, we took some photos, we spent the 4:00-5:00 hour on the Jon Bernthal photo-op experience, and we had a random moment of delightful confusion when we walked by the Torpedo Comics storage trunks and Michael Rooker sped past in the other direction, pointing at them and exclaiming, “LOOK AT THE LITTLE TOILETS!”

I also met the one comics artist I’d been looking forward to meeting most: Canadian funnyman Ty Templeton, whose thirty-year career started with black-‘n’-white creator-owned treasures like Stig’s Inferno and Kelvin Mace, then went back and forth between the Big Two with Batman Adventures, Justice League, a Spider-Man/Human Torch miniseries from a while back, and countless other amusing works I’ve run across again and again.

Somehow the three of us wound up harmonizing on Don Draper’s famous Coke jingle. I have no idea how that happened, but it was one of my favorite moments of the weekend. He also signed my copy of Stig’s Inferno #1, so that was nearly as nifty. When he’s not at conventions, teaching, or taking on assignments and commissions, he maintains a WordPress blog where he posts new comic funnies every Saturday.

The second panel ended at 5:45; the exhibit hall closed at 7. We had zero interest in eating a late supper, especially if we had to wait an hour for a table. With only a third of the hall visited, we bowed out after the panel, fetched dinner without a table wait (requiring a long walk to a German place that would validate our parking), and went to collapse in the hotel. We knew we had three days to work with, and we were exhausted and virtually elderly.

I spent the evening exchanging brief thoughts with other WWC fans on Facebook, and at one point stepped into the middle of a heated argument over anti-WWC negativity. I was reminded of my days as a message-board admin and how much I don’t miss them. But things calmed down shortly and someone offered to buy me a drink, so I guess it counted as a win even though we were in different hotels and I had to content myself with the free coffee in our room.

Saturday, August 22nd:

Attending three days wasn’t our only experiment. For our first time ever, we also bought VIP passes, partly to see how well they’d serve us and partly because one of the guests was the Nathan Fillion. Months ago Anne and I had discussed the possibility of skipping WWC this year, but for me the con was on when Captain Malcolm Reynolds was added to the list. We assumed correctly we’d be competing with a large mob for his attention and figured the VIP route might save time, energy, and disappointment. Our plan would’ve worked if they’d only sold ten or fifteen Fillion VIP passes out of 60,000+ attendees.

VIP perk #1: early admission at 9:30 a.m. We arrived shortly after 8 to beat as many of the other VIPs as we could. That worked. Once inside, we took a few car photos and then joined the autograph line for Fillion’s Firefly costar Summer Glau, who already had a few dozen Summer Glau VIPs ahead of us. She was scheduled to start at 11. Fillion’s VIP photo-op was at 12:15. Glau arrived at 11:25. At 12:05 Anne held my spot in Glau’s autograph line while I ran upstairs to join Fillion’s VIP photo-op line. By the time I finished with the latter and returned to the former, Anne was eight fans away from Glau. Thankfully she’d already explained the timing situation to others around her and everyone was nice enough not to punch me in the face for rejoining the line. If I’d missed out, it would’ve been especially awkward because Anne had zero vested interest in meeting Glau by herself.

Both Firefly folks were as wonderful as expected. By that time it was 1 p.m. (over three hours after opening) and the next matter up was Fillion’s autograph line, a separate line from the photo-op that was likewise included in my pricey package. I would’ve been happy to meet Fillion on Friday instead and gotten him out of the way, but my VIP pass was specifically, strictly tied to Fillion’s Saturday lines only. It was Saturday or never. And his line wasn’t shortening. Thus I dutifully went to the next line, where I spent the next 90-odd minutes. Anne again had no dog in this race and was set free to go roam the halls on her own recognizance. She went hither and yon, she spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in Sean Patrick Flannery’s line, and she fetched me my lunch of one (1) convention-center hot dog. By that time I was weakened and desperate and the hot dog was a gift-horse, figuratively and possibly literally.

Fillion was a pleasure for his encore, naturally, and left me just enough time to step over to the adjacent booth for an autograph from Firefly costar Adam Baldwin, whose performance as the remorseless Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket scarred my psyche in college. So now my Firefly DVD set contains seven actors’ autographs and counting. Soon, they will all be MINE unless they never come within 500 miles of here, or they do but their lines are eight hours long.

From there I had to make a beeline to the 3:00 Firefly Q&A very, very far away from the celeb-booth area. My VIP pass got me above-average seating and pre-admission ahead of thousands of other fans impatiently waiting their turns to sit and enjoy. Anne took her leave because (a) again, no interest, and (b) it was scheduled opposite her Burt Reynolds photo op. We hated splitting up again, but we had no choice if we wanted to do the things we’d paid to do.

(There were literally thousands of seats worse than mine.)

The panel was solid Browncoat fun, though it started fifteen minutes late, I’m guessing because of Fillion’s autographing. He, Glau, and Baldwin greatly enjoyed their time together onstage. I tried not to groan when one pair of fans used their moment at the Q&A mic to stage a marriage proposal instead of actually asking a question, because this panel was meant to be all about them, not the stars. I’m pretty sure I did groan at questioners who insisted on recording their moments at the mic for posterity so that the grandkids in 2055 could one day watch the most important moment of Grandma’s life. One fan even used a selfie stick for theirs. I took a photo of that one, but it’s blurred and I facepalm every time I look at it.

Speaking of facepalming: somehow one of Fillion’s short, free-wheeling answers to a fun question (“What other characters would you like to play?”) was caught on a slow day that later saw several quote-unquote “news” sites about comics cranking out excited five-paragraph non-news articles about this singular WWC moment, declaring, “NATHAN FILLION WANTS TO PLAY BOOSTER GOLD! DC MUST MAKE THIS HAPPEN OR THEIR CINEMATIC UNIVERSE IS A SHAM!” This is the kind of zeitgeist I hope never to catch and is why MCC will never, ever become a straight-faced, objective “news” site.

The Q&A ended at 4; I escaped through a crowd of several thousand to go rejoin Anne on the opposite end of the convention center, where Reynolds’ line was moving unusually slowly for a photo op. They’re usually done in mere minutes, but not this one, for reasons never revealed to us. Her brush with greatness wrapped up around 4:30, after which we returned downstairs for a shot at Seth Gilliam’s autograph line, even though he was supposed to be done for the day. He decided otherwise, much to my eternal gratitude, thus freeing us up around 5-ish.

By this time nearly two days had gone by and I hadn’t gone anywhere near Artists Alley. I was beat down from hours of standing and shuffling and crossing the convention center back and forth and back and forth, but I refused to leave without visiting Artists Alley first. So it was decreed, thus it was done.

MCC would like to thank the following Artists Alley personalities who successfully sold me pages with narratives on them or other artful things:

* Dean Haspiel, who autographed my copy of Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter, which he illustrated and remains my favorite American Splendor story
* Kane Lynch, whose funny, subtle, reflective, 24-page done-in-one Smooth as Glass is one of my favorite Artists Alley purchases of any con this year
* Michael Sacco-Gibson from Strange Bedfellows Theatre, who also helps run a Facebook page for WWC fans that was useful and fun for both networking and discussion all weekend long
* Erik Lervold and Kevin Kosmo at Monkey Man Labs (loved the coloring on their Red Calaveras book)
* Crystal Aura Wilson a.k.a. Crizltron (got some nice buttons for my Thinkgeek convention bag)
* Ashley Dunning at Hand Painted Nerd (a handcrafted mug with a picture of a gladiator helmet and the inscription “MR. POND”)
* Artist Laura Guzzo, who mostly seemed to be selling other people’s books, but who wins for cosplaying as Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time

We finished Artists Alley a bit before 6; the exhibit hall closed at 7. We had zero interest in eating a late supper, especially if we had to wait an hour for a table. With thousands of exhibit-hall square footage still unvisited, we bowed out anyway, exited in another direction outside that took us through the asphyxiating stenches of the designated smokers’ area, fetched dinner without a table wait (requiring a long walk to Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill, who would validate our parking), and went to collapse in the hotel. We knew we had one more day at our disposal, and we were even more exhausted and honorary ancients.

We spent 80% of Saturday in lines. We took very few photos by Saturday standards because lines are a terrible vantage point. While many cool things were made possible through our efforts, it was disappointing on other levels, chiefly because we had to keep working everything else around the inflexible event scheduling for my VIP pass, and consequently couldn’t keep things nearly as fluid as we prefer. We tried to accentuate the positive at the end of the day, but that’s harder when your energy levels are at critical levels.

I spent Saturday evening reading and reading and reading. The WWC Facebook group was mostly quiet as its members were either at the costume contest or meeting up at various hotel bars around the convention center. Our invitations totaled zero. For us zero is normal. Neither of us drinks or parties, and our closest geek friends who might forgive us this deep social flaw all live in other faraway cities and states. In the sense of what “geek” used to mean before it became just another corporate marketing demographic, we’re outcasts from the outcast.

Sunday, August 23rd:

Whereas my VIP badge had been for Nathan Fillion, Anne’s was for Jeremy Renner, a Sunday-only guest guaranteed to have one of the largest turnouts of all. His was close, anyway.

The exhibit hall opened at 11. Renner’s only VIP photo op was at 10:45. We arrived shortly before 8:30 under the correct assumption that dozens of other Renner VIPs would be ahead of us. Sure enough, we weren’t the first to arrive. The photo above wasn’t even the first group to arrive. Due to complicated scheduling issues, VIPs for The Walking Dead‘s Norman Reedus had to arrive for photo ops and autographs at something like 8 am. They were allowed through the doors as soon as they arrived, while the rest of us had to wait a bit longer.

Over two hours later, our photo op was done, we unlocked the “Hangin’ with Hawkeye” Achievement, and I was done with actors for the weekend. Not so for Anne; Renner VIP autographs were set to commence at 12:10, all part of her package deal. Knowing what this meant, she went from Renner’s photo op to Renner’s autograph booth — two separate areas a floor apart. And that’s where she spent her next two hours.

I would’ve loved to have him autograph a DVD for me, either The Hurt Locker or S.W.A.T. or maybe even Angel Season 1, in which he once guest-starred as an old vampire friend of Angel’s. But I wasn’t the one with the Renner VIP badge, and I figured waiting in the non-VIP line would take the next several days of my life. So this time it was my turn to go roam the halls on my own recognizance, to flit about hither and yon, while Anne withstood one last line.

Here’s a thing I learned: roaming a convention floor by yourself kinda sucks. You’re alone in a vast crowd filled with couples, groups, and other lonesome people. You have no one by your side noticing stuff that you’re not, or noticing the same neat stuff you are. There’s no shared sense of exploration, discovery, laughs, surprises, or fandom. Without someone to keep you company, you’re just…shopping. And it’s maybe not the healthiest place to send a natural introvert who’s burnt out after 2½ straight days of intensive social and sensory input. It was my Gen Con 2009 experience all over again, but with more comics for consolation.

It didn’t take me long to finish strolling all the exhibit hall aisles I’d missed the last two days, because I didn’t stop much. I picked up a few more Kieron Gillen books and very little else. My camera mostly stayed in my pocket because I was tired of politely bugging other people. At the opposite end of the floor from the autograph booths, I found the Max & Benny’s booth, bought geek cookies, and walked one all the way back to the autograph booths so Anne wouldn’t starve to death in my absence.

From there I walked all the way over to the programming hall for one last comics panel at 12:30 — “Chicago’s Illustrious Comics History”.

Left to right is a who’s-who of old-school Midwest comics fandom: once again, animator JJ Sedelmaier; Maggie Thompson, editor of the late Comics Buyer’s Guide (I was a subscriber from 1986 to 2005); Mike Gold, co-founder of First Comics and onetime editor at DC; comics historian George Hagenaur, whose byline popped up in CBG more than once; and two guys I’d never heard of, Chicago retailers Larry Charet and Ron Massengill.

I came for comics history. I got lots of that, but from an intensely Windy City perspective. Having journeyed there several times but never actually lived there, I found a lot of references and anecdotes bouncing off me uncaught. Not all of them, thankfully.

The panel ended promptly at 1:15. At 1:14 Anne plopped down in the chair next to me with a Renner 8×10 in hand, signed “To Randy and Anne”. Bless her sweet, loving, frazzled heart.

Lunch had to be next or else we would die. As another momentous WWC first for us, we tried the cafeteria hidden at the back of Hall A. The line moved slowly and the food was school-cook level, but we couldn’t believe the number of empty, clean tables. We sat and ate, and then sat and sat some more. By the time we were finished, we decided we were capital-F Finished.

Anne’s badge entitled her to VIP seating at Renner’s afternoon Q&A. We didn’t care anymore.

There was another comics panel at 3:30. We didn’t care anymore.

I had yet to buy a new T-shirt, something I always look forward to. We didn’t care anymore.

We hadn’t gone anywhere near the “Bruce Campbell Fest” all-horror section on the second floor. We didn’t care anymore.

The rest of the internet would have hundreds more cosplay photos than we did, so now MCC’s normal post-convention traffic spike would be a mere traffic dimple. We didn’t care anymore.

We had money left in the budget if we felt like more spending. We didn’t care anymore.

Well, maybe I cared an itty-bitty bit. Whenever we try to leave a con, I always have this nagging sensation that I need to buy just one more item and then I’ll be happy and satisfied and then we can go. To cure this annoying materialistic itch, I stopped at a dealer’s booth whose discount percentages had suddenly improved, picked up a Hoax Hunters trade, and suddenly the mental shackles of geek spending obligation snapped and fell away.

Now I felt free to go.

After exiting the convention center, we made one last, long walk to a snack shop that would validate our parking. Our consolation prize for abandoning Our Kind prematurely was a cookies-‘n’-cream sundae for two.

There was nothing geek about this. We didn’t care anymore.

This zillion-calorie one-dish smorgasbord gave us just enough of a sugar rush to stay awake through the three-hour drive home. And you can bet we were grateful it was only three hours. Southbound I-65 between Chicago and Indy remains totally open and not suffering the same bridge-collapse threat blues.

We spent the evening asleep. All of it. Zombies would point at us and say, “Wow, you guys look really dead.” and we both had to work the next morning, and all week long. Physical destruction made the usual post-convention depression that much harder to slog through. Walking several miles and standing several hours are fun games for the young, but it’s harder on us than it used to be.

It could’ve been worse. Without the VIP badges, our waits would’ve been three times longer. Or simply impossible to live through. (Prime cautionary tale: Norman Reedus was obligated to leave at 2:15, regretfully leaving behind hundreds of unrequited non-VIPs who’d kept hope alive all weekend long, only to get crushed a few feet from the finish line.) If several other awesome actor guests hadn’t canceled their WWC 2015 appearances (including a pair of high-profile Doctor Who veterans we must see someday), we shudder to think of all those other potential lines we wouldn’t have been able to resist, that collectively would’ve pushed the three-day endurance test that much closer to being a geek drill camp.

We chatted at length during the drive home about why we still do conventions, what we hope to get out of them, what we think we want out of them but subliminally don’t, and what everyone else in the community except us wants from them.

In a previous MCC entry I ruminated at length about what we don’t do at cons nowadays, but I think the laundry list of what we do want from cons keeps evolving as our living context changes, as we reach a point in our lives when we’re excited by fewer things than we were in our youth. We have greater buying power simply thanks to job advancements and debt reduction, but we’re tired of accumulating stuff for stuff’s sake. We still watch movies and TV, but not necessarily all the right shows, and not always in a timely, zeitgeist-y manner. I’m still at the comic shop every Wednesday for new comics, but I avoid online comics discussions as much as possible and have very little idea what other fans insist I “should” be reading.

Despite the damage done, we nonetheless gave the weekend a thumbs-up. We met actors and collected autographs. We got another round of jazz-hand photo ops. I bought new reading matter and decorations. I always love hanging out with my wife on a weekend getaway.

And there’s another part that’s become one of our favorite convention staples: meeting other fans in the long lines, those who share our interests and sensibilities, who make fantastic company for as long as the lines last. This time there was Rodney from Alabama, with whom we chatted about our 2015 road-trip impressions and a surprising number of actors he and I both liked. The dealer lugging around a box cart that I remembered waiting next to at a previous con, though last time he had a mustache. The college guy from Richmond, IN, who shared our frustration with the terrible I-65 shutdown. The lady who once got a selfie with Joss Whedon after she complimented his choice in set designers. The teen Renner fan who struggled to stay calm. The WWC Facebook group member who cheerily accepted my gift of a Nathan Fillion trading card that came with my VIP badge for some reason. The cosplay couple who kept my wife company in the Burt Reynolds line. The cosplay trio whose photo led off Part 1.

Sometimes for us, lines are more fun than any alcohol-soaked soiree. We’re funny that way. It would be even better if we could bring lawn chairs.

If the convention pluses keep adding up each time, maybe we can keep bearing the minuses, provided our bodies will continue letting us. It’ll be a long time before we attempt another three-day marathon, though for all I know maybe this was our “never again” breaking point and I’m still in denial.

We know there’ll come a day when we’re too old for this stuff. As long as they don’t run out of talented comics creators or impressive actors or books worth picking up or fellow fans to acquaint, we hope life will find a way. We like to think we’re not ready for the geek retirement home just yet. Sometimes we just need a full week and a lot of pain meds to recuperate, and sometimes I need to spend two nights and 4500 words working through What It All Means, even if I’m the only one who reads every word.

We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

…

If you made it this far, as always, thanks for reading! Previous chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Prologue: Five Shots from Our Convention Weekend in Progress
Part 1: Team Cosplay
Part 2: Marvel Cosplay
Part 3: DC vs. Star Wars Cosplay
Part 4: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 5: Actors We Met
Part 6: Cars and Other Objects

Once upon a time, at the very first comic book shows I attended as a teen, rooting through back issue bins for missing comics was the only thing I wanted to do. Once a year or so, my mom would drive me to the Marriott out at 21st and Shadeland, where the Ash Comics Show brought a bunch of dealers and collectors into a single ballroom and let them sell the heck out of comics — shelves, spinner racks, and packed longboxes from wall to wall. A few published artists would come in as guests. A TV and some chairs set up near the entrance passed for an anime viewing area. There may have been related events in another room or two. But mostly I wanted to plug the holes in my comics collection. The thrill of the hunt, the joy of discovery, the satisfaction of completism — whatever you call it, that’s how comics were my anti-drug.

I tried to get into the spirit in time for Wizard World Chicago last month. I took the above pic while going through my organized accumulation as a reminder to myself of the joy I once had rifling through hundreds of comics at a time in hopes of striking reader gold. I spent a couple of nights shifting from box to box, reuniting with old series, reliving classic arcs, stumbling across #1s I forgot I had (Reign of the Zodiac? That was a thing?), and generally immersing myself in the old-timey smell of newsprint and the nostalgic sight of crinkled, battered covers from decades past.

I was thiiis close to wanting more back issues. It almost worked.

I’ve been in the throes of lamentable back-issue withdrawal for a while. Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

While I’m thinking about dealers: my long-standing back-issue want-list largely comprise two kinds of comics: issues that were part of storylines from previous decades that mean nothing or make no sense if read today; and the really obscure stuff you’ll never, ever bring to sell at a con because no average customers would want them. To this very day my run of Alan Weiss’ six-issue Marvel/Epic miniseries Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool is one issue short. I would pay double cover price to buy the last several issues of Steve Moncuse’s Fish Police in person instead of online, and finally find out whatever happened to Inspector Gill. But when I’m surrounded by bulk supplies of Spider-Man and X-Men and Avengers and DC’s New 52 and dozens of Marvel Ultimate trades going for a dollar a pound, I know better than to waste my time searching.

We planned to be at WWC for three full days. We’d have a lot more time to spend than usual. I was worried about finding ways to make the most of the experience. A week before showtime, I got the idea of returning to the hunt once more. Somewhere out there are old comics I never got to buy or read, a lot of which have never been collected in trades and probably aren’t in line for legal digital purchase in the near future. And I thought maybe diving into my stash — the immediate, tactile old-book experience — would rekindle that old flame.

I had a second reason for box-diving: I had no idea what I was missing anymore. Back in July we suffered the heartbreak of a surprise hard drive crash that wiped us out and had virtually nothing backed up except photos:

My comics want lists, what I used to search for missing back issues at conventions, are likewise lost. The idea of going through all 10,000+ comics and writing down all that info again is not tempting yet. At all. I’m not sure my back could take the strain of lifting that many boxes in succession anymore. I have until our next comics convention (i.e., August’s Wizard World Chicago) to decide if I still really want to have a complete run of the original Incredible Hulk and am willing to go back and see which issues I need, or if I’d rather drop that longtime personal goal, among several other fan-based goals that just got a lot harder. A small part of me that’s angry at the rest of me wants to set the collection on fire and start a new spreadsheet tracking just the survivors.

So I gave it a shot. My current plan is I will never re-catalog all my comics ever again for the rest of my life. I love making lists, but I hate recreating former lists from scratch, especially one that would need a weeks-long undertaking. But at the very least I figured I’d skim quickly through each box, see which series jump out at me as works I want more of, and track only the gaps in those select runs. Focusing the hunt might be easier than a scattershot approach across the board, I reasoned.

I ended up with a short makeshift want list, 90% of whose prospects fit into one of four categories:

* Series I’d been slowly amassing for years exclusively from bargain boxes: Quasar, Incredible Hulk (of the original 454-issue series, I have a complete run from #224 to #454, but lots of gaps before that),.
* Christopher Priest books I missed back in the ’90s: The Ray, Steel, Extreme Justice
* Milestone Media books, which I lost track of in the mid-’90s: Hardware, Static, Xombi, Blood Syndicate, Kobalt, Shadow Cabinet, and especially Icon
* The earliest Marvel/DC books I collected as a wee lad, if they’re affordable: The Flash, Brave and the Bold

…and some other obscurities. Fun trivia: dealers routinely bring none of these to shows. They’re slow-moving non-starters, so much dead weight that only an frazzled old loon would be interested in buying off them. These stay behind in dealers’ basements or on their shop’s sales floor, and instead they bring wheelbarrows full of unwanted X-books on the hunch that someday their fortunes will change and suddenly everyone will once again be dying for anything with Wolverine’s face on it.

(Just once I’d also like to see a single dealer at any Indianapolis or Chicago con carry a single item from Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, or trendy bookstores. This never happens. Might be time to start looking into cons in other nearby markets.)

While the longbox run-through was fun for its own sake, its primary objective turned out kind of pointless in the moment. I took my list to WWC and hit the dealers’ rooms, but only took it out of my pocket once. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look through un-alphabetized, unsorted piles of randomness. I couldn’t bear to look up one more Incredible Hulk divider only to see their “early” issues were published in my college years. I couldn’t weigh myself down with ten pounds of non-sequential yesterdays rendered irrelevant by time passage and reboots. I couldn’t bear to see how many thousands of blank looks I could net by asking all comers if they’d ever heard of Pirate Corp$.

Maybe it’s one of those symptoms of old age, even for geeks, watching the things of this world fall away and recoiling at the thought of chasing after all of them. I’m really not feeling that “Gotta catch ’em all!” spirit. Maybe I’ve hit Peak Collection and, outside of a couple dozen Marvel Essentials omnibuses I don’t have, have reached the point where I’m just burnt out on old-school super-hero stories. Considering that my weekly new-comics hauls keep getting more selective over time, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see my back-issue cravings wither likewise or worse.

In the eyes of those who make a living selling comics of all ages to readers of all ages, I’ve become one of the hundreds of things that are What’s Wrong With Comics. Sorry, dealers. Call me when you change your mind and bring some Milestone books with you.

DC Comics house ad from The Flash #339, cover-dated November 1984. A lot of ’80s characters are no longer around, and it’s been decades since fans begged DC to bring back “legends” like these.

We live in an entertainment culture where we take it as given that all the best ideas were conceived before we were born, so trying to forge new universes seems like too much effort. Reboots used to be a desperation move, but anymore they’re the norm for luring in new fans — not just for work-for-hire companies with an intellectual property catalog to keep fertile and growing, but for artists, writers, and filmmakers all too happy to make a lifelong career out of perpetuating the lives and histories of worlds and heroes they didn’t invent themselves. It’s a living.

It’s easy to scoff at reboots when they’re happening to characters that don’t matter to you. If you’re a geek for long enough, though, sooner or later they’ll get to a universe you do care about.

I’ve been there. I remember the first time I had a universe yanked out from under me.

In 1985 I was 13 years old and had been following along for seven years, because comics were cheaper than snacks and fit easily into our family’s grocery budget. I glommed onto the Marvel and DC universes in equal measure; for the latter The Flash and The Brave and the Bold were among the first series I collected regularly, back in the days of Barry Allen, Iris’ untimely murder (the first major comics death I ever witnessed, and at such an impressionable age), and the one true Batman in my young eyes as drawn by the great Jim Aparo. Eventually I expanded to other heroes and titles, learning more about DC’s history from the 741.5 section of my local library as well as from their own ongoing comics. I found it easy to keep track of Earth-1 versus Earth-2, between Golden Age and Silver Age, between the JLA and the JSA.

As the ad prefacing this entry shows, DC seemed pretty happy with its results and its diverse lineup. I didn’t collect all the titles shown above, but I found plenty of reasons to buy in.

Less than six months later, fans were put on notice that everything they held dear was about to change forever.

House ad from The Flash #343, March 1985. The original maxiseries’ title and logo were a work in progress, apparently.

I didn’t take them seriously at first. I was young. I wasn’t yet plugged into the meager fanzine culture, not until another six months had passed and my local Waldenbooks began carrying Fantagraphics’ Amazing Heroes. The first issue I saw had a cover story all about Crisis on Infinite Earths, the milestone event that would save or toss out fifty years of comics continuity as they saw fit, combine all their multiple Earths into a single DC Earth, start over from scratch, provide a company-wide entry point for new readers, and redefine their entire fictional milieu for a new generation of readers.

I wasn’t thrilled, especially not by the deaths of dozens of characters great and small throughout the series and the official Crisis Crossovers happening over in all the other DC books. Even as a lowly ragamuffin I thought it was a shame to see so much legacy relegated to the forgotten bins of ex-history. While Crisis was in the middle of its twelve-issue run, I discovered the wonder of my first local comic shop, the secret joy of direct-sales comics, and The Comics Buyer’s Guide, another publication about comics like Amazing Heroes, except weekly instead of biweekly, in a larger newspaper format, and, as I recall, filled with letters and comments from fans two or three times my age who were absolutely livid about all of this. I don’t have those issues at hand anymore, but many were the speeches about the indignities of childhood heroes whose sagas would no longer continue uninterrupted like soap operas, who would see their original timelines come to definitive stopping points and their stars regress to Day One to relive all the same triumphs and tragedies over again, or to potentially have to endure inferior, stupider, awful ones guided by the hands of greedy whippersnappers who care only about the bottom line and just want new moneys from new customers.

It was a rough introduction to the corporate world, to a completely different dimension from our own fanboy bubbles, where professionals in suits expect increasing profits every year, not just flatlined returns year-in-year-out. Where the key to beating inflation, growing as a company, and maybe handing out occasional raises isn’t to depend on the exact same customer base to hand over the exact same dollar amounts over and over and over and over again. Where sooner or later the reality of maintaining a successful product line is to retain customers to an extent where possible and to keep actively courting new clientele to replenish and surpass the attrition of the old.

I mean, I didn’t realize all of that at age 13. It took a while to get it.

House ad from The Flash #344, April 1985, now featuring the official Crisis on Infinite Earths logo and most of George Perez’ amazing wraparound cover to the first issue. My scan of thirty-year-old newsprint doesn’t do Perez justice, obv.

Sure, I lamented losing some of the pre-Crisis concepts. Batman’s fun team-ups in The Brave and the Bold as well as Superman’s own in DC Comics Presents. The original SHAZAM!/Captain Marvel (acquired from the late Fawcett Comics) and what little flair he’d retained from C.C. Beck and Otto Binder’s original, whimsical tales (I’d found a few in some books for comparison). The Legion of Super-Heroes before Byrne’s deletion of Superboy muddled their entire team origin. But there were pre-Crisis things I didn’t miss, too. Both Superman and Action Comics had turned into aimless anthologies. Barry Allen’s depressing ordeal after killing Professor Zoom had dragged on for two-and-a-half years with no hope in sight. I was a little relieved to see those axed, to be honest.

And, granted, not everything in the post-Crisis DC universe worked. Some folks were less impressed with John Byrne’s Superman than I was. Hawkman was a butchered mess with multiple backstories that took years to vet and reconcile. The addition of drunk driving to Hal Jordan’s origin was a questionable move. The new “street-level” Jason Todd was more irritating than a cloud of mosquitoes.

But the next twenty-five years also saw a lot of astounding, unforgettable work in the all-new all-different DC universe. Perez’ revamp of Wonder Woman. Wally West’s long reign as the new Flash after Barry Allen’s death in COIE #8. The Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire sitcom-like Justice League. Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan on the Question. Cary Bates, Greg Weisman, and Pat Broderick on Captain Atom. Roy Thomas’ Infinity Inc. adjusting to super-heroing without their dead or retconned Golden Age super-parents, while enjoying the radically different art of a young Todd McFarlane. Miller and Mazzucchelli’s “Batman: Year One”. New Bat-villains over time like the Ventriloquist, Azrael, and Bane. Tim Drake as a Robin competent enough to headline his own series. James Robinson and Tony Harris on Starman.

I’m skipping around a lot, but you get the idea. Crisis on Infinite Earths saw a lot of concepts retired and never brought back again. It saw a lot of concepts revived and retooled into worthy works. It paved the way for a lot of brand new heroes, villains, and antiheroes to join the stage and make their individual marks in the annals of DC Comics. Crisis most certainly did not mean we would never, ever, ever have good DC Comics ever again.

I’m sure I went through the five stages of grief in my own way. And then I came out the other side and enjoyed the ride.

In 2011, here they went again. DC’s “New 52” initiative did the exact same in a more thorough, sweeping manner. All titles were canceled, the 1986-2011 DC universe came to a close (except the Bat-parts Grant Morrison had borrowed, and maybe some impenetrable Green Lantern leftovers), and another all-new all-different DC Universe began afresh for still another generation of potential new customers. Of the fifty-two new titles I tried something like eighteen or twenty of them. By the end of Year 1 I was down to less than a handful because I got the impression I wasn’t their primary target anymore. I understood, complied, and found other uses for my money. Today my monthly DC list comprises Prez and Batman ’66.

For a while it kind of sucked. I was miffed at first as DC and I grew apart, but then I realized it was for the best. I type this today with neither rage nor contempt. I’m in my 40s. I have myriad other things on my plate, from other fictional universes to non-superhero comics to non-comics-reading to non-print hobbies to fellow living humans to adult responsibilities, and so on. I’m not out of things to do, and my life doesn’t seem to be a meaningless shambles without a monthly fix of Serious Aquaman.

The characters who live in the DC Comics Universe aren’t my family or my idols. They’re the puppets of a corporation that can use, disuse, refurbish, leave alone, or destroy as they see fit. Their heroes are not my gods. If there are other hands directing their actions from behind the curtains, they’re not gods. That means it’s okay to walk away from them.

In all my stages of coming to terms with their justifiably capitalist behavior, with this two-time shattering of the foundations of one of the many universes I liked, not once did it ever occur to me that maybe DC would bring back all my favorite DC stuff and cater to me, and only to me personally, no matter how much business sense it would totally lack, if only I would renounce personal morality and start pushing lots of people around until DC collectively surrenders and gives me what I want. Not once.

But that’s just me.

That brings me to another universe.

This is my wife’s collection of Star Wars Expanded Universe books. Almost all of them, anyway. The comics and graphic novels are in another bookcase in another room, but they’re a smaller set because she’s less completist about those.

She’s read them all, more than once. Out of pure fun and enjoyment, for the Star Wars message board we call home, she’s spent the last nine years writing her own coverage of each and every Expanded Universe novel that’s one part SparkNotes and one part Nitpicker’s Guide. She has dozens of novels she hasn’t posted about yet, but literally years’ worth of chapter summaries she’s written in advance for posting, one per day, until she’s someday caught ’em all. After our hard drive crashed in July, she had to retrieve many portions of those advance writings from emails she’d sent back and forth between work and home as she’d added to them during downtime. What she couldn’t recover that way, she’s having to rewrite from scratch, hoping she can recapture the same plot points, questions, and Easter eggs she’d noted the first time around.

And that’s not even talking about what the movies mean to her. It’s safe to say she’s a big Star Wars fan and has a vested interest in the Expanded Universe.

It’s also safe to say when Lucasfilm announced in 2014 that they were rebooting the entire SW prose universe, Anne wasn’t thrilled. Her reaction was, quoted here word for word, “Well, that sucks.”

When George Lucas sold his precious moneymaking babies to Disney, when The Force Awakens was announced, and when every division of the Lucasfilm empire began buzzing with new life, she knew a line-wide reboot was one possibility. She also knew she had no control over it. She was bummed for a while, and, as she summed it up to me just now after waking up for a few random minutes in the middle of the night, “I’m sorry that it happened…in some cases.”

But I know what she’s going through. I’ve been there. More than once, and with a much older universe. I’ve shared my experiences with her. I like to think it helped put things in perspective, though she still had a few bummer days to let the news sink in.

In discussions like these, we hear the inevitable nutshell about how those old stories haven’t been erased and how they’re perfectly intact on our bookshelves where she can still read them anytime. That’s not the point. The part that hurts most is when you realize the company that once considered you its target audience has decided you’re not so much anymore and is moving on to captivating your successors instead, for its own good from a commercial perspective.

When you think that you and a company have a quote-unquote “understanding”, it’s never fun when they pull rank and dispel the notion. It’s a form of rejection. And some people take rejection better than others. Some can’t handle rejection. At all.

Some write angry letters. Some now take to social media and contact the responsible parties. Some flood said parties with messages endlessly for days and weeks on end without regard for decorum, manners, civility, or other traits that make human interaction a desirable experience. Some attend conventions and all but bully other fans into joining their hivemind, so that theoretically all shall rise up as a single, entitled mob and demand the large corporation go back to catering to them Or Else, no matter how much business sense it would totally lack.

Thankfully for me I married a wonderfully level-headed woman who has no use for such movements.

She’ll miss plenty about the old Expanded Universe — the Republic Commandos, the Han Solo Trilogy, Corran Horn, Rogue and Wraith Squadrons, Jagged Fel, Grand Admiral Pellaeon, Anakin Solo in the New Jedi Order, and anything written by Jude Watson. She’d be fine with more of those. For now, there’s not. She soldiers on.

The EU also gave her plenty she won’t miss and wishes she could erase from our timeline: The Black Fleet Crisis, the Jedi Academy Trilogy, the Lando Calrissian Trilogy, Callista, Jacen Solo walking straight into the Dark Side with his eyes wide open, The Crystal Star, Luke Skywalker’s wishy-washiness as a supposed Jedi Master, every strong woman turning into an idiot when she becomes a wife and mother…

…and then I realized Oh, no, I got her started! as she kept trying to go on and on for several minutes with more detailed examples from specific scenes, books, and series where assorted authors went off-track and failed at bookmaking. When her bullet points threatened to become paragraphs I had to call time-out and invited her to write up a separate “1000 Worst EU Moments Ever” entry of her own sometime, because I’m not sure I would be the best stenographer for that. Updates as they occur.

At this point she hasn’t read any of the new stuff beyond A New Dawn, the prequel to the Rebels animated series. EU books haven’t been a week-of-release must-buy for her for a long time now. At this point it’s too ridiculously early to gauge the EU reboot as a success or failure based on the scant evidence and the fact that we’re barely months into this new universe and there’s a little movie on the way to shake things up even more. Anne remains open to the possibility that The Force Awakens may be watchable, possibly even above-average. And in my eyes she’s weathering the transition with an enviable grace and dignity.

And who knows? Maybe a lot of EU concepts will stay retired and never brought back again. Maybe a lot of concepts will be revived and retooled into worthy works. Maybe the reboot will pave the way for a lot of brand new heroes, villains, and action figures to join the stage and make their marks in the annals of the post-Lucas galaxy far, far away.

And regardless of whether you love or hate Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath, it most certainly does not mean we’ll never, ever, ever have good Star Wars books ever again.

This weekend ushered in the inaugural Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, an intentionally different comics show from what we’re used to seeing here in Indianapolis. As conceived and executed by Bone creator Jeff Smith, Comics Reporter journalist Tom Spurgeon, and no doubt a sturdy support network of other talents, CXC promised no actors or celebrities, no mainstream publishers, no costume contest, no cosplay, no gaming, no super-sized convention center, no inedible convention center food, no back-issue longboxes, no action figures, and no bobbleheads. CXC was an aesthetically purified form of literary/art show about comics, featuring a lot of people who make comics better, from within the local community as well as from distant parts.

As a longtime comics fan who needs more than super-heroes in his reading list, I found their guest list intriguing and populated with the kind of principled names we’re likely never to see at a Wizard World show. I deeply regret we had a limited time frame to spend there, but my wife, who only recognized one name on the entire guest list, was happy to tag along and let me immerse myself for a few hours, even though it meant a three-hour drive each way through an unsightly rainy day. We met several creators, we attended one Q&A, I came away with a potentially fascinating reading pile, and we had just enough time left over for some bonus comics sightseeing a few miles up the road.

CXC’s itinerary was spread among five different buildings from downtown to two different college campuses. Thursday and Friday comprised numerous presentations Ohio State University, while Saturday’s daytime focus was the CXC “expo” — what other cons would call an Artists Alley — at the Cultural Arts Center. Fascinating in its own right, this historic structure was erected in 1861 as a state arsenal and converted into its current identity in the 1970s.

The Center has three stories, open ceilings, beautiful hardwood floors, and a courtyard outside lined with artifacts and a sofa. It seemed the perfect size and ambiance for the festivities, if a bit warm from all the bodies. The ground-level space was crowded nonstop with artists and fans alike. I should mention admission to nearly every CXC activity was free (including all Saturday events), thanks to several generous sponsors.

Tabled near the front entrance was the name most familiar to mainstream comics fans today — writer/artist Jeff Lemire, who staked a claim in the biz with creator-owned books like Essex County and Sweet Tooth before DC Comics lured him into trying corporate-owned super-hero books with their New 52 relaunch. The horrific weirdness of Animal Man (with Travel Foreman) led to other Big Two gigs, but Lemire still sets time aside for his own projects like the mind-bending, narrative-twisting, cross-time romance of Trillium, the recently launched Plutona (with Emi Lenox), and the beautiful yet jarring sci-fi drama of Descender (with Dustin Nguyen).

Naturally he had an autograph line, but a totally bearable one. The creative table arrangements made for some odd flanking in our pic.

He signed my copy of Lost Dogs and added a quick sketch using the old-school combo of dip pen and bottled ink. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an artist sketch with one of those at a con. I don’t think I’ve even seen a dip pen since high-school art class. For that momentary nostalgic art thrill alone, the long drive was worth it.

Three of the biggest names in the house showed up at the other end of the floor — the aforementioned Jeff Smith (with hat), renowned indie editor/publisher Françoise Mouly (with scarf), and her husband Art Spiegelman (with vest), whose two volumes of Maus are among the very few graphic novels that my wife, my son, and I have all read. That area seemed more crowded than any other in the Center, but Anne tried her best to take a pic before Spiegelman left to attend other matters. And in a space this cozy and literary-minded, I began to feel self-conscious about us taking too many pics.

Unfortunately all the best speaking engagements with these comics legends were scheduled on Friday when we couldn’t get out of work, or Saturday evening after we needed to return home. I’ll be kicking myself for missing those grand opportunities for some weeks to come, but our allotted time in Columbus was what it was. Thankfully the official CXC Twitter account live-tweeted the Friday night presentation, and I understand video was shot of the Saturday night finale, which I’d love to see if/when it’s available online.

Our limited presence means this entry is obviously not the definitive recount of the full CXC experience. At the very least, though, I was elated to show up, see what Year One looked like, and donate over supportive wads of cash to creators in person, like a Kickstarter but with instant tangible results. All told, I can say it was a pleasure to meet and buy from Lemire, “Derf” Backderf, Dara Naraghi, and Keiler Roberts, among others. (Full disclosure: Tom Spurgeon’s Patreon supporters were treated to an incisive interview with Roberts shortly before CXC that sold me on her book Miseryland in advance.)

Derf won my personal award for Best Banner of Show, with his copious use of the Ramones.

CXC also took advantage of the Center’s other two floors for more in-depth purposes. While podcast interviews were conducted up on the third to a limited audience, the second was used to host a conversation series with assorted guests. We attended the one whose work I’d read the most: Grace Ellis, co-creator/co-writer of the surprise hit series Lumberjanes.

If you’ve never read an issue of this all-ages series that reimagines the Girl Scouts as plucky action-adventure heroes, here’s an excerpt from #5 that captures its best elements in no particular order: optimism, surprises, danger, bravery, and monsters.

Art by Brooke Allen and Maarta Laiho.

It’s extremely rare for me to have the opportunity to witness a comics Q&A conducted by an interviewer with Spurgeon’s professional qualifications, so it was refreshing to hear prompts beyond the insight level of “Where do you get your ideas?” or “Which Marvel/DC characters would you love to write?” or “What actors would you cast in the movie version?” Random tidbits from their chat:

* Ellis attended OSU for as long as she could; her writing background was primarily in the theater. Lumberjanes #1 was her first published comic. Each medium has its own requirements, but her editors and co-writer Noelle Stevenson have given her quite a learning experience.

* “Lumberjills” was already taken by actual loggers who kept the chopping industry going while all the manly woodcutters were fighting overseas during WWII. (My wife’s a massive WWII buff and made a point of stopping by Ellis’ table later to express her gratitude for this heretofore unknown-to-her wartime trivia.)

* She set aside an entire day just to write the Lumberjanes Pledge for the first issue.

* Ellis now has a much longer list of comics ideas than she did before the series began. She hasn’t ruled out autobiographical or more “adult” works in the distant future, but for her right now the watchword is “fun”. She and co-creator Shannon Watters are working on their next project, which is officially in its nascent too-soon-to-talk-about-it stage.

* Their publisher, BOOM! Studios, is a pleasure to work with, though she admits she has no other basis for comparison in the field.

* Lumberjanes has been optioned for live-action Hollywood treatment, because that’s a kind of thing BOOM! really loves to make happen. Ellis isn’t actively involved in its development and diplomatically hopes it’s great and that it sells a lot of Lumberjanes books.

* She’s among the millions who highly recommend the new hip-hop Broadway musical Hamilton, concerning the life of Alexander Hamilton, which in the past two months has become the New Thing I’ve Never Heard of That Everyone Keeps Talking About. Consider yourself notified: Hamilton is hereby a Thing.

…

After taking our leave of CXC we’d hoped to walk around downtown for a few minutes of basic tourism (e.g., the Ohio State Capitol down the street), but the rains that had dogged us all along I-70 finally arrived and dashed those hopes. This giant gavel was the only non-comics attraction we spotted before Mother Nature tried to wash us down the sewers.

Its sculptor has the same name as the actor who played Moriarty on Sherlock. Let’s all pretend that’s relevant somehow.

After lunch, we weren’t done with comics yet. Our last Ohio stop for the day was up in OSU’s Sullivant Hall, at a topical repository called the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. CXC’s activities dovetailed nicely with a strong recommendation from writer/cartoonist Evan Dorkin that I’d read two weeks ago. Also, like CXC, admission is free. Its inclusion in our short Columbus day was a no-brainer.

Dorkin was treated to an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour, but the public displays are sufficiently worthy for comic art aficionados. After a courtesy docent greeting your first sights are the drawing-room furniture of Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould.

On display are original pages and strips from the likes of Jack Kirby, Jeff Smith, Pogo‘s Walt Kelly, Todd McFarlane, and Prince Valiant‘s Hal Foster (honestly, now I get why he’s revered) alongside vintage newspaper pages from Krazy Kat‘s George Herriman and Little Nemo‘s Winsor McCay.

Delightful discovery: a Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip in which you can see where Bill Watterson decided the title panel had too many spotty shadows for his liking and remedied the details with some whiteout.

This damaged Charles Schulz Peanuts page cries out for a plaintive Martin Scorsese speech about the importance of art preservation. I winced hard when I noticed the rips.

Other rooms featured walls and displays of WWI political cartoons, local political cartoonist Billy Ireland, and a retrospective on Puck, the first American humor magazine. Those subjects were largely new or ignorant territory for me, but I enjoyed the exposure and I wrote down names like Joseph Keppler Jr. and Nell Brinkley that I need to know more about at some point.

Their backroom archives are vast but require prior arrangements to access specific materials. The museum has an extensive reading room, but it’s closed Saturdays. I tried not to kick the walls on my way out. I love that there’s a college with seminar halls named after Will Eisner and Charles Schulz.

Normal art museums are fine, but visiting comics museums would be my primary nonstop post-retirement activity if we can open hundreds more of them nationwide by then. See to it, America.

…

Thus concluded our joyous comics day in Columbus, as we resigned ourselves to the comicsless three-hour drive home. I trust all other attendees had a wonderful time and availed themselves of the astounding opportunities afforded by this festival. I can’t wait to hear next year’s lineup, though here’s hoping for sunnier weather in 2016. Until then, I expect I have some quality reading ahead.

Ransom Riggs’ Library of Souls, one among a handful of 2015 books I actually read in 2015.

Presented below is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2015, mostly but not entirely in order of completion. As I whittle down the never-ending stack I’ve been stockpiling for literal decades, my long-term hope before I turn 70 is to get to the point where my reading list is more than, say, 40% new releases every year. That’s a lofty goal, but I can dream

* * * * *

That reading list, then:

1. Jay Faerber, Fran Bueno, Patrick Gleason, et al., Noble Causes: Archives vol. 1
2. George R. R. Martin, editor, Wild Cards: Busted Flush
3. Steve Bryant, Athena Voltaire: Compendium
4. Roger Ebert, Life Itself
5. Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts 1993-1994
6. Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
7. Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
8. Brian Clevenger and Scott Wegener, Atomic Robo, v. 3: Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time
9. Brian Clevenger and Scott Wegener, Atomic Robo, v. 2: Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War
10. Stephan Franck, Silver v. 1
11. Rick Remender and Wes Craig, Deadly Class v. 2: Kids of the Black Hole
12. Brian Clevenger and Scott Wegener, Atomic Robo, v. 1: Atomic Robo and the Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne
13. Brian Wood and Brett Weldele, Couscous Express
14. Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard, Super Dinosaur v. 1
15. Ben Avery and Javier Saltares, The Book of God: How We Got the Bible
16. Jeff Lemire, Lost Dogs
17. John Ridley and Ben Oliver, The Authority: Human on the Inside
18. Jane Espenson, Brad Bell, Ron Chan, Ben Avery, et al., Husbands
19. Greg Pak and Paul Pelletier, Incredible Hulks: World War Hulks
20. Warren Ellis and Terry Dodson, X-Men: Storm
21. Thom Zahler, Love and Capes, v. 2: Going to the Chapel
22. Ken Jennings, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
23. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
24. Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts 1995-1996
25. Jamie Munson, Money: God or Gift
26. Joe Sacco, Palestine: A Nation Occupied
27. Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
28. Ransom Riggs, Library of Souls: the Third Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children
29. Scott McCloud, The Sculptor
30. Jeff Lemire, The Underwater Welder
31. Sam Glanzman, A Sailor’s Story
32. Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant
33. William Gibson, Spook Country
34. John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, March, Book One
35. Dara Naraghi and Brent Bowman, Persia Blues, vol. 1: Leaving Home
36. Rick Remender and Wes Craig, Deadly Class vol. 3: The Snake Pit
37. Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, Russian Olive to Red King

Here’s what they look like shelved together:

By way of comparison, my yearly book count from 2008 to the present has trended like so:

2008: 39
2009: 50
2010: 44
2011: 33
2012: 23
2013: 42
2014: 43

Best book of the year was unquestionably Five Came Back. Epic nonfiction about five famous directors who volunteered their film-making skills to the US military in WWII: John Ford, best known for Westerns like The Searchers and Stagecoach, who captured the Battle of Midway live in person; William Wyler, whose Mrs. Miniver became instantly dated, who lost his hearing while riding aboard aircraft during dogfights; John Huston, put on the map by The Maltese Falcon, who was sent on assignment to three continents all while being investigated as a potential Communist; Frank Capra, who was given his own wartime film division to supervise, but barely got half his to-do list completed in a timely or noteworthy manner; and comedy director George Stevens, who’d mostly done Laurel & Hardy shorts and Tracy/Hepburn films, whose travels through North Africa, D-Day, and the liberation of Dachau damaged his psyche so irreparably that he never directed another happy movie for the rest of his life.

Longtime Entertainment Weekly contributor Mark Harris weaves their five stories into an engrossing, tragic narrative with plenty of famous guest stars and (in)famous WWII moments. Essential reading for historical film buffs.

Other noteworthy favorites in the stack, in nearly random order:

* Life Itself: The autobiography of my all-time favorite film critic, even when I disagreed with him, even when his thoughts on religion drove me up a wall. I read this over a month’s worth of lunch breaks and kept emailing quotes and highlights to my wife daily after lunch because I wanted to keep savoring moments of it whether she cared or not. Ebert lived life the way a seasoned critic ought to: got bitten by the writing bug while young, got out of the house, got an education, became a certified journalist, spent years establishing his career, traveled worldwide, made lots of poor life choices, cleaned himself up, and then started reviewing movies, but only because someone offered it to him and not because he was dying for a job that let him sit around, watch stuff, scribble adjectives on Post-Its, and get paid. Millions of wannabes have taken what they perceive as the road more easily traveled, but that’s not the route Ebert took at all.

* To Kill a Mockingbird. My first-ever read-through came about in response to our 2015 road trip to New Orleans and Alabama. (Our still-ongoing travelogue will reach the relevant stop in due time.) It’s so thoroughly head-and-tails above 90% of what I normally read or watch that part of me now wants to burn a lot of my possessions and just become a hardcore literary snob and read absolutely nothing but books at least this great or greater. I made a point of saving the movie till after I’d finished reading. The book was better, but I’ll spare you the obsolete nitpicking over What They Left Out.

* Palestine: A Nation Occupied: A rare instance of comics as true journalism. Joe Sacco is a cartoonist who traveled over to Palestine for a good while, took lots of notes, then wrote and drew a nine-issue series about the hostilities and tragedies he witnessed (or his many interviewees told him about) between the Israelis who were given land way over there and the Palestinians they kept kicking around so they could take more and more as it pleased them. This volume collects the first five issues, contains a lot of eye-opening stories, and doesn’t shy away from Sacco’s guilty self-awareness of his steadily growing craving for more newsworthy, exciting, almost prurient tales of violence, which began to preoccupy him to such a fault that it began affect his decision-making processes.

* Library of Souls: The final chapter of the (first?) trilogy sees most of the time-displaced mutants and their beloved ornithothropic teacher captured, leaving the cast winnowed down for most of the book to our no-longer-powerless hero Jacob Portman, his 100-year-old pyrokinetic girlfriend, a talking dog, and a creepy hooded boatman. The quartet must negotiate the violent despair of Not-Knockturn Alley to rescue all the other Not-X-Men from the clutches of Miss Peregrine’s evil brother and his not-undead henchmen. Easily the darkest book in the series, with bizarre ideas about how souls work and gory violence that stretches a few miles beyond the “young adult” label, but the closure is exactly what was needed, Riggs knows how to build up to powerful rallying points, and the stage is set for Our Heroes to enter a brand new era at the end.

* A Sailor’s Story: A purchase from the gift shop at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, collecting two autobiographical graphic novels previously published by Marvel in the ’80s. The longtime comics artist is also a WWII Navy veteran (still alive today in his 90s) and was among the very, very few of those to tell his own story in comics form. The first volume tells the basic framework of his service on the Pacific Front aboard the USS Stevens; volume 2 is a more disjointed selection of additional anecdotes and incidents that slot into the first volume, some of them far more harrowing, particularly the haunting images of kamikaze wreckage and the Allied carriers they sundered.

* March, Book One: The graphic novel autobiography of Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a major participant in the 1960s civil rights protests, who was a character in the movie Selma and who’s still around today to tell the tales. Surprisingly, I found this on sale at the gift shop in the Alabama State Capitol, the last place you’d think would want to remember that era. Regardless: it’s great, important, firsthand history, and I regret not buying vol. 2 at the same time. I bought this from a notable shop in Montgomery, AL, but we haven’t gotten to that story yet, either.

Other random trivia and comments:

* Worst book on the list: the twenty-year-old Storm trade that was pointless to read this far removed from its original place in X-Men continuity.

* I’m withholding the names of the second- and third-worst books among these because I’d rather not pick on them. They each meant well in their own, diametrically opposite ways.

* The Sculptor might have been jaw-droppingly amazing to me if I were a secular humanist.

* I bought The Book of God at a tiny comic con on my birthday and it’s the best Christian graphic novel I’ve ever read. I wish that sounded more like a compliment and less like a sigh of relief.

* The Klosterman essay collection was, I’m pretty sure, the last book I ever bought at a Borders before their sad demise.

* The first Atomic Robo volume was a long-overdue Kickstarter reward.

* Several of these books were read on the same sick day. Looking forward to my next one. The free time, I mean, not the prospect of winter illness.

After 37 years of collecting, 2015 was the year I first bought more than two Archie comics in a row. From the new Archie #1; art by Fiona Staples and Andre Szymanowicz.

Comics collecting has been my primary geek interest since age 6, but I have a tough time writing about it with any regularity. My criteria can seem weird and unfair to other fans who don’t share them. I like discussing them if asked, which is rare, but I loathe debating them. It doesn’t help that I skip most crossovers and tend to gravitate toward titles with smaller audiences, which means whenever companies need to save a buck, my favorites are usually the first ones culled. I doubt many comics readers follow MCC anyway, so it’s the perfect place to talk about comics all to myself. Whee.

Anyway: time again for another list of lists with comics in them!

Favorite comics from 2015, in random order:

* Archie / Jughead: No, really! After a changing of the editorial guard, the survivors at Archie Comics HQ tossed dollar bills at Mark Waid, Chip Zdarsky, Fiona Staples, and Erica Henderson and hoped they’d go make the greatest Archie comics of all time. Gone are the ancient gag strips, the decades-old model sheets, the forgettable single-issue trifles; in their places are sharp wits, updated appearances, nuanced color tones, pop culture references that didn’t belong to your grandparents, and a cast of rebooted characters that remain true to the core of the originals, and who, despite their snark, every so often evince genuine affection for each other. The burger-addicted Jughead in particular has received a new lease on life and turned into the kind of breakout character who ought to be conquering other media any second now.

* Silver Surfer: Dan Slott and Michael Allred’s loving, unabashed homage to Doctor Who featured one of my two favorite comics moments of the year when he introduced his companion Dawn Greenwood to his former boss Galactus. Fighting once again to save billions of lives and stop his old master’s epic bingeing, this time he had the backing of a most unusual crowd: a planet populated entirely by refugees from other worlds previously consumed by Galactus. They’re not just a bunch of survivors; they’re a population who know what it means to sacrifice. Their collective, defiant stand was a rare moment of super-heroic inspiration. I could totally imagine a triumphant Who orchestra power-chording in the background.

* Manifest Destiny: That other great comics moment fell on the other end of the ol’ morality scale. Lewis and Clark continue leading their men through the secretly creature-filled lands west of the Mississippi and find themselves teaming up with a race of cute, feathery, silly, bitey, angry predatory bird-dwarves against an even bigger, angrier, grosser threat. “The enemy of my enemy of is my friend” only takes their truce so far before the end of the arc starkly reminds us Lewis and Clark aren’t crusading paladins: they’re government men on a mission from the President himself, and all the priorities the title of this book entails. As created by Chris Dingess, one of the showrunners on Marvel’s Agent Carter, and as brought to life through the rustic, sometimes bloodied palettes of artists Matthew Roberts and Owen Gieni, the undiscovered country was a terrifying place where Man fought hard for his place at the table with all the other monsters, and then planted his flag in the table.

* The Vision: Marvel’s strangest Avengers-related series in years was nowhere near my radar till I picked up #1 on a lark at a rundown Colorado comics shop (sort of a pity-purchase, to be honest), and now I refuse to put it down. After enduring one mega-crossover event too many, not to mention his big movie debut, the Android Avenger decides he needs more in life and moves to suburbia into a nice home with a wife and two kids who are androids that look like him, but possess their own distinctive, dysfunctional personalities. Fitting in with new neighbors and friends is hard enough when a normal family moves, but when your clan can turn diamond-hard and still hasn’t worked out all the kinks in their emotional subroutines, you’ll need more than Leave It to Beaver lectures to navigate the life lessons, the petty bickering, the troubles at school, and the one troublesome murder Dad doesn’t know about yet. Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta are staging an all-robot production of Picket Fences and it’s all kinds of messed-up.

* We Can Never Go Home: Upstart publisher Black Mask Studios first got my attention when we met co-writer Matthew Rosenberg at last year’s C2E2, where I bought the first issue of this stunning surprise. Two mismatched teenagers find themselves on the run in the worst way. She’s a popular girl who’s just learned she has super-strength; he’s an angry loner who claims he can kill people just by thinking really hard. Maybe it’s a premise worthy of a direct-to-video drama, but the tension and bonding between the duo are equal parts reality-grounded and unpredictable. This received very little distribution and required me to go to weird lengths to track down all five issues (one was at an itsy-bitsy hideaway shop in Terre Haute), but it was worth the hunt.

* Doctor Who: The Four Doctors: Sure, “Day of the Doctor” was one of the best of the Doctor Who TV specials, but it only had two doctors. Writer/superfan Paul Cornell (whose “Father’s Day” remains my favorite episode) and artist Neil Edwards had the privilege of adding Peter Capaldi and John Hurt’s War Doctor to the mix, plus a pair of comics-exclusive companions who might mean more to me if I were reading any other Who titles. I’m finicky about my licensed non-canon reading, but “The Four Doctors” was my idea of the perfect comics crossover, in that I only had to buy five (5) issues to read an entire satisfying story from beginning to end.

* Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: I loved it so much, I already wrote about it at length. Not even a post-Secret Wars forced restart has slowed her down, as the time-travel machinations of some form of Doctor Doom have proven no match for her, her plucky pals, or those value-added gutter captions hiding at the bottom of most pages. I SEE YOU DOWN THERE.

* Wild’s End: The Enemy Within: The sequel to Dan Abnett and L.J.N. Culbard’s wonderful, frightful miniseries (one of 2014’s best) in which The Wind in the Willows meets The War of the Worlds adds an unhelpful British government and an even more unhelpful science fiction writer, none of whom get it and are making things worse for our ex-military dog hero, the strong cat character, the increasingly more courageous piglet, and the craftiest drunken Cockney fox in all of fiction. I was so invested in this, I actually gasped aloud at the end of the most recent issue. And grown men do not simply gasp at just anything.

2015 honorable mentions: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10 (Christos Gage remains my fave Buffyverse comics writer); Daredevil (Mark Waid and Chris Samnee exiting their long run on a high note); Injection (Warren Ellis fantasy/sci-fi weirdness reuniting him with Declan Shalvey, fast becoming a must-buy artist); We Stand on Guard (what if future America invaded Canada to take over all its clean water? Answer: things get ugly).

Lewis and Clark meet new indigenous lifeforms in Manifest Destiny #15. Art by Matthew Roberts and Owen Gieni.

Special awards for books that nailed deadlines and held my interest all year long: The Virginia Romita Traffic Management Awards for books that saw twelve new issues in print and on my receipts in 2015:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10
Angel & Faith
Star Wars
Star Wars: Darth Vader
Astro City
Batman ’66

Highly commended series that got my money for eleven issues in 2015, despite crossovers and unnecessary restarts:

Groo: Friends and Foes
Ms. Marvel
S.H.I.E.L.D.
Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

Series that were canceled or ended as planned:
Alex & Ada
Batman ’66
Moon Knight
SHIELD
The Unwritten Apocalypse

Titles I either dropped, or tried once but opted out:
All-New Hawkeye (really tired of dumped-upon loser Hawkeye)
All-Star Section Eight
Bizarro
Black Magick
Captain Marvel (her previous outer-space cast weren’t doing anything for me)
Deadpool
Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor
Drax
Hulk
Invincible Iron Man (liked it till they announced a second series to go with it, and probably crossovers)
Kaptara
Monstress
Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur
PastAways
Siege
Suiciders
Survivors Club
Totally Awesome Hulk
Twilight Children (might work better as a collected trade)
Where Monsters Dwell
The Wicked & the Divine (I stopped remembering characters’ names, always my first sign of growing disinterest)
Wytches

Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey cosmic-wozmic stuff from Silver Surfer #13. Art by Michael and Laura Allred.

And that’s kind of an overview of my 2015 comics highlights. For reference and maybe unconscious oblique insight, here’s what I’m currently buying every Wednesday at my local comic shop, budget permitting, broken down by publisher:

Marvel Comics:
Captain Marvel
Daredevil
Doctor Strange
Hercules
Howard the Duck
Karnak
Ms. Marvel
Silver Surfer
Star Wars
Star Wars: Darth Vader
Star Wars: Kanan
Star Wars: Obi-Wan & Anakin
Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
The Vision

DC Comics and DC/Vertigo:
Astro City
Batman ’66 Meets the Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Prez (assuming they deliver the other six issues we were promised)
The Sheriff of Babylon (another Tom King project, another unique winner)
Superman: American Alien (short stories by Chronicle‘s Max Landis, given a lot of leeway)

Dark Horse Comics:
Angel & Faith
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10
Fight Club 2 (hoping this begins to make unified sense any minute now)

Image Comics:
The Autumnlands
Copperhead (though it’s a bad sign that the artist has announced another gig…)
Descender
The Dying & the Dead
Injection
Invisible Republic
Lazarus
Manhattan Projects: The Sun Beyond the Stars
Manifest Destiny
No Mercy
Nonplayer (one issue published this year! Call it a comeback!)
Paper Girls
Plutona
Rumble
Starve (about a scary post-apocalyptic cooking show? yep, I’m in)

Other publishers:
Archie
Empire Uprising (…or is this dead?)
James Bond 007: Vargr (Warren Ellis bringing back the meaner Bond from the novels)
Jughead
Strange Fruit
Wild’s End: The Enemy Within (but with only one issue to go, here’s hoping more are in store…)

Captain Woodchuck, the official mascot of Mile High Comics, welcomes you to the wonderful world of graphic storytelling!

On our annual road trips I usually hold off on my weekly comics fix until after we return home. It’s a selfish impulse I’m fine with deferring for the sake of family quality time, because a few of my least favorite travel memories involve shops in other states. It doesn’t help that some cities we’ve visited simply had no decent comic shops near any of the points of interest on our to-do list. Between the late-’90s Heroes World debacle and the late-’00s recession, America has several thousand fewer comic shops than it used to when I was a kid. (Examples of both extremes: when we took Manhattan in 2011, you can bet I swung us by Midtown Comics’ two-story location in the city with the mostest. On the other hand, our 2015 journey to New Orleans found exactly zero shops in the French Quarter or in the CBD/downtown district to the south.)

But this wasn’t our usual trip. With Anne’s business matters keeping her preoccupied and frazzled, I was free to plan my one-man sightseeing as I saw fit, to drive wherever I wanted to drive, to indulge in whatever flights of fancy came to mind without any companions to bore. So when I woke up on Day Four, a Wednesday as it so happened, I had two major events coded as Priority One, and one of them was a very special out-of-town New Comic Day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Each year my wife and I take a road trip to a different part of the United States and see what sorts of historical landmarks, natural wonders, man-made oddities, unexplored restaurants, and cautionary tales await us. From November 1-6, 2015, we racked up a number of personal firsts. My wife Anne was invited on her first business trip to Colorado Springs, all expenses paid from flight to food to lodging to rental car, to assist with cross-training at a distant affiliate. Her supervisor gave me permission to attend as her personal travel companion as long as I bought my own plane ticket and food. I posted one photo for each of the six days while we were on location. With this series, we delve into selections from the 500+ other photos we took along the way.

Half the day was devoted to yet another road-trip-within-a-trip, kicking off with a drive north from Colorado Springs to the much larger city of Denver, home to the largest comic shop in North America. Finding it was tricky because it’s not in a strip mall or a small-town storefront like a lot of other dealers. You have to navigate an older, clustered, cluttered, urban area and pay no attention when the road gives way to a wide open space of unmarked asphalt and hibernating semis.

I found myself checking my phone every thirty seconds to make sure I was on the right track. Google Maps has lied to me before and this didn’t look like the best place to ask for directions.

Lo and behold, there it was: famous Mile High Comics, one of the granddaddies of the comics scene. Founder Chuck Rozanski is a well-known name to older collectors who remember back in the day when he regularly bought advertising space inside various Marvel and DC comics to sell his prodigious back-issue inventory by mail order, or when he used to write a regular comics-business column for the late, lamented Comics Buyer’s Guide. I was familiar enough with Mile High that they were on my shortlist for our 2012 road trip, but didn’t make the final cut.

As of November 2015 they had three locations. The biggest and broadest is literally a warehouse.

Mile High: stories tall, acres wide, aisles deep.

I had to park a few garage doors down to the right, then took a couple of minutes to find their spartan front door at far left.

Abandon funds, ye who enter here.

Enter: wonderland. Millions of comics, graphic novels, books, magazines, toys, licensing tie-in products, and more more more.

This being November 4th, a few Halloween decorations were still hanging around. Note the table full of freebies front and center.

At left: manga! At right: Avengers standees! Far in the back: the cordoned, employees-only area where they store their older, rarer issues.

Quite a few areas and displays were welcoming to younger readers, not just us old guys. I’m not sure li’l Billy would enjoy the back-issue boxes.

That super-sized Lego Sentinel, though.

Little did I know the warehouse was packed more than it had been previously. The following week, Rozanski announced to the press he’d been moving stock there from his second-largest location with the intent to put the latter up for sale because, thanks to a combination of legalized marijuana use and firm laws against outdoor marijuana crops, vast warehouse spaces are doing booming business on the local real estate market as demand has surged from the burgeoning pot-farming industry. Rozanski’s plan to consolidate his operations should net him a pretty penny once the right buyer comes along. As of this writing that warehouse can be yours…for a price.

Major caveat for the unfamiliar: as with their mail-order business, Mile High is not a place for clearance sales or 3-for-$1 boxes. Anything more than a few months old is assiduously priced for collectors willing to pay above cover price to find those vintage rarities or just to fill gaps in a recent beloved series. I could’ve spent all day there browsing from shelf to shelf to shelf to shelf to shelf, but (a) I had other things I wanted to do with my day, and (b) the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 2015 wiped out my long-standing want list, so now I have virtually no idea what back issues I’m missing, and I’ve yet to get into the mood to redo a full inventory on those fifty-one longboxes sitting in our library.

So my primary objective was new comics only. This was the first week of the month, which means heavy shipments of new stuff from the major publishers. Of the hundreds of new issues out this week, my list had fourteen comics I was either reading regularly or considering trying out for the occasion. Mile High opens earlier in the morning than our shops do back home, so I’d hoped to get there early enough to beat our the other buyers for this week’s new issues.

Final haul: Angel & Faith #20, James Bond 007: Vargr #1, We Stand on Guard #5, Dr. Strange #2, Hercules #1, and Star Wars #11. I was surprised to find nearly half my list either sold out on Day 1, set aside behind the counter for regular customers, or simply not ordered in the first place. For a place touted as America’s Largest Comics Dealer, that’s, um, kind of disappointing.

* * * * *

After lunch I wandered in a direction recommended to me by a local friend who thought I might be interested. That led me to Shop #2: All in a Dream.

I’m guessing this location isn’t much younger than Mile High Comics.

Inside was a labyrinth of dozens of boxes and bookshelves full of graphic novels and old sci-fi paperbacks. Paths of threadbare-to-disintegrating carpets wind around the outer perimeter, with wire racks in the back for recent comics and that day’s new arrivals laid out across the back-issue bins in accordance with the traditions upheld by older retailers.

Final haul: Unfollow #1, Paper Girls #2, this year’s second Howard the Duck #1, and an Optic Nerve #11 plucked from a stack of multiple copies still on the new-release rack years after the fact. I can’t recall if the shopkeeper said hi when I first entered. When he rung me up, we spoke briefly only to agree neither of us remembered any papergirls in our respective neighborhoods way back when. Truth be known, I wouldn’t say I wasn’t the most in-touch kid on my block, so for all I know we could’ve had dozens. Not really a hill for me to die on.

Apparently I got off light compared to the Yelp reviewers who’ve amassed quite a collection of cautionary tales about the place. I’ll leave you to explore those reports at your discretion, though it seems the store is so frequently opened or locked up on random whims that as of tonight Google+ thinks it’s permanently closed despite one review from a month ago insisting otherwise.

* * * * *

Later in the day I returned to Colorado Springs and spent some time traipsing around their downtown, angling my way toward stop #3: Escape Velocity Comics.

Pretty sure it was the youngest and smallest of the three stores. Didn’t matter.

I chose it for two reasons: it was near other things I wanted to see; and, of all the shops in Colorado Springs, theirs had the nicest website, complete with pics of what appears to be a younger, fun-loving staff.

BUY COMICS OR HULK SMASH!

Their selection was above-adequate, and the general ambiance read “actual customer service” to me. Other than a stubborn, not-quite-state-of-the-art credit-card machine that slowed me up at the register, Escape Velocity felt like the kind of place I’d be happy to shop regularly if I were a local, or if we had the chance for more discounted Colorado trips in the future. If only.

Final haul: Survivors Club #2, Invincible Iron Man #3, and Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire #3. I’d’ve bought more if I hadn’t stopped at two other stores first.

To be continued!

[Link enclosed here to handy checklist for previous and future chapters, and for our complete road trip history to date. Follow us on Facebook or via email signup for new-entry alerts, or over on Twitter if you want to track my TV live-tweeting and other signs of life between entries. Thanks for reading!]

1959 PSA commissioned by DC Comics editor Jack Schiff. Artist not credited.

Last month a dead holiday went and passed us by for thirtieth time in a row, and we all missed it. Shame on us. SHAME.

But are we worthy enough to celebrate it? Take the vintage quiz and check your own tolerance levels. Well, not you cabbage lovers. You people are monsters.

I’m currently reading through an oversize tome called The DC Vault, a hardcover history of DC Comics that comes with a variety of tangible extras. Pictured above is one of several public service announcements published during those troubled decades when Americans didn’t get along well with each other and needed opportunities to figure out how this “getting along” concept worked. DC decided some people needed practical advice and tackled the matter head-on. This sudden attempt at cutting-edge relevance came several years before Green Lantern/Green Arrow tackled racism and drug abuse, before Wonder Woman found “Women’s Lib”, and before Brother Power the Geek taught comic readers that a rag-doll hippie could be their savior if they could imagine there’s no dignity.

National Brotherhood Week wasn’t DC’s idea. During the third week of every February from 1934 till sometime during the 1980s, people of all imaginable subdivisions were supposed to try to find ways to mend fences, cross bridges, and think of America as one big team rather than one unruly sport comprising dozens of teams of hypercompetitive hooligans. NBW was the product of the “National Conference of Christians and Jews”, which began in 1927 as a sort of interdenominational coalition combating the burgeoning peril that was anti-Catholic prejudice. Over time the conference expanded to cover multiple demographics with ideas for harmonic coexistence in a melting-pot country. To reflect that broader reach they later rechristened themselves the National Conference for Community and Justice, focusing on basic shareable concepts rather than spotlight two groups among the myriad.

I wasn’t around in those early days, and have no memories of local celebrations during my childhood. Perhaps there was a National Brotherhood Week parade on Times Square the week after Valentine’s Day. Maybe Hallmark sold “Happy National Brotherhood Week!” cards with children in all the colors of the rainbow and all the hats of the haberdashery. Maybe furniture stores held National Brotherhood Week mattress sales with free sheet sets in the multicolored pattern of your choice. Maybe there was a Peanuts special called It’s National Brotherhood Week, So Get Over Yourself, Charlie Brown starring Franklin, Frieda, Snoopy’s brother Spike, and special guests Ben Vereen and Charo.

Despite whatever parties went on before my time, all the hoopla eventually faded away. Maybe they thought they’d cured all the bigotries ever. Maybe bad winter weather kept ruining everyone’s plans and spoiled the holiday mood. Maybe the inventors of Presidents’ Day annexed it and forgot to mention it. Or maybe we got bored trying to smile at each other for a whole week and decided it was more fun to factionalize, form isolationist cliques, view all others as The Enemy, and forget the point of the whole “more perfect union” concept. Like maybe the Civil War deserved a reboot and the key to getting us-vs.-us warfare right this time was to divide everyone into smaller, more manageable franchises.

Whatever the cause, National Brotherhood Week evaporated, only to be revisited from time to time by lone news sources accidentally stumbling across it (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), chuckling about it, appreciating the only National Brotherhood Week carol ever written by Tom Lehrer, and then dropping it and moving on to cover whatever next major turmoil was dividing and conquering Americans that week. If past Presidents or charity organizations had tried to keep its spirit alive against the odds, who knows if it would’ve helped, if it would’ve been renamed National Siblinghood Week to stave off microaggression accusations, or if observing it would’ve become such a rote chore that The Purge would’ve had to be invented to bring balance to the national mood.

Regardless, I like to imagine National Brotherhood Week was nice while it lasted. Good luck trying to jump-start anything like it today. But hey, points to Silver Age DC Comics for doing their part, in their own quasi-contemporary way, to set up a teachable moment about non-hate in their time. If just one young boy or girl at home took that quiz, rethought their entire life, and vowed ever after to be kinder to alligators, it was all worth it.

Longtime MCC readers may or may not remember last year’s C2E2 experience, in which Anne and I met Gene Ha, a fine comics artist who’s worked on past books I’ve collected such as Alan Moore’s Top 10, Fables, Starman, Global Frequency, and guest spots on assorted DC super-hero projects. In 2015 he was at C2E2 to promote his Kickstarter project for the hardcover graphic novel Mae. My Kickstarter moratorium was still in effect, but I bought another item from him instead and wished him well.

Thankfully the Kickstarter was a rousing success and Ha had copies of Mae for sale today at C2E2. Buyers at the show (e.g., me ) were also entitled to a “small doodle” inside the front cover. The above photo is his idea of a “small doodle” — a drawing of my very own wife as Supergirl. Her one-time art-modeling role was his idea. When he suggested turning her into a super-hero, Supergirl’s was the first name that popped into my head. Anne is a lifelong Superman fan, and we’ve both been watching and enjoying the show. No-brainer.

This is many, many light-years above and beyond my expectations and may literally be the greatest purchase I’ve ever made at a con. I spent the next ten minutes just walking around with the book still open to sketch of the woman I love by the Gene Ha.

So our 2016 convention season is off to a stellar start. I’m betting that sketch will be the pinnacle, but the next-best is yet to come!

We’ve been busy planning for these moments all this week, and right now are recuperating from the activities we’ve managed so far. Our to-do list still contains many options to consider and attempt before we surrender and return to the rat race. In the meantime, plans are already tentatively afoot for other geek convention options within a certain radius of home. The coming months will see MCC covering our impressions and successes at several of the following shows and events:

March 18-20: C2E2 – Now playing. With special guests Cliff Clavin, TV’s Supergirl, and her hero sister Alex. Updates over the next several days after we get home.

April 8-10: Wizard World Madison is father than we’d usually travel for a con, but somehow Wizard World snagged the David Tennant to appear at three shows over three weekends. This show’s the least improbable of the trilogy, but a long shot nonetheless.

April 29 – May 1: Indiana Comic Con, featuring special guests Ray Park and Emperor Palpatine. Hopefully the out-of-town showrunners are continuing to take notes and keep learning from the mistakes of their first two years in the Circle City.

June 9-12: We always keep a berth open for the Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois, in case their guests are cool and our schedule works out. It’s been a while since our last visit because it’s a five-hour drive at top speed, and their autograph ticketing system requires a major time investment. But it’s a fun place and a required bullet point for every DC fan’s bucket list.

June 17-19: Indy Pop Con is bringing in Mike Baron and Steve Rude, creators of the ’80s sci-fi super-hero series Nexus. I’m therefore up in that shindig because that book was absolutely All That. So far the rest of the guest list is a healthy mix of YouTube all-stars, cartoon/video game voice actors, and monetized cosplayers. It’s possible this may be another one-hour “speed-conventioning” experience for us, but I’d love to find reasons to hang around longer.

Aug. 4-7: Gen Con continues on, probably without us again, but who knows. For a long time Gen Con was the only convention option in Indianapolis. For that they’ll always have my respect.

Aug. 18-21: Wizard World Chicago is our other big annual Chicago trip, but we always wait for their guest announcements before we commit.

Oct. 13-16: Cartoon Crossroads Columbus last year was an intellectually fascinating indie-comics experience like nothing else we’ve ever done. The show was so tightly concentrated and community-based that I kind of felt like a gawky intruder at times, but if you’re an Ohio comics fan who yearns to experience the medium’s horizons beyond Marvel, DC, and super-heroes, you need to go immerse yourself in CXC’s cavalcade of complexities.

November ??: That’s when we’d expect to spend a few hours at Starbase Indy, our local longtime fan-run Star Trek/TV-sci-fi con, but they’ve kept oddly quiet about their 2016 dates. I’m assuming and hoping they’ll have some.

And who knows what other events will pop up as the year rolls along. If this is all the geek world sends in our direction for 2016, we’ll also have Indiana’s bicentennial coming up, hopefully with differently interesting opportunities to get out of the house and explore the worlds around us.

Updates and photo galleries as they occur! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!

Toting around a boom-box blaring mad beatz, roaming the show and rapping all Friday long, that’s Deadpool on the left with his funky pal Spidey, whose costume is red enough that he basically counts as an honorary Deadpool.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition — or “C2E2” to Ichabod Crane and other acronym haters out there — where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture. Larger shows like San Diego have garnered the nickname “nerd prom”, which I don’t care for because I have issues with the word “nerd”, but I’ll agree the always fascinating cosplayers make every con quite the extraordinary masquerade ball.

Longtime MCC readers know Deadpool cosplayers have been a rapidly growing demographic in previous cons. C2E2 is the first con we’ve attended since the Merc with a Mouth got his own movie in theaters that’s raked in a ridiculous $340 million at the American box office with no signs of stopping anytime soon. So naturally his variants once again ruled the dance floor and were the belles of the ball.

Kidpool kind of does a jig around the super-sized BB-8 at the Funco booth.

Movie Deadpool, now in theaters, is now filthy rich and no longer has to street-dance for quarters.

Santapool brings toys and goodies to all the naughty children of the world. In March, because Santapool has no use for The MAN’s oppressive holiday schedule.

Assassin’s Creedpool is looking for his old partner Cable, who hasn’t hit the big screen because he has a terrible agent.

Captain Ameripool: the Winner Soldier.

Wanna buy your own costume? Can we interest you in a My Little Ponypool ensemble?

Or you could settle for our extensive line of Deadpool-wear, such as this sweater, which looks cool unless you look too closely and notice it’s covered in tacos instead of chimichangas. This is clearly FAKE GEEKWEAR.

The 11th Doctorpool, the last guy you want tap-dancing all over your timeline. And for those who don’t watch the show, the hat is canon. Or was for about two minutes. Good enough!

Ashpool already caught ’em all, but only Pikapool survives because he locked the other Pokepools in their Pokepoolballs and suffocated them. Whoops!

Finnpool headlines an all-new, all-different, extra-bloody Adventure Time dance party.

Roaring Twenties Lady Deadpool is obviously the most fabulous and worthy of your Queen of the Dance votes and is SHOCKED at all these crimes against Deadpool fashion.

…

More C2E2 pics to come. Stay tuned! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!

Finally, two guests who showed US how jazz hands are done.

Defying all expectations, Supergirl has become must-see TV in our house. I’ve yet to write about it here, but Twitter followers are (hopefully) used to me live-tweeting it on Mondays for fun and more fun. (I think most of the I’ll-follow-you-if-you-follow-me-and-also-please-buy-all-my-ebooks crowd already Muted me seconds after I followed them back anyway, so I may not be bothering as many people as I think.) The show has its occasional silly moments and head-scratching choices (many of them Maxwell Lord’s fault), but Kara, Alex, James, Hank/J’onn, MVP Cat Grant, and, yes, even Winn are a welcome sight to us.

Las year Anne and I discussed the notion of no longer considering any conventions an automatic buy-in until and unless the guest list gave us a solid reason to commit. C2E2’s early guest announcements for 2016 were okay, one of them pretty great. (We’ll get to him in a later entry.) Then they added special guests Melissa Benoist, the greatest Supergirl of all time, and former Grey’s Anatomy costar Chyler Leigh, who plays her adopted sister Alex. They sealed the deal for us.

Behold above the newest addition to our ongoing jazz-hands photo-op collection. Even after posing for pics with the hundreds of fans in front of us, their unstoppable enthusiasm bowled us over and won the con and the photo.

If you asked me to summarize our Saturday experience at C2E2, the answer is Supergirl. The dual photo op came later in the afternoon, but when security opened the floodgates and let all several thousand fans inside the show floor promptly at 10 a.m., we made a beeline for Benoist’s autograph line. She was supposed to arrive and begin signing at 10:30, but circumstances (Chicago road construction, probably) delayed her arrival till closer to 11:30. We were in the front half of the line and took about an hour to wind through, say hi, and be all dazzled at how she looked exactly like she does on TV, except no cape or glasses. From there we skipped immediately to the next line for an additional 15-minute wait for Chyler Leigh’s autograph as well. Also awesome in every respect.

The photo-op came later in the afternoon. In between the two came the Q&A on the C2E2 Main Stage. Our special host for the hour: Clare Kramer, best known as the evil goddess Glory from Buffy season 5.

We met Clare Kramer at Wizard World Chicago 2011, but failed to get a photo of her at the time. That oversight is now technically rectified.

Fun trivia and moments from throughout the talk:

* They’re pronounced Melissa Ben-OYST and KYler Leigh.

* Supergirl’s costume was designed by three-time Academy Award Winner Colleen Atwood (Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland). It was the only super-design Benoist ever had to try on.

* Neither had read the comics prior to winning their parts. Benoist immersed herself in the comics afterward, starting with the New 52 and then working backward.

* Each episode takes eleven days to make, plus another three for visual effects and post-production.

* The hardest parts are when their characters have to be mean to each other, such as when Alex had to rescue Kara from her dream Krypton in “For the Girl Who Has Everything”, or in last Monday’s Red-K episode “Falling”. They get along great, which made Bad Kara scenes all the more challenging.

* The March 20th crossover guest-starring The Flash was, naturally, fun to film. Regarding Grant Gustin, Benoist confirms, “He was pretty jealous of my cape.”

* Benoist is a fan of Star Wars and Kingdom Hearts, and believes the Sorting Hat would put her in Ravenclaw. Leigh confirms Benoist is good at “math stuff.”

* Benoist’s stunt double Shauna Duggins has a lengthy resumé including Kill Bill and pinch-hitting for Sydney Bristow in JJ Abrams’ Alias.

* Leigh really, really, really, really wishes the showrunners would let Alex turn into an all-new Batgirl. REALLY wishes.

* When time began to run short for the Q&A, they asked all the young girls in line to step to the front to make sure they’d have the chance to ask their questions to their heroes.

* The final question of the hour came from a fan asking about their opinions of the sexualization of female super-heroes. The fan was a 12-year-old girl. Everyone was so impressed by the maturity level of the question that answering it kind of became beside the point.

…and that’s how 85% of our Saturday went. Friday was a fabulous day in itself, but Saturday was all we’d hoped and more. Much like the TV show itself.

More C2E2 pics to come. To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools