Can this be? Rey and Kylo Ren working together? Say it ain’t so!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, 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.
We expected new costume ideas to abound thanks to the interstellar success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the whole new cast of iconic characters for us to watch, study, follow, debate, and impersonate. We saw veritable armies of Rey and Kylo Ren parading around the show floor and claiming it as their own. We caught a mere fraction of a fraction of the Star Wars fans on site.
Prepping your own all-Lego The Force Awakens fan-film for YouTube? Two different vendors are ready to hook you up with all the background extras you need.
The folks at Funko brought Mega-BB-8, grand emperor of the kingdom of Funko Pop. Or Funko Pop! Or Funko POP! Look, I don’t buy the things, so I’m old and I have no idea which parts are or aren’t capitalized or punctuated.
Strong will, tremendous leaping skills, Spider-Sense warning him of danger, dead parents, lousy at long-term romantic attachments because of the meddling of others…Jedi Spider-Man makes perfect sense.
This very special MCC series is far from over, but this was the very last photo we took on our very last day before we headed home — one last Rey hanging out with her new comrade Artoo, beeping merrily and welcoming her to the Star Wars Universe and the wild, wild world of convention cosplay legends.
To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:
The family that cosplays together: straight out of Final Fantasy VII, it’s Barrett, Vincent Valentine, and li’l Cait Sith peering into your SOUL. My favorite photo of the weekend.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, 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.
In tonight’s photo parade, we focus on artforms made of moving art, interactive or otherwise. I’m not the best guy to ask about anime or XBox games, but I’ve played my share of video games and seen more than a few animated features. The younger cosplayers are great at stumping me, but I love seeing other fans celebrate some familiar faces out there. And as longtime MCC readers may recall, Final Fantasy characters get preferential treatment here, but there’s more where they came from.
Pretty sure this is a a Black Mage form one of the FF games I haven’t played, or from a remastered version of one of the oldies. I beat the original FF on my old NES back in high school…
I’m currently playing through (and gnashing my teeth at) the DLC for the original Borderlands, but I was excited to meet Krieg and Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2.
I remember when the first extra-large Jetfire figure hit the U.S. market when I was a kid. Transformers his size were too pricey for my lower-class paws. And if you thought last night’s entry needed more Star Wars in it, then the bonus Mini-Kylo Ren is here just for you.
Nitpickers might point out Sailor Moon was a manga before it was adapted to anime and therefore oughta be moved to our next entry with the other comic-book cosplayers. If that’s your take, then in the name of the Moon, I will ignore you.
To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:
New Marvel meets modern manga: Silk and One Piece star Monkey D. Luffy.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, 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.
In tonight’s photo gallery: costumes from your favorite comic books! Or someone else’s favorite comics, whichever. You’d think these would out number the other categories, but C2E2 attracts a diverse following of myriad tastes in reading material. Regrettably, it wasn’t till after we got home and I took inventory, when I realized Marvel and DC Comics were very nearly the only publishers represented in the “comics-based costumes” section. I have no idea how that happened, but it’s too late for retakes.
Spider-Family deluxe: another Silk teamed up with Spider-Gwen, Iron Spider, Pokemon trainer Misty, and the only Harley Quinn you’ll see in this week-long MCC miniseries, though there were several hundred patrolling the show.
Erstwhile HYDRA leader Baron Strucker, armed with his deadly Satan Claw. You may remember him as one of the 461 characters vacuum-packed inside Avengers: Age of Ultron. He was played by Thomas Kretschmann, but sadly de-Satan-Clawed.
Arrow and Speedy from TV’s Arrow. I want to say their companion is…a Joker/Harley mash-up? variant Sailor Mercury? an anime superstar popular with everyone younger than me?
Once upon a time, Donna Troy was Wonder Girl, charter member of the original Teen Titans. Then she was just Donna Troy. Then she was Troia, pictured above. Everything after that is a convoluted blur, but suffice it to say hanging with Jareth the Goblin King is a far better fate than being torn apart every six months by DC reboots.
Static Shock! Or just Static, if you’re an old Milestone Media fan like me. Either way, I’d pay good money to have the complete animated series on DVD, and even better money for a regular comic series that reverses everything I loathed about his New 52 reboot.
The Taskmaster, a classic villain who copied all the weapons and physical talents of all the Avengers. If he appears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’ll just be a guy who has the proportionate strength and speed of five guys named Chris.
Another Luke Cage, this one in his classic ’70s super-costume as part of the mismatched buddy-hero duo we called Power Man and Iron Fist. Soon to be Netflix acquaintances.
That time Marvel and DC used to do crossovers, but the comics executives decided Iron Fist just wasn’t white enough and replaced him with Captain Cold.
To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, 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.
This isn’t the final chapter in this very special week-long MCC miniseries, but it is all the costume photos we have left. Most of these would fit into a “Movie and TV Costumes!” chapter of their own, but that would leave a few stragglers out in the cold. As always, our goal here is to see No Cosplayer Left Behind if we have any say in their fates. So everyone unites in one last big potpourri hurrah for the sake of inclusion.
What we’ve presented in our five C2E2 2016 costume entries is a fraction of a fraction of all the hundreds of cosplayers we saw swirling around us all weekend. No two C2E2 attendees will have the same costume photo collections, so I’d strongly recommend seeking out others online if you want an even broader picture of the complete Chicago convention experience. C2E2 is large and it contains multitudes.
Also from the world of advertising, Quiky the Nesquik Bunny, reminding consumers of a time when shilling was more of an artform than a traumatic horror show.
At first I thought SuperPizza might be a webcomic star, but this is a for-real Papa John’s shill trying to drum up business by offering free pizza through social media. Marketing nostalgia can be fun, but actual marketing is the WORST.
From that Game of Thrones series that I’m told is all the rage with the grown-ups these days: Daenerys Targaryen, Khal Drogo, Jaime Lannister, Mayor Tommy Carcetti from The Wire, and know-nothing Jon Snow.
“Did you know the Visigoths actually invented comic book conventions back in the fourth century as an excuse to get together with family and draw unflattering caricatures of the Romans? True story…”
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, 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.
Last 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. They’re expensive and the guest lists aren’t always tailored to our specific areas of fandom or nostalgia. When C2E2 added TV’s John Ratzenberger to their 2016 roster, he was the first sign that I knew we’d be there. From TV’s Cheers to every Pixar movie ever, ol’ Cliff Clavin has been a part of our lives from childhood to adulthood. We met him twice at C2E2 — once at his autograph booth, where he confirmed he’ll indeed return for Finding Dory, and once at his photo op, where we sensed he was not a jazz-hands kind of guy. ‘sokay, no harm done.
We spent most of our C2E2 time wandering the show floor, perusing the wares and works, buying stuff from writers and artists, and noticing there were dealers but not really doing much for them. The usual boxes and shelves full of $5 trade paperbacks were in shorter supply than usual. With the destruction of my old comics want list in the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 2015, my interest in ’80s back issues has taken a nosedive now that I no longer know or remember what specific singles I’m missing. We stocked up on T-shirts from StylinOnline, SuperHeroStuff, and even the official C2E2 merchandise store, because I’ve never owned a piece of their con merchandise and they finally came up with a shirt design that caught my eye.
Fun true story after our shopping experience: when a charge showed up on my wife’s account under the thoroughly generic name “Super Hero Stuff” outside our home state, her credit card company pegged it as possible fraudulent activity and immediately froze her card. This well-intentioned yet uninformed monitoring made for a moment of awkwardness when she tried and failed to buy us lunch Saturday, and had to call them Sunday morning to clear up the matter.
We appreciated seeing big-name companies like Marvel, Valiant, and WETA Workshop among the other booths. DC Comics sent creators to represent for them in spirit but once again had no booth. Dark Horse Comics sadly skipped this year, a shame considering they’ve released two books in the last few months that I’d very much love to buy in person from someone someday. Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint was in the house, but the rest of Image Comics bowed out after last year’s debut.
On a smaller scale, we were happy to reunite with a few folks we’d met at previous cons. Matthew Rosenberg, whose super-teen fugitives miniseries We Can Never Go Home was one of my favorite comics of 2015, is currently working his way into DC’s graces and was on hand to promote his next Black Mask Comics project, 4 Kids Walk into a Bank. Writer Russell Lissau had more indie projects on hand, including a young-readers’ sci-fi comic called Stranger that looks promising. We stopped by the booth of sci-fi author (and fellow WordPress user!) Luther M. Siler, trying out C2E2 for his first time. He’s posted dozens of cosplay pics on his own site along with a candid write-up of his three-day bookselling experience.
I’ve already posted about our second time meeting the great Gene Ha and the wondrous sketch he did for us. Here’s him in action sketching my wife inside the copy of Mae I’d just bought…
Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez is a huge name to collectors my age, a longtime dependable DC artist with strong, bold linework who’s never been “hot” but always been awesome. I brought my copy of Deadman #1 (early-’80s miniseries) for him to sign.
I liked Ming Doyle’s art on the future-soccer superpower miniseries Mara. Currently she’s co-writing Constantine the Hellblazer for DC and just finished a Vertigo project about Mob wives called The Kitchen that was among many comics that went largely unordered by our local comic shops last year.
Illustrator Gary Gianni has done a variety of projects for Dark Horse and other publishers over the years. I’ve always been fond of his adaptation of A Christmas Carol he painted long ago for First Comics’ short-lived Classics Illustrated line.
Colorist Nick Filardi, whose past credits include Powers, Batman ’66, and Atomic Robo, among dozens of others. His table caught my eye when I noticed he was selling an awesome print of that fiendish halfwit Dr. Dinosaur.
Among the creators we didn’t meet: the legendary Chris Claremont, whose decades at the helm of Uncanny X-Men sparked many a reader’s imagination and provided a solid foundation for today’s steadily improving movie franchise.
I wish I could follow up with a long list of panels we attended, but the truth is, of the five Friday comics-related panels I was interested in checking out, four of them conflicted with our two timed-ticket photo-op appointments. I’ll admit I was bummed, but this is what happens when one set of schedules is released farther in advance than the others, and it’s what happens when a con dumps all the most interesting programming into a single, narrow, compacted afternoon. After all appointments were met and I’d finished my first Artists Alley run-through, I insisted on attending one panel late in the day: the annual Silver Age Trivia Challenge!
Pictured left to right: moderator Craig Shutt, Mike Chary, Jason Fliegel, Tom Brevoort, Todd Allen, and Mark Waid.
I’ve been reading about this event for literally decades, on the rec.arts.comics.* Usenet groups and in Comics Buyer’s Guide back when it was held at the erstwhile “Chicago Comic Con” (now Wizard World Chicago), but never saw one in person till now. Once upon a time, fans and pros formed two teams and faced off in a trivia contest made entirely of questions about Silver Age comics, spanning from the mid-’50s to the early ’70s. After a while it was noticed that comics writer Mark Waid was basically carrying his team, so the event was restructured and now every year it’s a group of longtime fans vs. just Mark Waid.
Half the fun was in watching Waid’s incredulous scoffing whenever the other team got an easy question, and the anguish whenever he missed a question he knew he should know.
Our moderator, Craig Shutt, a.k.a. Mr. Silver Age, was once a columnist for CBG and currently has his own forum over at Captain Comics. As he used to do in CBG, he’s posted a thorough rundown of the entire event, including all the questions he posed to each team if you want to test your own knowledge of obscure comics or just get a better idea of how truly goofy comics used to be.
Mr. Silver Age knows way more about Jimmy Olsen than is healthy for any normal human. Same goes double for Mark Waid, for that matter.
Even with the addition to the fans’ team of the skillful Tom Brevoort, Senior VP of Publishing at Marvel Comics, Waid still won for, like, the eighty-seventh consecutive year. The other team tried. They really did. And everyone contributed, not just Brevoort, though Waid had to confess that a few of his zillions of comic-book memories are slowly beginning to fade. It’s conceivable there may come a day when Waid loses the Silver Age Trivia Challenge without dying first. I wouldn’t call it probable, though.
Tom Brevoort knows far more about old DC Comics than you’d expect a Marvel editor to know.
Likewise, I wish I could say our Saturday was made of comics panels, but the Supergirl experience took up over half our day, and the remaining options for which we did have plenty of time were a lot of not-my-thing, mostly divided as they were into three popular categories: How to Make Some Comics; Hurray for Event Comics I Won’t Be Buying; and Diverse Diversity in Diverse Comics Diversities. It’s extremely cool and encouraging that those platforms and networking opportunities are in there and in greater force than ever before, but I’m not sure the presence of a superfluous straight white prudish Christian guy would add much to the ambiance. I have this mental image of entering a room only to have one or more fans turn with a burning gaze to yell at me, “YOUR KIND HAS MUCH TO ANSWER FOR!” so I tend to buy their comics but sidestep their panels.
Otherwise, a lot of our weekend was browsing, shopping, hanging out, and crowd-watching among those with whom we share a lot of touchpoints. Fun times, all told.
The view on the escalator ride from the fourth floor to the third. Such loud, very crowd, much color.
Oh, and about the other photo op we did on Friday: movie star John Cusack, another name dating back to childhood, from the constant cable reruns of One Crazy Summer to the many romantic comedies to the latter-day explosions of Con Air and 2012, with a heartfelt stop in between for High Fidelity, one of the few movies from the last twenty years that I personally, genuinely consider influential.
The total addition to my reading pile from our two days at C2E2. On a related note, I’ve been suffering back pain flare-ups all week long. I normally don’t buy sketches or prints, but I bet fans who buy only sketches or prints didn’t share my problem.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, 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.
So it all comes down to this, as every convention ultimately does: stuff and things! Items for sales, displays around the show floor, the neat collectibles everyone wanted to get their paws on, and the big corporate advertisements that surrounded us and insisted we need more stuff. Thus we conclude with one last look at the inanimate objects that entertained, tantalized, or just plain baffled us.
The big C2E2 sign is a staple of the main hall, no matter which McCormick Place building houses the show each year. This was a rare moment of the sign having zero cosplayers in front of it.
WETA Workshop, the visual effects studio responsible for everything spectacular about the Lord of the Rings movies, is now in the high-end merchandising game.
Marvel Comics naturally had the largest space of all, featuring autograph desks and oversize posters for their current and upcoming projects. I’m only two episodes into Daredevil season 2, but so far I approve of Jon Bernthal as the Punisher and am severely annoyed with everything else about it. And not just because they got Grotto wrong.
Mega GEICO Gecko loomed above its company truck and tried to lure young adults away from blowing all their money on books and toys, and maybe put some thought into insurance and other forms of financial planning. Theirs was surely an uphill battle.
My grandma was heavily into sewing when I was a kid, and Simplicity patterns frequently littered our home, covering end tables and filling up the storage space inside her flip-top piano bench. And now Simplicity would like to help a new generation make costumes the old-fashioned way: sewing!
McCormick Place bathrooms stick to the same old male/female binary paradigm, but social awareness spurred the showrunners to designate one high-traffic set as Gender Neutral Bathrooms. While I’m sure there are those who appreciated the gesture, most of the people we saw approaching stopped in confusion and waited for other fans to tell them which one had the urinals and which one had the feminine hygiene boxes. Superficial cosmetic changes will only get you so far.
Also trying to change all of society: an insensitive egotist with a heart ten sizes too small, morally compromised supporters, and hair issues. That’s right: Lex Luthor, asking YOU to help him Make America Great, possibly for the first time ever.
Anne had never heard of Barney Hiller and was convinced this was a cheap overseas knockoff toy. But no, Barney Hiller was apparently the second Six Million Dollar Man as played by special guest Monte Markham. And once upon a time, he was an action figure, commemorated as a toy for all eternity.
Basketball action figures just in time for March Madness. They asked us to fill out brackets at work for fun, which was interesting since I know zero about college basketball except that Duke wins everything. Hopefully that’s true, anyway. I don’t even know where Duke is.
Steampunk Lincoln was brought courtesy of the city of Lockport, IL, who’ll be holding a big Steampunk Weekend festival in September, and a modest comic show at their town library. We honestly thought we smiled better than this, but we must’ve been distracted. Timing is everything, I guess.
The path leading out of the McCormick Place South Building, where we ultimately had no choice but to exit and rejoin the ordinary world. We dragged along as many reminders and keepsakes with us as we could.
The End. Thanks for Reading. See you next year, quite possibly!
Large-scale geek conventions weren’t a thing in Indianapolis when I was a kid. We had tiny comic shows in hotel ballrooms, but nothing requiring the spacious accommodations of the Indiana Convention Center. My young-adult years saw the advent of an annual Star Trek convention that brought great joy on several occasions and would become beloved by many, though their fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the past two decades. In 2003 Gen Con became the first super-sized company to believe in the considerable forces of local geek dollars, and they’ve been rewarded handsomely ever since for their benevolence by tens of thousands of Midwest gamers as well as folks like me who weren’t strictly gamers but were content to enjoy any sort of hobbyist gathering validation. We took what we could get, and we liked it.
Another full decade passed before other convention companies and wannabe startups noticed we’re here and began bringing their medicine wagons to town in hopes of finagling our approval and our wads of cash, and not necessarily in that order. Over the past four years we here at Midlife Crisis Crossover have shared our photos and our experiences — the good, the bad, the distressingly inept — as we’ve explored these new contenders in hopes that sooner or later, someone would establish the Greatest Indianapolis Comic Convention of All Time. My wife and I still find ourselves driving to Chicago twice per year for geek satisfaction, but it’s nice to know folks are trying to save us some gas money. And they’re welcome to keep trying.
Anne and I are now preparing for our next con this coming weekend, for which we’re mostly excited but reserving the right to retain our qualms after the rockiness of the showrunners’ last two events, each of which ran more like dry-run learning experiences than like professional expositions. While we’re selecting our personal artifacts for autographing and deciding what camping gear is most suitable for an unsupervised photo-op line, let’s take stock of the cons that have been courting us Hoosiers, praise those who did right by us, bury those who aren’t coming back, and look ahead to what’s on the Circle City calendar so far for 2016.
* Wizard World Indianapolis: WWIndy was one of many beachheads that Wizard World set up in new markets with an eye on nationwide geek domination. For their first and only try here, they debuted on Valentine’s Day weekend 2015 during an icy winter, had to share the Convention Center with other events, and reserved a limited amount of rooms and just one exhibit hall. Anne and I had fun for most of a single day, but not enough of us showed up for Wizard World’s liking. I guess no one warned them about winters or holidays. After a year that saw cumulative losses here and elsewhere, Wizard World recently saw their CEO resign, appointed a longtime entertainment lawyer from their board of directors as his replacement, and currently have no sequels on their schedule for WWIndy and several other erstwhile WW shows in other states.
* Awesome Con: Normally based in Washington, DC, where they’re successful enough that they’ve snagged the Peter Capaldi and a few high-end Doctor Who costars as headliners for their next show in June. Back in October 2014 they took a stab at duplicating their success here, albeit with a guest list that was interesting to us but fatally short on the kind of “hot” names needed to sell multiple thousands of tickets. They later pulled the plug on a follow-up show in Milwaukee and have retreated to home base for the foreseeable future.
* Starbase Indy: What was once our biggest game in town and a must-do con spent a few years in post-scandal limbo until a group of dedicated fans took it over, recalibrated its sights, and ushered in a new era with bigger hearts and more modest guest lists. We’ve attended more Starbase Indy shows than we have any other con, but 2015 was not their best year. They assembled a riskier guest list and relocated to the other side of the city, parting ways with the hotel that SBI called home for ages. I don’t know if fans didn’t get the news and all showed up at the wrong hotel, or if the actors on hand weren’t enticing enough, or if everyone was busy on Thanksgiving weekend for a change. All we know is we were only there for about an hour (partly due to our own scheduling issues) and never saw more than a handful of fans in the same place at the same time. Maybe everyone had flocked to panels to the point of violating fire codes and we totally missed them, but this was the sparsest SBI we’ve ever seen. They announced their 2016 dates at the end of March, but location still appears to be pending. We hope they’re well and we look forward to future news.
* Gen Con: Still going on, still the largest geek rendezvous in all of Indiana, still expanding their territory to its farthest reaches yet for their 2016 shindig. We skipped Gen Con in 2015 for reasons that mean more to me than they might to you. We’re not saying “never again”, but an awful lot of stars would have to align for it to happen. Nothing against them, mind you — the TL;DR version is “It’s not them, it’s me.” If you’re a fan of TCGs or tabletop gaming, you really ought to try Gen Con in as many Augusts as possible.
* Horror Hound Indy: Horror isn’t really my thing nowadays, but twice in the last three years their impressive guest list has intersected with our interests. Their 2015 gala was pretty great for what it was. They’re returning in September but their guest list is still in its early stages. We’re keeping an eye on this one just in case.
* Indy Toy and Comic Expo, and other smaller shows: A variety of cons in varying sizes and mission statements dot the Indianapolis landscape and other cities statewide, but we’ve missed out on most of those. Anne and I are social wallflowers, fairly disconnected from most local fan bases, and tend to get fidgety at cons where the primary objectives are old-inventory sales, best toys ever, and/or networking. For better reference from a higher authority, I direct you to the detailed calendar of Indiana Geeking, a local blog whose head honcho is top-notch at keeping track of all the opportunities out there that we misfits too often miss.
* Indy Pop Con: Their inaugural multifaceted 2014 show was one of our favorite convention experiences of all time and I can’t gush nearly enough about it, except that I wish attendance had been hundredfold what it was. As a means of course correction, their 2015 follow-up rebalanced the guest list heavily in favor of YouTube all-stars. Attendance skyrocketed exponentially and the poor, unsuspecting volunteers found themselves overwhelmed to the breaking point. Those young, hip, beloved whippersnappers with millions of online groupies didn’t mean quite so much to us old folks, so the lines we chose could be measured in mere minutes rather than in stressful hours or days. Lucky us. Their 2016 guest list is bigger than ever, once again heavy on the YouTubers and accentuating monetized cosplayers. As of this writing I see one (1) comics writer I absolutely have to meet because he’s on my bucket list, so I’ll be there on Saturday for at least a short while. Hopefully we can find other fun things to do and people to meet.
* Indiana Comic Con: This weekend! Despite their inaugural 2014 amateur hour (see here and here for the full disgruntlement) and their 2015 improved performance with unresolved management issues, they’re trying again. In the past week we’ve seen billboards around town and commercials during our morning news shows, so they’ve obviously got a budget to work with this time. We’ll be there once again because guest list and stubbornness. We know folks who refuse to give them another dime ever again, so for us one of the perks and responsibilities of attending the show is to watch it happen firsthand and invoke our storytelling privileges to report whatever we witness to You, the Viewers at Home. If we can tell they’ve learned a lesson, we’ll let you know. If not, don’t expect silence here. And hey, if you’re in the area, feel free to say hi and try drawing us out of our shells! If you could also bring some extra supplies to our base camp inside one of Emperor Palpatine’s multiple lines, we’ll probably need them to survive the day.
Gimli. Sallah. Treebeard. Professor Arturo. da Vinci. Kingpin. All those names and personalities don’t prepare you for the fact that John Rhys-Davies will tickle you in the middle of your photo op.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Friday and Saturday, my wife and I attended the third annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. Previous chapters in this special MCC miniseries:
The TL;DR rundown of our weekend experience: this was the best-run Indiana Comic Con to date. The showrunners evidently took notes last time, focused on their weaknesses, streamlined their processes, and exceeded our apprehensive expectations. We came away with a new set of happy memories, several cool books, another gallery of photos, a few minor suggestions for future years, and no sour complaints this time. A fine convention at last, would run through again, 10/10.
Early arrival times are a standard practice for us at most conventions, but given the troubling crowd-control issues we witnessed at the last two ICCs, we remained fully committed to this principle and mentally prepared for the worst. This year the con opened for business Friday at noon. We arrived around 9:30 and waited to see what would happen next…
Registration at Hall F opened at 11. Line #1 filed inside, we traded in our pre-order printouts for official lanyards, we exited the hall, then we had to go join line #2 on the opposite end at Hall I, the exhibit hall whose entrance would give us nearest, fastest access to the celebrity autograph area. Emmy Award Nominee John Rhys-Davies was scheduled to begin signing at noon sharp, and we were determined to avoid a repeat of the Carrie Fisher event. We bided more time and made small talk with a group of younger fans who were anxious to meet the various voice actors.
We walked briskly inside once the doors opened promptly at noon and found every autograph line had a dedicated transaction system — their own separate table with two volunteers to sell you tickets and provide your complimentary 8-x10 glossy for signing before you could get in the actual autograph line; one volunteer actually at the actor’s table as their assistant; and maybe an extra volunteer as standby security/gofer. Most other cons provide one handler per actor having to manage all necessary tasks at once from money to glossies. If your con can draw enough volunteers to provide a separate team for every actor, it’s a handy system.
Through some combination of effort and miracle, we found ourselves second and third in line for Mr. Rhys-Davies. He arrived a few minutes after 12 and we were done, out and giddy by 12:08. Frankly we were stunned by the speed of service, and by the hours of bonus convention time we thought would be wasted standing in lines instead of spending money at booths.
John Rhys-Davies is in the house with a Dalmatian tie and he was awesome and wow that was a fast line and awesome. #indianacomiccon
We had time to wander the exhibit hall at a leisurely pace, to buy stuff from folks (see below), to grab lunch from one of the food trucks outside (saving those pics for a separate entry), and to return in plenty of time for the Rhys-Davies Q&A at 2:00.
Our seats weren’t the best, but we didn’t mind. This was our least worst photo from where we sat.
The Q&A started with an unexpected ten-minute extemporaneous speech about UK economics, free trade, fossil fuels, the butterfly effect on a worldwide sociopolitical scale, probably world peace and Real Change and so forth. I lost the narrative thread several minutes into it, and I imagine the younger apolitical American fans retreating into their mind palaces and waiting till it was safe to ask questions about Lord of the Rings or Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Of all the topics I expected to come up here today, "Welsh farmer suicides" ranked right around #17,314,906th place.
Random tidbits you may or may not have heard before:
* He sums up Gimli as the series’ “grumpy old fart” and played his attitude as “Glasgow paranoia and aggression”.
* His face became so destructively aggravated by the makeup that he’d have to wait days between filming for his skin to heal just enough for them to have clean places to reapply it, rather than gluing things onto open sores.
* I, Claudius was more fun in hindsight because he got to murder a young Patrick Stewart.
* He imagines Gimli after Return of the King building “an elaborate cabinet” as a shrine to hold the three hairs Galadriel gave him.
* As a noted conservative who’s made no secret of his anti-Islamic views, he nonetheless laments Sallah as “the last popular Arab in popular culture.” (Contrary examples do leap to mind, but are they as Popular-with-a-capital-P as Raiders?)
* As someone who grew up in Tanzania and witnessed aspects of the slavery market firsthand as a kid, he wondered aloud why African-Americans aren’t more vocally activist about opposing slavery in other parts of the world.
* The last fan to step to the mic was a well-educated nonwhite woman who politely asked if he as an actor was choosing parts that would afford him opportunities to speak out or confront serious issues that meant most to him, including but not limited to what he’d just finished pontificating about at length. He conceded he takes the parts offered to him, offered a bit of Latin, and — holding up his old-school feature phone as evidence — concluded with an admission that in his advancing age, “My opinions may have the same relevance as my technology has.”
We wandered a bit more, I flipped through a back-issue bin or two, and we moved on to our next actor: the great Maurice LaMarche. With over three hundred credits to his name, he’s appeared in something you’ve seen and enjoyed.
Anne adored him most as The Brain. His co-conspirator Rob Paulsen (Pinky!) had to cancel his scheduled ICC appearance, but LaMarche brought along a small stack of Pinky & the Brain 8x10s pre-autographed by Paulsen as a consolation option. She was on cloud nine.
Whatever character a fan gushed about, he responded in kind in the corresponding voice. I remembered The Brain, Dr. Zoidberg, and various Orson Welles spoofs off the top of my head, but I last saw him in Disney’s Zootopia, in which he plays a shrew(d) send-up of Don Corleone. I complimented this, and in his Mr. Big voice he let me know he wouldn’t have me iced. And then I died content. The End.
From there we headed over to the photo op area, where fans arriving early for Line A had to march back and forth through sixteen rows’ worth of serpentine line to join others in wait. If you were 400th or 500th in line it was no big deal, but if you were among the first thirty in line as we were, it was a short bit of calisthenics to add to your already impressive Fitbit total for the day.
That’s one of Anne’s old friends taking her turn going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and so on. Anne greeted some arrivals like a marathon volunteer with words of encouragement and accomplishment. If only we’d had Participant ribbons to hand out.
And then we got the goofy-looking results shown at the top. At the photo pickup tables we compared notes with other fans, who each testified he tickled everyone. We discussed whether it was okay for us all to laugh or if we should all file an offended class-action lawsuit in the name of Problematics. Anne and I took a while to stop laughing and carry on.
* * * * *
On Saturday ICC opened at 8 a.m. — not just for waiting, but for activities — shopping, panels, and even one major actor Q&A at 8:30 a.m., a start time unprecedented in the history of Midwest comics conventions. Our #1 reason for attending was a chance to meet Emperor Palpatine himself, Ian McDiarmid, whose first autograph session was scheduled at 9:20. That meant we had to adjust our own parameters and arrive shortly after 6:30 a.m. Anne is an early bird, but that’s hard for a night-owl like me. I can only imagine how hard that probably was on anyone who spent Friday night carousing and binge-drinking in accordance with comic convention customs.
Status update: we're here, we're 5th and 6th in line, and we're ready for an audience with the Emperor. #indianacomiccon
Shortly after 7:30 a.m. Some roosters were probably still in bed.
Our line-buddies were a gregarious, shockingly wide-awake bunch, including one cosplayer who let Anne try on his Red Hood helmet. She’s not exactly a big Jason Todd fan, but cosplay opportunities are exceedingly rare for her. It’s been ages since she used to attend Trek cons in her old Starfleet medical officer’s uniform.
If she’d been Robin during “A Death in the Family”, I like to think thousands of DC fans would’ve called in to save her life and there’d be no Red Hood in the first place.
At one point we were joined by special guest George Perez, whom we’d previously met at Wizard World Chicago 1999 and at the 2012 Superman Celebration. A legendary artist and a very nice man, he posed for pics with the Batman of Mishawaka before heading off to find the pros’ designated entrance.
We got to say hi to old friend Richard, a fellow Carrie Fisher line survivor. And Anne the history buff had the pleasure of chatting at length with fellow fan Dave, a history teacher who came out all the way from Long Island for this chance to meet the Emperor himself. I played fly-on-the-wall for a while and watched them speaking in each other’s language.
Unsurprising trivia: Palpatine already has the longest autograph line; King Joffrey running a distant but healthy second. #indianacomiccon
Like a true professional, McDiarmid arrived at his table at precisely 9:20. Despite one dealer bringing several posters for autographing, each of which required veeeeeeeeryyyyyyyy slooooooooowlyyyyyyy uuuunrooooooolliiiiiiiiing so every one of them could be individually signed and turned into eBay gold. Once he was out of the way, then the line proceeded normally and we had our chance to say hi and bask in his majesty.
That moment took an unexpected turn when his handlers recognized us. One recalled our Jenna Coleman photo from last year; the other recognized me from this very site. Wonders really never ceased this weekend.
We were done, out and giddy yet again by 9:35. We’d honestly expected a minimum three-hour ordeal. Once again we had hours of surprise free time on our hands. I can’t say the same for other McDiarmid fans who arrived much later and were part of the system organized behind us, divided into managed sections for a much more orderly process than we’d endured in 2015. Many Star Wars actors are regulars on the convention circuit and have shorter lines as a result, but Palpatine isn’t among them. His line remained larger than any other guests’ pretty much all day long. Points to us early birds, then.
That gave us more time for light shopping, cosplayer-watching, and temporarily escaping the Convention Center to grab lunch at Circle Centre Mall rather than overpay for underwhelming convention food. We saw several other fans over at the food court with the same life-saving idea. We returned in plenty of time for our 12:30 photo op, for which the con kept advising ticket-holders should begin lining up fifteen minutes early. By the 35-minute-till mark, we were fifty strong, with hundreds more filing behind us over the next hour. The start time was delayed till after 1:00 so they could whittle down more of that overwhelming autograph line. All things considered, we understood, though a few kids in line with us were grumpy for a bit.
Eventually it happened, and we got our photo with the Sith Lords themselves, Emperor Palpatine and Ray Park, a.k.a. Darth Maul.
To his credit, Park was caught mid-jazz-hand when the shutter clicked. And all Star Wars Prequels fans know Palpatine prefers opera over jazz.
The delay caused us to miss a 1 p.m. comics panel we’d been considering, but there was nothing to be done. Next event: the 2:30 Q&A with those same Sith Lords. Thousands of fans filed through the serpentine in Hall J for the main event in Hall K.
I didn’t take too many more notes because I doubt much of the chat was stop-the-presses news. Ray Park talked about his early martial-arts inspirations like the old anime Monkey Magic, and thought it was funny that he had to record ADR for Snake-Eyes in both GI Joe films because they wanted this very mute character to still grunt and groan and go OOF whenever he was hit. Otherwise we relaxed and listened and tried not to bristle too loudly when younger fans asked 100% inappropriate Q&A questions like “Will you sign this for me?” or “Can I have a hug?”
At panel’s end, the room was cleared per con procedure and thousands of us flooded into the halls all at the same time. Weaving through and around so much writ-large Brownian motion made me a minute late to our final panel of the day, a writers’ confab called “Writing a Shared Universe”.
* John Jackson Miller, former Comics Buyer’s Guide editor turned comics writer (Iron Man, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) and Star Wars novelist (A New Dawn, which kicked off the controversial New Canon), who’s now got a Star Trek novel in stores and a Trek trilogy called Prey set to begin in September.
* Eric Flint, mastermind behind the 1632 shared-world series.
* An author who wasn’t listed in the panel’s program description, whose intro I missed due to late arrival.
* Jody Lynn Nye, whom I recall from the Thieves’ World shared-world series back in the ’80s, who also co-authored the later volumes in Robert Asprin’s MythAdventures series.
Most of their useful tips for co-writing in other people’s universes boil down to “Don’t be a jerk to the other writers by writing things that screw up everyone else’s possibilities.” But as we’ve seen in comics, some people do still need practical advice. I was worried that this panel might be the perfect opportunity for any haters of the New Canon to establish a beachhead at ICC, but Miller asked the audience to hold any Star Wars-specific questions until the end of the panel. At the end, they’d spoken so long that we only had time for questions from two fans — one asking about the value and drawbacks of fanfic, one broadly wanting general writing tips, neither of them coming within 500 yards of any elephants in any rooms. Bullets = dodged.
(I took more notes than that if anyone’s interested, but I realize I’ve lost most readers a couple thousand words ago. Just let me know if you’re interested in a follow-up sidebar.)
We made a few last stops in the exhibit hall to pick up heavy or unwieldy items, then bade Indiana Comic Con farewell for the year. (Saturday nights at any given con are rarely programmed for square old-timers like us, and we almost never do Sundays.) Before we close here, special shout-outs to the comics creators I had the pleasure of meeting throughout the weekend:
Nacogdoches’ own Joe R. Lansdale, who started in the ’80s as a horror author (The Drive-In once blew my teenage mind) and has done a number of comics projects since the ’90s, including a pair of Jonah Hex miniseries for DC’s Vertigo line. His “Hap & Leonard” novels were recently lined up for adaptation into a Sundance Channel series costarring Omar from The Wire. Really friendly guy. Photo was taken by his son Keith, who’s done some co-writing with him.
Tim Truman, creator of Scout (new project forthcoming!), co-creator of the great Grimjack, contributor to DC’s post-Crisis Hawkman mythos, and writer of several Conan arcs for Dark Horse Comics.
A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran, who’s done various projects for Marvel and DC since I was a kid (e.g., Neil Gaiman’s Sandman!). Her most recent project: illustrating the graphic-novel autobiography of Stan Lee, Amazing Fantastic Incredible, which I’ve been dying to read since I first heard about it.
Unparalleled horror illustrator Bernie Wrightson, co-creator of Swamp Thing and other spooky books. Stephen King fans have seen his illustrations gracing the cover of the old Creepshow graphic novel, the early trade editions of Cycle of the Werewolf, and if you’re into really deep cuts, King’s contribution to Marvel’s hunger-relief benefit book Heroes for Hope.
John Jackson Miller, whose work in comic stats I knew long before he began writing fiction…
Full disclosure on that last one: as CBG editor, Miller was instrumental co-writer of their Standard Catalog of Comic Books, which compiled comic-book sales figures from past decades using the “Statement of Ownership” forms that publishers were once required to release once per year inside any and all comics that were available by subscription. I submitted a few forms I’d found in my own collection, so the Standard Catalog‘s “Special Thanks” section was the first appearance of my name in print in a nationally distributed book. Miller’s sales-stat work continues over at Comichron as time permits between fiction-writing opportunities.
Unfortunately not pictured above: Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, local co-creators of the webcomic Little Guardians that we met at C2E2 back in March. I thought well enough of their first collection that I wanted to say hi and pick up Volume 2. I’d meant to ask if we could take a photo, but then another potential paying customer approached their table, so we stepped back and let them have the chance to make more money. Next time, then.
…
…and that was our successful thumbs-up experience at Indiana Comic Con 2016. If I had to submit a few nitpicky ideas to their suggestion box:
* I live-tweeted occasionally using the #indianacomiccon hashtag even though ICC’s official Twitter account kept recommending #ICC2016, which is already in use by other groups sharing that really common acronym, some of them overseas and none of them relevant. By contrast I counted only one (1) company likely to have use for #indianacomiccon. A hashtag shared by multiple groups for multiple purposes is a useless hashtag. (Value-added personal-preference note: I’m also staunchly opposed to hashtags that add pointless suffixes and devour those precious 140 characters for no good reason, like #indianacomiccon2016 instead of #indianacomiccon, or #thewalkingdeadfinale instead of #thewalkingdead. Maybe that’s just me.)
* As a fan of straight lines in general and grids in particular, the layout for Artists Alley, and various publishers’ and dealers’ booths was frustratingly non-linear and virtually freeform in parts, making it hard to ensure that we actually saw every exhibitor in the house. I missed at least one webcomic artist and one local comic shop that I’m pretty sure were supposed to be there but never appeared in our paths.
* Sincere kudos for printing an actual convention program this year, but I’d add at least a few more sections to it, including but not limited to: (a) short bios of all the main guests, as a means of upselling them to attendees who might be interested in spending more money on them if they had a better idea of who they were; and (b) a print version of the con’s official harassment guidelines, which were posted nowhere and only available online, buried in the About page.
So far the only other complaints I’ve run across were from a couple of comic fans on Twitter who thought George Perez’ line moved too slowly. As a two-time Perez line veteran, I can say that’s not unusual. He’s extremely cordial and will sketch for you then and there while you watch and marvel, instead of taking a commission list and getting back to you three weeks from the October after next, like other artists might do. I can sympathize, but to me he was worth both long waits. And trust me, however long you waited, he’s no Carrie Fisher.
Otherwise: great year. Special thanks to my local shop Downtown Comics for helping me complete my collection of Christopher Priest’s The Ray, and to Gem City Books, who always bring a fine selection of discount trades to our favorite cons, and who struck gold in my heart with a new idea: a rack for damaged books at rock-bottom clearance prices.
Our annual Free Comic Book Day tradition saw us once again at Indianapolis’ own Downtown Comics North, where cosplayers are always on hand to greet kids, accompanying adults, and regulars alike. Naturally for pop culture’s Year of Deadpool there was Deadpool, so please enjoy Deadpool because Deadpool.
On May 7th my wife and I had the pleasure of once again observing Free Comic Book Day, the least fake holiday of them all. 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. This year’s assortment saw more all-ages comics than ever, so this wasn’t just an outreach to longtime fortysomething collectors who need no further enticement.
I never grab copies of everything, but this year I got a little more grabby than I thought. This entry was procrastinated days past its relevance expiration date because it took me that much longer to find the free time to read them all, even those I could speed through in three minutes flat. In my mind, regardless of total consumption minutes, 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
Surprisingly, none of this year’s samples settled for option 5 or 6. Good show, publishers.
The comics in my FCBD 2016 reading pile came out as follows, from least favorite to definite favorite:
19. Spectrum #0 (Automatic Publishing) — I usually avoid comics co-created by actors as illustrated TV/movie pitches, but the name of Firefly‘s Alan Tudyk on the cover caught my eye. After a sluggish, uninviting, 370-word all-text prologue (for a Star Wars film it’d make a ten-minute opening crawl), the comic proper is divided in two halves, one about Our Hero and his current role in an anti-alien rebellion, the other about an ethereal lady taking over a spaceship from her alien captors through indecipherable powers, decorated throughout with still more sci-fi names that the overlong intro didn’t mention, all accompanied by frequently inscrutable illustrations failing to convey what’s actually happening. I should’ve stuck to my guidelines.
18. Avatarex: Destroyer of Darkness (Graphic India) — Inimitable comics legend Grant Morrison and a not-bad artist introduce a new Indian superhero who awakens aboard a spaceship, acquires his weapons, and goes on and on and on about how awesome he is. That’s twelve pages spent on the print equivalent of an I-am-the-greatest old-school rap single. Also included is an excerpt from Morrison’s ongoing 18 Days, in which other Indian superhumans or possibly deities are at war with each other and prepare for the oncoming battles by debating their conflicting philosophies. The Hindu discussions are weighty but the excerpt ends before they take on enough context. I’m taking it on faith that’s Morrison literati superfans have already annotated every sentence of this at extreme length.
17. Mixtape 2016 (Devil’s Due/1First Comics) — Three excerpts: li’l Mercy Sparx, one of the few Devil’s Due characters still around in any fashion, which means more to her current readers (not my thing); Squarriors, which are like Mouse Guard with angry squirrels and unhelpful flashbacks; and an excerpt from Badger #4, the recent revival of the classic Mike Baron/Jeff Butler character that was one of my early faves when my teen self first discovered comic shops. Val Mayerik’s art captures all of Badger’s strengths — martial arts and unfettered loopiness — but anyone who doesn’t recognize him, or his old pals Yak and Yeti, will probably be lost and wondering why he’s facing Vladimir Putin in an MMA match. That’s, uh, typically how things go for him.
Downtown Comics North opened at 11 a.m. This was the line when we arrived around 9:30…
16. Civil War II (Marvel Comics) — Story #1 is an excerpt from the upcoming annual very special Marvel company-wide summer blockbuster mega-crossover event spectacular that will shake up the Marvel Universe irrevocably forever or whatever. It’s just the heroes gathering so Thanos can appear from nowhere and beat on them for a while, two of them not looking so good by the end. Jim Cheung’s art looks pretty as always, but so far I don’t care. Story #2 introduces the all-new Wasp, Henry Pym’s #1 fan who hopes the late doctor doesn’t mind her stealing his shtick. I’d forgotten the pleasures inherent in the art of Alan Davis, but I tend to avoid superteam books noawadays and will therefore be disconnected from whatever happens to her next in All-New All-Different Avengers.
15. DC SuperHero Girls (DC Comics) — It’s DC’s all-women answer to Muppet Babies but instead of a nursery they’re in high school. Intended for younger audience who like short, sparse sentences but are prepared for new vocab words like “wormhole”, “evaluation”, “carelessness”, “trendsetter”, and “cliffhanger”, a word here which means “an unsatisfying ending like this comic’s that means you’ll have to beg your parents to buy you more comics if you want to find out what happens to Supergirl next”. To be fair, this non-canon side trip treats some of the characters with more respect than their New 52 counterparts have received. And girls will love the all-new all-dreamy Comet the Super-Horse!
14. We Can Never Go Home/Young Terrorists (Black Mask) — Story #1 is an interlude that takes place amidst one of my favorite comics of 2015, bridging the gap toward the second WCNGH arc coming later this year. It fits well within the first arc and is every bit as shocking, though I’m too biased to tell if it does much for newcomers. Story #2 is my first glimpse of Young Terrorists, a less subtle and much more sadistic, nihilistic tribulation of the sort that stopped entertaining me years ago. For those who like this sort of thing professionally crafted, here some is.
13. Camp Midnight Free Comic Book Day Special (Image Comics) — Excerpt from the upcoming graphic novel written by Steven T. Seagle (House of Secrets, Ben 10), about a weird girl sent to a spooky summer camp for monster kids. I think the excerpt lopped off a few too many pages at the start, but the whole promises to be better than just the one part.
…and this was the line behind us a few minutes before 11. It wasn’t any shorter by the time we left at 11:15.
12. Bongo Free-for-All! 2016 (Bongo Comics) — The annual batch of Simpsons Comics reprints contains a few painful clunkers, including a two-pager that felt like 30-year-old MAD Magazine leftovers, but two stories both written by Ian Boothby — one a Homer/Pieman story, the other some hijinks in which Bart convinces everyone Principal Skinner is a vampire — got a few chuckles out of me, which is more than I can say for the average new Simpsons episode these days.
11. Lady Mechanika FCBD (Benitez Productions) — Joe Benitez is a fully accredited, upper-tier member of the Marc Silvestri/Top Cow comics design school, which can be a nifty art style to behold if you can overlook the heroine’s curiously modest boob window. I’m not familiar with Lady Mechanika beyond the one time I saw a Lady Mechanika cosplayer win a Gen Con costume contest, but the done-in-one new tale moves briskly, introduces other cyborgs like her as well as a set of nemeses, and threw in a few surprises I didn’t see coming. Two excerpts from other LM works show off even better art by Benitez and other collaborators. It’s not for kids, but this was a more interesting read than I expected.
10. Oddly Normal #1 (Image Comics) — Reprint of the first issue of the creator-owned all-ages series by Otis Frampton, one of the artists behind the YouTube series How It Should Have Ended (one among my very few YouTube subscriptions). The titular young girl is a green-haired, pointy-eared, half-witch outcast mocked at school, saddled with parents who don’t get her, and confused by powers that may have just kicked in. A fast read aimed squarely at all the other young oddballs out there. I can relate.
9. Steve Rogers: Captain America (Marvel Comics) — Story #1: after being dead for a few years, then resurrected and elderly for several more, Steve Rogers was recently rejuvenated and returned to his Star-Spangled Avenger role thanks to some contrivances set up in the recent Avengers Standoff: Welcome to Pleasant Hill very special Marvel mini-crossover event, of which I read exactly one issue. Cap’s comeback looks great thanks to artist/colorist Jesus Saiz, and ends with a declaration of an official War on Hydra, which is tempting to follow but probably leads into twelve more crossovers, so I’m reluctant to commit. Story #2 stars the amazing Spider-Man, whose version of Peter Parker is barely recognizable to me. He’s undergone so many changes ever since “One Moment in Time” severed my last remaining childhood emotional ties to him years ago. Dan Slott’s writing style never disappoints me, and “One Moment in Time” wasn’t his fault, so I can acknowledge this as a pretty fun prologue to yet another upcoming very special Spider-Man major crossover event that will pass me right by.
The all-ages books had one table; this was the other. Plenty of supplies on hand for would-be readers.
8. Rom #0 (IDW Publishing) — ROM, Spaceknight, one of my beloved childhood toys, is back from a long, long stint in licensing limbo! And now IDW’s got him instead of Marvel! But for some reason at the end of this intro, probably for legal reasons, he calls himself “Rom the Space Knight”, which is wrong wrong WRONG. And the revamped Dire Wraiths are pale anime impersonations of Sal Buscema’s classic creepy designs. But Rom still has his trusty Analyzer and Neutralizer, and his silver armor with just some corners rounded, and his starchy Bill Mantlo speech pattern. It’s a promising start, as nostalgia reboots go. Story #2 is a revival of Britain’s own “Action Man”, about whom I know zilch beyond what writer John Barber’s afterword tells me, but his passing-of-the-mantle does a nice job of connecting the old GI Joe precursor to a young, befuddled successor left to figure out how Action Man things work. It’s got a breezy Young James Bond vibe and deserves a second look.
7. Serenity/Hellboy/Aliens (Dark Horse Comics) — Story #1: River Tam turns the Firefly cast into a really precious bedtime story that’ll warm the hearts of fans like me who still miss Wash. Story #2: Richard Corben draws Hellboy and mostly leaves me cold. Story #3 is connected to Brian Wood’s Aliens: Defiance, which I’ve been on the fence about trying or skipping, so I’m at a disadvantage. The art of Tristan Jones and colorist Dan Jackson is a strong selling point, I’ll give it that.
6. The Tick Free Comic Book Day 2016 (New England Press) — Our annual Free Comic Book Day reminder that New England Comics is still in business even though Tick creator Ben Edlund hasn’t been an active contributor in a long, long time. The lead story, in which the Tick meets dozens of other alt-universe Ticks, reminds me of Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, except this was funnier — the funniest Tick story I’ve read in a long time, truth be known. If regular Tick comics ever appeared at my local shop in any of the other 51 weeks every year, I might have to revisit these old, silly friends more often.
5. Doctor Who: Four Doctors (Titan Comics) — Four new shorts with each of the modern-era Doctors! The Tenth is bogged in the current comics’ status quo, Eleven and Twelve face revamps of classic-Who adversaries I don’t know, but the Ninth — my “first Doctor”, for the record — wins with Rose Tyler and Captain Jack at his side against a “geohacker” who reshapes planetary surfaces like a bored intergalactic Banksy. All four stories get each Doctor right and are worthy additions to any Whovian’s comics library. A trade collecting Titan’s first Twelve arc was one of my non-free FCBD purchases to support our local shops, so hopefully it’s more of the same niftiness.
Harley Quinn and the Red Power Ranger doing their exercises before assuming crowd-control and party-hearty duties.
4. Mooncop: A Tom Gauld Sampler (Drawn & Quarterly) — Reprints of the British cartoonist’s single-panel gags from The Guardian are great on their own, but the lead story, taken from the forthcoming graphic novel, is good quirky sci-fi about life on the still-desolate Moon in a time when the novelty of living on the Moon never quite took off. Gauld’s website contains more samples and pointers in case this wasn’t nearly enough, which it wasn’t. More, please.
3. Legend of Korra/How to Train Your Dragon/Plants vs. Zombies (Dark Horse Comics) — The Airbender/Korra universe always wins at FCBD, and the streak continues here with the origin of how Korra met her dog. I think. I’ve never seen an episode of either show, but in print they always impress me. Likewise the Dragon short gives cast members a chance to tell their favorite dragon tales with varying degrees of unaware humor, but all tie together at the end with a heartfelt nod to Hiccup’s dearly departed father, of which I approve. I’ve still never played Plants vs. Zombies, but this year’s story (versus a mad scientist zombie) is more coherent and funnier than last year’s. Well met.
2. Science Comics (First Second) — The title says it all: comics about science, and not necessarily just for the kiddos. In story #2, Jon Chad delivers a handy precis on the wide world of volcanology and answers the important issue of “why volcanoes”, but I’m even more enamored of story #1, in which Maris Wicks tells the inspiring true story of how her double-proficiency in comics and oceanography led her to taking scuba lessons for art’s sake. Many folks are lucky if they can do one thing they really love; Wicks is the rare victor to realize you don’t have to settle for just one.
1. Spongebob Freestyle Funnies (United Plankton Pictures) — Maris Wicks completists can then move on to this one, in which she has a two-pager about underwater mountains. There’s also a mostly okay opener by Israel Sanchez (I haven’t watched enough Spongebob to know that his arms can regenerate, but okay, sure) and a one-pager by James Kochalka called “Patrick’s Guide to Getting Stuff for Free” that had me in stitches (“#4: draw a picture of it and pretend that it’s real”), but the winner and champion of Free Comic Book Day 2016 stars Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, in a super-hero throwback tale written by old favorite Evan Dorkin (Beasts of Burden, Eltingville) and illustrated by Ramona Fradon, a longtime DC Comics artist who graced the ’60s through the early ’80s with work on the original Aquaman and the long-running Super-Friends comic based on ye olde cartoon. To have her drawing a spiffy Aquaman parody in the classic action-adventure mold after so many years in retirement is one of the most brilliant ideas any publisher will have this year.
And that’s the free reading pile that was, which has given me quite a few spending ideas. See you next year!
Our Free Comic Book Day 2016 Cosplayer of the Year: the unbeatable Squirrel Girl! Buy her amazing comic now or you hate reading, fun, literacy, women, and cute furry animals.
Gathered together from the cosmic reaches of the universe, here in this great Hall of Heroes, are the most powerful forces of good ever assembled: Captain America! Deadpool! Bucky! Cartoon Hulk! The Lizard!
My wife and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. My 2016 birthday destination of choice: the northern Indiana city of Elkhart, with a bonus stopover in South Bend, both some 100+ miles north of here. Elkhart was regrettably cut a little short because the weather was miserable and tried to freeze us in our tracks, but we had enough fun to fill out another four-part miniseries starring a candy factory tour, a super-hero roadside attraction, and a selection of the “art” in Elkhart. Also, food.
Part Two of Four: a birthday celebration for a venerated super-hero at a museum made by a fan for fans.
Deep in the heart of Elkhart, the Hall of Heroes Museum is easy to miss because it’s in the middle of a wooded residential neighborhood. The museum’s owner and founder, Allen Stewart, is a real estate agent with a longtime passion for comics, super-heroes, and Captain America who has turned his collections into one large exhibition piece. He had the Museum built in his backyard, with plans to upgrade to a larger commercial space someday. Frankly, I felt weird parking in his lawn.
A fraction of the wall displays on hand, to say nothing of the longboxes containing 60,000+ comics spanning all the medium’s decades. I’ll admit it: his collection is bigger than mine.
We first hear about the Hall of Heroes from booths they set up at a few of our past cons. In previous entries we’ve shown readers pics of their Captain America actual-movie-prop shield signed on the inside by several cast members from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the Shelby Cobra that Tony Stark crash-landed on during suit-testing in the original Iron Man. When Anne and I were still gathering birthday ideas the week before, we just happened to catch a segment about the Hall of Heroes on one of our local morning shows and remembered this was a place we might want to check out. Nice timing, that.
One of their most treasured periodicals: a restored copy of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America Comics #1.
As luck would have it, we’d chosen to visit the day they’d planned a mini-fest in honor of Captain America’s birthday. Now 75 years old, the Star-Spangled Avenger is healthier than ever, ruling the American box office and sporting not one but two noble guys with the name and costume in Marvel’s current comics continuity. The bottom floor and a few outdoor party tents were set up for expanded collection viewing, a sort-of dealers’ room for a few other fans with comics to sell, that damaged Shelby Cobra, face-painting for the kiddos, special guest Allen Bellman (a Timely Comics artist as a teenager while Simon and Kirby were serving overseas in WWII), and two local artists selling their own self-published wares.
And, of course, the one thing every successful comic book party needs: cosplayers!
Even in a small-town costume gathering dozens of miles from the nearest major convention center, there’s no escaping Mandatory Deadpool, seen here with A-list film star Bucky the Winter Soldier.
Part of the first floor and all of the second are devoted to the bulk of Stewart’s impressive trove of comics, books, toys, high-end statues, and other nifty hobby collectibles. Guys like me have seen our share of action figures at cons, but they’re always boxed, stacked, hanging, or otherwise unnaturally shackled. Most of the heroes in this Hall are unboxed, posed, free-standing display items grouped with their friends, enemies, and other corporate cohorts out in the open. Touching isn’t invited, but with some pieces, I couldn’t help stopping and staring.
A selection of Super-Friends, including those brave DC heroes who entertained us on Saturday mornings but were forbidden inside the DC Comics universe.
The Justice League of America faces off against Starro the Conqueror in this statue reprising the cover of their first appearance in Brave & the Bold #28.
A true treasure: Ralph Hinkley’s actual suit from The Greatest American Hero, autographed by William Katt. (Anyone calling him “Ralph Hanley” is banned.)
One corner of the first floor is a virtual Batman shrine. One of the most beloved, most heavily merchandised super-heroes in the medium’s history deserves no less.
I didn’t ask if this was a real TV prop or just an amazing simulation, but its brilliance bowled me over either way: the Hall of Heroes has its own Batpole.
To be honest, the Hall of Heroes wasn’t exactly what I imagined we’d find after a nearly three-hour drive, but it’s a fun place to be. For a modest yet fair entry free, local fans and newcomers to super-heroing get to see a scintillating panoply of faces and universes, giving them a better appreciation and a deeper dive into the vast imaginary worlds of Marvel, DC, and more. Only a fraction of a fraction of those characters have ever made the transition to summer action blockbuster event movies and are likely strangers to the general public. Stewart’s Hall of Heroes is a neat diversion, a potential educational tool, and maybe even a handy gateway to new reading possibilities for kids and adults alike.
It might even spur new collectors into the hobby, though some rookies might do well to keep their expectations realistic and their hopes grounded. We chatted briefly with one young starry-eyed lady who asked if I have any comics (I casually mentioned “some longboxes”) and bragged that her boyfriend owns “a dozen boxes worth a million dollars!” I thought about my thirty-seven years of comics fandom, my 50+ longboxes, many years spent skimming Overstreet price guides, and that one short time I tried eBay on for size, and I had to fight the urge to reach over and pat her on the head.
To be fair, though, based on what we saw of Stewart’s own accumulations, he would’ve had full bragging rights to come up and pat me on the head.
Marc McClure and Michael Landes in a tale that should be called “The Jimmy Olsen of Two Worlds!”
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: June 10th and 11th, my wife Anne and I attended the 38th annual Superman Celebration in the city of Metropolis, Illinois. In Part One you met two of the headliners, Mehcad Brooks and Twilight’s Peter Facinelli from TV’s Supergirl. Brooks was one of three actors on hand who’s played Jimmy Olsen to someone else’s Kryptonian hero. Pictured above: Marc McClure, costar of the four Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve; and Michael Landes, costar of the first season of the ’90s series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. My wife likes to describe the weekend as a veritable “Jimmypalooza”.
Actors weren’t the only guests around. We also had the pleasure of meeting director Jon Schnepps and producer Holly Payne, the minds behind the recent documentary The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?, the astonishing true story of that time Nicolas Cage, director Tim Burton, and writer Kevin Smith tried and failed to make a, uh, truly unique Superman film together. I’ve been wanting to see this for months even though I’m afraid to see it for myself.
Photo courtesy of the Department of Not Sure Why We Didn’t Just Take Their Photo When We Met Them.
Over in Artists Alley I had the chance to meet a pair of talented comics pros: Rick Burchett, one of the longtime contributors to DC’s Batman: The Animated Series comics and, more recently, their Brave & the Bold kids’ series, of which he brought several trades for sale; and Jon Bogdanove, co-creator of John Henry Irons, a.k.a. Steel (the one brought to life by Shaquille O’Neal in the eponymous film). Before his long run on Superman: The Man of Steel, I was a big fan of his work on Marvel’s Power Pack, which he penciled and sometimes wrote for over two years at just the right moment for teenage me.
Hasty pic of Jon Bogdanove in a hurry. More on that in a future entry.
Also in Artists Alley was freelance writer Brian K. Morris, whom we first met at Gen Con and last saw at C2E2. He was on hand to sell lots of nifty reading matter and fill in gaps in my comics history knowledge. (I thought my subscription to Comics Buyer’s Guide had covered all the bases for me back in the day, but apparently not.) On Saturday we had the pleasure of watching him host a special presentation on the comics history of Superman and Batman, with a little help from some friends.
(You’ll see pics of his colorful stage companions in Part 3.)
Another local business, the Americana Hollywood Museum, brought in a classic-TV guest of their own for the occasion: Butch Patrick, the original Eddie Munster from The Munsters. He had his own tent on the north end of the main straightaway with a pair of most unusual exhibit pieces we’ll feature in another chapter. (Part Four or Five, maybe. We just got home this afternoon and I don’t have a fixed outline for this miniseries. Coming soon!)
(I’ve been captioning every photo for fun, but feel free to take a turn with this one.)
After our moment at the statue, Our Heroes adjourned to the main tent for an extended Q&A. Tidbits:
* McClure was in the first and third Back to the Future movies, but deleted from the second because test audiences thought it weird that Marty McFly’s brother was around but his sister wasn’t. (Wendie Jo Sperber was unavailable due to childbirth.) McClure had to pause quite a bit whenever questions were asked about Christopher Reeve. On the lighter side, he dislikes Henry Cavill’s Super-suit, likening its scaly design to something “like Aquaman or Lizard-Man.” He officially retired from acting at age 55 (he’s now 59) but has a small part — hopefully a recurring role — in the upcoming NBC/DC Comics sitcom Powerless, which he’s doing literally for the health insurance.
* Landes has a part in an upcoming Matthew McConaughey vehicle called Gold, but laments that actors with fourth, fifth, or lower billing in movies don’t get paid nearly as much as they used to, so any non-A-list actors not lucky enough to score TV gigs find themselves more and more having to “sing for my supper”, so to speak. He’ll next be seen this summer on the UK channel Sky 1 starring in an eight-episode action-adventure series called Hooten & the Lady (he’s the Hooten), alongside the likes of Dr. Quinn‘s Jane Russell and Jonathan Bailey, the meddlesome reporter nephew from Broadchurch.
Many kind words were shared about the late Jack Larson, the Jimmy Olsen from George Reeves’ Adventures of Superman. About Justin Whalin, the guy who took Landes’ job on Lois & Clark, not so much.
Not long after the Q&A came the meet-‘n’-greet with Michael Landes. At first I tried to think of something to say about Final Destination 2 besides raving about the opening car-crash stunt spectacular, but deferred to Anne’s kindnesses instead.
The helpful Celebration volunteer snapped two photos for us. Landes looks better in this one, so it wins. I, on the other hand, look like a drunken madman and have harshly cropped myself out for the sake of my own self-esteem.
McClure arrived in Metropolis the day before, so he was the first actor we met this weekend. Anne is a lifelong fan of Superman: The Movie and watched it so many times on videodisc (go look it up, children) that she memorized every single line and used to be able to perform all 2½ hours of it as a one-woman show.
And these weren’t all the colorful characters we saw at this year’s Superman Celebration. To be continued in Part Three’s epic-length cosplay photo gallery!
Arch-rivals Sinestro and Green Lantern in a rare team-up moment. Some of you may recognize the distinguished gentleman in the middle.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: June 10th and 11th, my wife Anne and I attended the 38th annual Superman Celebration in the city of Metropolis, Illinois. In Part One you met two of the headliners, Mehcad Brooks and Twilight’s Peter Facinelli from TV’s Supergirl. In Part Two you met the other guests, including two more famous Jimmy Olsens — Marc McClure from the four Superman films and Michael Landes from TV’s Lois & Clark.
As with any other comics-themed event, there shall always be cosplay. Rather than stagger our super-hero costume photo gallery across a few themed entry, right here is all the costumes fit to print. Most were from DC, but a few other superhumans infiltrated the proceedings from neighboring universes. Fortunately for them the citizens of Metropolis are welcoming to any and all — especially in times like these, when we need heroes now more than ever. All heroes.
(For value-added puzzle fun, see how many Supergirls you can count. If you can spot five or more, consider yourself an honorary CatCo Correspondent!)
Obviously we ought to have at least one Superman in the lineup, right? This one’s joined by old foe Solomon Grundy, Bane, Bizarro Supergirl, and Ant-Man, sneaking in from another universe, which is just the kind of thing Paul Rudd would do.
Just as we had more than one actor who’s played, so did we have more than one cosplayer with us in Marc McClure’s line as Jimmy Olsen, this one armed with camera and trademark bow tie.
In civilian life, the other Jimmy Olsen is local man Mike Meyer, who made headlines five years ago when some heartless bounder stole a chunk of his large collection of Superman comics and memorabilia. The perp was caught and, in an outpouring of love, fans nationwide sent him Super-donations to replenish his collection. The response was so overwhelming that he ended up donating a lot of it to others in turn. ‘Twas an honor to meet him in person.
What if baby Kal-El’s rocket landed in the USSR instead of in Kansas? You’d have the star of Mark Millar and Dave Johnson’s Elseworlds saga Superman: Red Son.
Batman and Robin emerge from the shadows because no one can resist posing in front of the Superman statue. Flaunting the emergency kryptonite he keeps in his utility belt seems kind of gauche, though.
Nearly every cosplay gallery we share has at least one costume we don’t recognize, and would love any labeling assistance we can get from You, The Viewers at Home. “Riddle me this!” says the Riddler, introducing today’s guest strangers. Little help? [UPDATED 6/14/2016, 10:45 p.m. EDT: super-special thanks to Holly at Bloggity Ramblings for recognizing Slenderman when memory failed me. The jury’s still out on Pajama Cowboy.]
Mr. Miracle and Green Arrow, fully accredited JLA members who occasionally suffer the indignity of being mistaken for Hawkeye or Iron Man. Kids clearly learn nothing in school these days.
Fire and Ice from the ’80s Justice League hang out with Stargirl from the Justice Society of America. Fans will notice she’s wielding the Cosmic Staff given to her by Jack Knight, the early-retired Starman.
Dr. Fate, DC’s own master of the mystic arts. Eagle-eyed viewers of NBC’s Constantine spotted his fabled Helmet of Nabu on a dusty shelf in at least one episode.
From the deepest depths of DC’s Who’s Who, it’s the animal-powered hero that men were asked to call…B’wana Beast! My wife thought he was just some dude who had the right idea about how to cope with the 90-degree heat. For once in his career, B’Wana Beast may have been the smartest of us all.
Friday at 5 p.m.: all-ages costume parade! Bonus points to Miss Martian there for thinking outside the box.
SECTION FOUR: HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE!
As mentioned briefly in Part Two, Saturday morning we attended a special presentation in which writer Brian K. Morris taught visitors about the rich, varied, occasionally outlandish history of the DC Comics universe with a little help from some special friends, most of whom are presented below. (Solomon Grundy, seen above, was also among their number.)
Cyclops from the X-Men movies, which begs an interesting question: what would happen if he aimed his ruby quartz rays through a piece of red kryptonite? Your move, fanfic writers.
This weekend Indy PopCon returned to the Indiana Convention Center for their the third annual gala of YouTube, gaming, podcasting, comics, voice actors, animation, and various other manifestations of pop and geek culture in general. My wife and I still regard 2014’s inaugural Indy PopCon as one of the best convention experiences we’ve ever had, but got a little lost when 2015’s event shifted focus toward luring in droves of younger fans. This time we were in the house Saturday for just a half-day with a short itinerary and muted expectations, but were happy to find ourselves another round of wacky fun.
We arrived at the Convention Center a little after 9:30 and left at 2:20. In between, we found quite a bit to do, a few interesting people to meet from the world of comics, and a few familiar faces from previous cons…
Sign in the middle of the hallway, held over from a previous Indy PopCon. If it’s still funny, no reason to junk it.
Unlike a lot of other cons, we didn’t have any major Hollywood names we were looking to meet, no famous actors with hours-long lines that we felt compelled to endure. The largest guest scheduled, Karen Gillan, regrettably canceled the Wednesday before due to shooting schedule changes for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Many fans were disappointed and received refunds for their photo ops and VIP package upcharges, but we’d already met her at last year’s one-shot Wizard World Indianapolis, so we were unaffected. A few other actors on the schedule were below our general radar, though I was tempted for a moment at the possibility of meeting Nolan North, famous video game voice actor from such franchises as Uncharted and Assassins Creed. Ultimately I opted out, but I was glad to see his line had a healthy turnout.
One guy I had to meet was the one YouTube star I recognized on sight: Jon Bailey, a.k.a. Epic Voice Guy, narrator of the long-running “Honest Trailers” series on the Screen Junkies channel (one of my very few YouTube subscriptions), along with the spinoff “Honest Game Trailers” over on Smosh Games (I check in once every 2-3 months). To be honest, I nearly missed him because for some reason, instead of seating him on the big autograph signing stage with the other YouTubers, or even giving him a table within 100 feet of them, he was relegated to an Artists Alley table and surrounded with lots of used-stuff dealers and fan groups on the opposite end of the show floor. Considering this is a guy whose team’s videos rack up one to three millions views apiece, I was baffled at the showrunners’ logic.
Epic Voice Guy had hoped to be moved to another table, but it hadn’t happened by the time we left. Oddly, we saw signs indicating other exhibitors had been relocated here and there as opportunities arose due to no-shows. Regardless: that’s Epic Voice Guy putting up with me in the lead photo, a pleasure to meet.
(At least one person who attended Saturday might know me as The One Guy in the Nexus Shirt. And I was gratified, for the first time in my life, to meet another human who recognized Nexus on sight. I wish I’d gotten his name and brought him a prize.)
Geek knitwear by Shye’s in Stitches included this wonderful Bender cap. Since it was gone the second time we walked by (replaced by a BB-8 cap), I trust it’s now found a loving forever home.
Reunions with folks we’ve met at other shows included:
* Brian K. Morris from Freelance Words, whom we just saw last week in Metropolis. This time he and his lovely wife were repping for Comicspriceguide.com, purveyors of neat writings and stuff from older collectors not totally unlike your humble aging blogging guy here. While we were chatting, they were given the official go-ahead from The Powers That Be to double their booth since the vendor assigned next to them was a no-show. (They were an odd choice of convention vendor anyway.) We helped them move a few small objects from A to B and therefore felt like honorary con volunteers. It’s nice to be useful.
* Writer Luther M. Siler, last seen at Starbase Indy and C2E2, having a great Saturday after a not-so-hot Friday. He collected way more cosplay photos than we did and has been sharing them on his own blog here and here, probably with one more gallery to come after Sunday’s over.
* Andy from Trek-rocker troupe Five Year Mission, from whom I intend to keep buying one CD per show till I’m caught up. They were likewise at Starbase Indy, where I bought their most recent album Spock’s Brain, which went on to become one of my favorite albums of 2015. This time I picked up their 2012 The Trouble with Tribbles EP but didn’t get a chance to listen to it before typing this. I assume it’s keen.
* Who North America once again brought all the Doctor Who things, including another Dalek, curiously standing on bathroom guard duty.
As equal opportunity destroyers, the Daleks care not for hot-topic debates and consider anyone who actually needs a bathroom to be human and therefore a victim to EXTERMINATE. So what I’m saying is obviously it’s a trap.
In our four-plus hours on premises we made time for two panels. At 11 a.m., a chat with the folks at Aw Yeah! Comics — one part indie publisher, one part comic-shop chain with locations in Muncie, IN; Skokie, IL; and Harrison, NY. We once visited the Muncie store at its previous location and identity and found it pretty inviting. Comics fans should recognize at least one, hopefully more, of the fine citizens on the panel.
Left to right: store employee Kyle; famous writer/co-owner Mark Waid; co-owner Franco, collaborator on neat books like Tiny Titans and Itty Bitty Hellboy; writer/co-owner/Professor Christy Blanch; and store employee Cy or Sy or something homophonous.
In addition to speaking on the tricks and tribulations of owning a comic shop in a sad era when not every state has one, various members of Team Aw Yeah! spoke on topics including:
* What it’s like being a woman in comic-shop owning (short answer: no fun dealing with dudes who can’t believe a woman would own a shop)
* How digital comics like Mark Waid’s Thrillbent imprint have not, in fact, killed print comics dead despite the industry’s doomsayers
* The Silver Age DC story “Superman Owes a Billion Dollars” that made a believer of Waid
* Waid, longtime Cap writer and superfan, swears Steve Rogers: Captain America #2 settles the record for the whole “Hydra Steve” debacle that has people flipping out and not using their imaginations
* Kyle’s hot screenplay for Gymkata 2, soon to be a major motion picture if there were a God of Gymkata who could order Hollywood around
After panel: lunch. Nearly all of Indianapolis’ vaunted food trucks abandoned us and left money on the table. Thankfully Indy PopCon was aware of their insolence and, for anyone in their right mind who dreads Convention Center food, made catering arrangements over at the Pan Am Plaza, which they rented this year to host their great big GFUEL eSports Arena, a dedicated three-day home for video gamers to gather at screens and play at each other.
You could join one of several computer huddles with other players, or have your choice of empty audience chairs and pretend other people playing on the big screens were like a movie without a plot. It was like watching your big brother hog the Nintendo, writ large.
Food options included a Hot Box Pizza tent, sandwiches from Triple Play BBQ, or — if you wanted to skip straight to dessert — frozen yogurt from a food truck called Pink Walrus. (We also saw them hanging around downtown for the Indy 500 Festival Parade a few weeks ago.) For us, ’twas sufficient. Thankfully there were no lines because the Arena was nearly empty and the food options weren’t heavily promoted in advance. I wasn’t even aware they existed, but Anne caught a mention on Indy PopCon’s Facebook page.
Also thankfully, we had pleasant walking weather on our side — no major storm fronts, and no Equatorial heat waves buffeting us on the walk from Pan Am Plaza back to the Convention Center. Things nevertheless nearly turned deadly for one second when the wind knocked over this sign, which came within a few inches of clobbering Anne.
At best, she might’ve gotten a tiny bruise. At worst, it could’ve slashed a femoral artery or something. We’re thinking about suing for eleventy million dollars for hypothetical emotional damage.
After lunch I wanted to attend a 1 p.m. panel starring this man: Mike Baron, kind of a major comics writer in the ’80s. He co-created two of my all-time favorite indie super-heroes, Nexus and the Badger; he wrote the first fourteen issues of Wally West’s post-Crisis Flash series; he was Marvel’s head Punisher writer from the late ’80s through the early ’90s; he wrote projects starring Deadman and Robotech; and so on.
He was, without hyperbole, the main reason I was here and bought tickets in the first place.
Nexus and Badger both left that kind of impression on teenage me and young-adult me.
He recently relaunched Badger through Devil’s Due/1First Comics. #5 hits stores this Wednesday. Next to him at the table was Nexus co-creator Steve Rude, whom I met at my first large-scale comic con, Wizard Chicago 1999, and again at Metropolis’ Superman Celebration in 2006. Unfortunately he wasn’t feeling well, limited himself to just drawing, and bowed out of the 1:00 “Nexus Fan Panel”, leaving Baron to hold court alone.
Baron took the stage a few minutes early with ten of us in the audience, which included the one distinguished gentleman who recognized my Nexus shirt, one Indy PopCon volunteer sitting in the back as assigned room monitor, and of course Anne. who I suspect wasn’t the only plus-one in the room who had no idea who he was. His mode of speaking and digressing sound pretty much like many of the eccentric yet forthright characters he’s written over the decades. We few old-timers tried to come up with questions for him to satisfy whatever curiosities we brought and to stave off the awkward silence of one of the smallest panels we’ve ever attended. (We may have seen smaller. Can’t remember offhand.)
Topics that came up while we tried vainly to ignore the anime soundtrack blaring through the walls from the meeting room next door:
* Though he was once from Wisconsin, he and his wife now live in Colorado.
* He’s been writing novels for the past five years, has a few available for sale online and more ideas in the pipeline.
* The Badger revival is initially a five-issue miniseries, with more specials to come in the near future. The next planned story, “Vichyssoise”, will see Badger and his wizard employer Ham traveling to France and being so offended by their treatment that Ham decides to take it over and make some changes. If you’ve read Badger in the past, or if you’re aware that the current miniseries has Our Hero wrestling Vladimir Putin, this isn’t a stretch.
* There’s talk of bringing Badger’s one First Comics graphic novel, Hexbreaker, back into print. This just so happened to be one of the books I brought him to sign, after I had artist Bill Reinhold sign it a few years ago at C2E2. (In my mind it’s one of the best martial arts tournaments ever illustrated in comics.)
* He and Rude are in the middle of bringing back Nexus as well, with Baron plotting and Rude both illustrating and scripting, which isn’t how they used to do it.
* He’s still very much into martial arts, a Badger signature element that made it stand out among its ’80s contemporaries.
* Other comics projects in various stages of planning and working include a werewolf detective series called Howl (with Shane Oakley), something I forgot to take notes for called Groovin’ High (with Rod Underhill), and a newly gestating book with one-time X-Men artist Paul Smith.
…and then the panel ended twenty minutes early, fairly unanimously. We all silently agreed this was a bit weirder than expected, but I was fine with that.
I had a few other comics people I wanted to see that day before we left. We’d previously met Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, the creators of the webcomic Little Guardians, at both C2E2 and Indiana Comic Con and gave them money each time, but this was the first time either of us remembered to ask for a photo.
Last but far from least: Scott Shaw! He was scheduled to appear previously at Indy PopCon, but this time let nothing stand in his way. Shaw! was a Hanna-Barbera animator for many a year and is best known to comics fans as the co-creator of DC’s Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, another childhood fave of mine that they recently tried to reboot and ruin. Shaw! confirmed his disapproval of their gritty new take, retold the story I’d once read in one of writer Mark Evanier’s columns about the time Shaw! won an ugly-Hawaiian-shirt contest at a con and nearly made the audience throw up, and really got a twinkle in his eye when he and my wife discovered they’re both fans of Forensic Files. While they enjoyed themselves, I stepped back and quietly enjoyed the Pig-Iron sketch I’d just bought.
This stupendous Hawaiian dinosaur shirt was a gift from a fan. They’ve always been his thing.
…and that concluded our day at Indy PopCon. I wasn’t in much of a mood for back-issue hunting, for meeting YouTubers I didn’t know, or checking in with the roughly twelve thousand different geek podcasters who manned a lot of really plain-looking tables, brought laptops and free stickers and not much else, and competed to see who could lure in the most customers who want to pay money to hear other people gab about stuff they read, watch, or play. I have a couple of friends into podcasting and I get the impression it’s a big, booming business. If that’s what the kids these days are spending money on, then more power to ’em. Same goes for YouTube all-stars and monetized cosplayers, really.
While pop and geek cultures moves on without us in business directions that we can’t wrap our aging heads around, we’ll be around in our own little fiefdom, eagerly looking forward to more works from the creators that still resonate with us, keeping tabs on the characters that haven’t been rebooted too far beyond recognition, venturing forth to conventions whose diversified portfolios intersect with our interests, and gabbing about the stuff we like for free, both as a labor of love and as a long-term loss leader for whatever we’re actually meant to be doing with the talents we’ve been granted.
We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.
The End. Thanks for reading. See you next show, I imagine!
Attentive readers may have noticed this con had absolutely nothing to do with Anne, and you’d be right to the extent that she remains my loyal partner at my side for such occasions, plus if we get legalistic and vindictive about it, she owed me from when I’ve done much the same for her in at past shows where I was her plus-one. But she got a photo with a Humane Society guy dressed in a dinosaur suit and calling himself Cupcake the Raptor, so let’s all agree to pretend this one moment balanced the scales.
Not the Bad News Bears reboot we want, but maybe the Police Academy reboot we need.
Midlife Crisis Crossover calls David Ayer’s Suicide Squad the best DC Comics film since The Dark Knight!
To be candid, that’s not too much of a compliment if you reconsider the competition. I suppose it’s a close race with The Losers, but I think of that more as a DC/Vertigo movie even though the original Losers were an old-time DC property. Suicide Squad has quite a few flaws in need of fixing — or, quite possibly, unfixing if you believe the press — but the overall studio-approved package contains a lot of well-crafted elements, some inspired performances, and a pretty faithful approximation of the 1980s Squad of my teenage years.
Short version for the unfamiliar: Academy Award Winner Viola Davis IS Amanda Waller, a tough-as-sledgehammers black-ops coordinator just barely operating under the auspices of the American government, as previously seen on Arrow and Justice League Unlimited. In a world where citizens are depressed and hate life because Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice just happened, Waller proposes the creation of Task Force X, a super-team that takes direct orders from her, as opposed to relying on the superheroes we know and love who’ve never cared much for military chain of command or bureaucracy in general. Waller reasons if the heroes won’t toe the line, then the answer is to coerce super-villains to work for them instead. Call it a military super-draft. If the inmates succeed at their assignments, they receive sentence reductions and/or bonus prison amenities; if they fail, instant execution. Waller’s not one for mannerly diplomatic negotiations or demerit slips.
Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Waller’s super-villain team-up includes:
* Will Smith as Deadshot, the Fresh Prince of Ballistics. An uncanny marksman who treats human life like safari quarry, with one exception: the 11-year-old daughter who knows Dad’s a bad man but loves him anyway. In the comics, this occasional Batman villain was a charter member of the ’80s Suicide Squad and one of the best things about the series, though Smith’s version is a lot more talkative.
* Margot Robbie (Wolf of Wall Street) as Harley Quinn, DC’s answer to Deadpool. She’s pretty much what you remember from Batman: the Animated Series except with a skimpy costume retooled for a mostly male audience, and a surprising amount of team spirit when the chips are down. She breathes more life into the movie than any of her teammates or even her beloved Puddin’.
* Jai Courtney, who usually ruins everything with his musclebound leading-mannequin act, is weaselly Australian bank robber Captain Boomerang, who had a long history of antagonizing the Flash before he and Deadshot became permanent Squad fixtures. This version carries more knives than boomerangs for some reason, but his wide-eyed antics are the most fun Courtney has ever been allowed in front of a camera. Either Ayer coached him really hard, or this is the real Courtney when studio execs aren’t trying to mold him into America’s Next Top Dolph Lundgren. But I’m disappointed that not once does Waller ever call him “Boomerbutt” like in the comics.
* Joel Kinnaman (the one good reason ever to watch AMC’s The Killing) is Rick Flag, the non-super no-nonsense team leader in charge of this motley crew, much like the comics, except here he’s saddled with an additional relationship because someone decided he needed feelings. That’s not the Rick Flag I know.
* Jay Hernandez (Syfy’s The Expanse) as the pyrokinetic El Diablo, which here is Spanish for “the Hispanic one”. He’s the most tragic and remorseful member of the team, whose dark past makes him a conscientious objector until circumstances force his hand and everyone has to remind him he’s in a super-hero film and is therefore subject to certain baseline expectations such as clobbering and invoking special effects. I wanted to see more of him because I brake for storylines about sinners seeking redemption.
* Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (slightly less malevolent in Oz) (and no, I don’t know how it’s pronounced) is buried under ninety pounds of fancy shoe leather as classic Batman villain Killer Croc, and crammed into maybe six minutes of screen time and given twenty-five words of dialogue, tops. He’s the mandatory Strong Guy and he’s slightly more intelligible than Bane was in The Dark Knight Rises.
* First-time movie actress Karen Fukuhara is Katana, who’s a hero and not a villain. In comics she was a member of Batman’s misfit super-team the Outsiders; here she’s Rick Flag’s executive assistant and has fewer lines and scenes than Killer Croc. Honestly, she could’ve been easily replaced with another armed, nameless soldier and the plot would’ve gone on as is. Her soul-catcher sword plays a part in the final battle, but could’ve been replaced easily with Boomerbutt’s knives. This is wrong.
* Adam Beach (Windtalkers), possibly the first Native American actor to have a speaking role in a major-company super-hero film, is a forgettable loser villain named Slipknot who fought Firestorm once or twice. His power is ropes. Here he’s mostly Super Zip-Line Man. Continuity buffs may recall he tagged along on the original Squad’s first mission, for all the good it did anyone.
Elsewhere in the film, there’s that darn Academy Award Winner Jared Leto as Extreme Method Joker. He looks funky and achieves creepiness once or twice, but he’s neither a Squad member nor the film’s Big Bad. Forty hours of makeup, months of driving his castmates up a wall, weeks of filming, and his part was trimmed back in the final cut to a handful of scenes and reduced from Overwhelming Madman to Doting White-Knight Boyfriend, which seems the opposite of every other Joker ever.
David Harbour (the Stranger Things police chief) is the government official who has to talk to Waller the most. Academy Award Winner Common pops in as the Tattooed Man for all of a single scene. Famous son Scott Eastwood is a military minion with more lines than Katana. News reports and IMDb confirm the tie-in cameo from a Justice League cast member who needs to rethink their impractical costume.
As for Paper Towns‘ Cara Delevingne…we’ll come back to her.
Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? Much of Suicide Squad is a murky yet frenetic style exercise starring bullets and bats and blades and Bats. In its better moments, this battle of Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys poses intriguing questions about reform, recidivism, and what happens when bad people try to do good, with varying levels of “bad” at play. Deadshot has a soft spot for fatherhood, but keeps on killing anyway because it’s what he does and it pays the bills. Harley is a good-girl-gone-bad, manipulated by male mind games into an anarchic, immoral free spirit. Boomerang is just a thug, lacking Deadshot’s soft spot and finesse, only lifting a finger when it saves his own life. El Diablo is the only member truly sorry for his crimes, now trying to exercise self-control to the point of shamed repression.
Waller forces them all into doing her bidding for humanity’s sake (and a selfish objective here and there) under threat of remote-detonating explosives planted inside them, but past a certain point Our Villains find a chance to escape, abandon the mission, and potentially let millions suffer…but then hold a group discussion about whether or not they should. A moody pep talk in an abandoned bar is a weird place for soul-searching, but the answers are revealing.
Nitpicking? That same bar scene happens only because the characters mutually agree to pull the movie’s emergency brake and grind everything to a halt for ten minutes of chitchat, despite everything going on outside. Out of context it’s a well-played emotional showcase for the principals involved; in context, the entire city should’ve exploded while they were talking.
Other scenes show evidence of ADR to dub in lines as added jokes, exposition, hole-patching, or general elimination of any quiet spaces. More irritating on a sound level: that tired K-Tel soundtrack has GOT to go. The first hour is saturated with your parents’ favorite FM-radio songs and all but begs for an eventual Suicide Squad Midnight Sing-Along re-release for the over-40 set. Any movie that uses “Bohemian Rhapsody” invokes Wayne’s World memories and jolts me right out, and I’d be grateful if the copyright holders of “Spirit in the Sky” and “Sympathy for the Devil” would consider saying “no” to the next sixty Hollywood productions that ask to license them. Next time, Hollywood, might I suggest John Wesley Harding’s “The Devil in Me”? Maybe some Social Distortion, or some previously unused Leonard Cohen? Lotta songs out there about bad people rethinking their actions if you actually look around.
Suicide Squad hums along like a well-oiled engine when it keeps the action street-level and the focus on the team chemistry, but eventually the money-men dictated that it switch gears into family-friendly summer-action-blockbuster mode and show Our Villains staving off the End of the World even though they’re better equipped to take on militias and terrorists than to take down eldritch demon mages from beyond. Enter the film’s true Big Bad — Cara Delevingne as basically Zuul. She and her brother, an extra-tall fire sorcerer mummy, are sporting frequently fake-looking Power Rangers villain armor, downconverting entire neighborhoods into X-Men: Apocalypse debris, replicating hundreds of magic demon soldiers so that Our Villains can use their mad murdering skills on monsters instead of on fellow humans because PG-13, and generating the kind of space-laser light-show finale that’s probably mandatory for 3-D showings. At one point she performs a sort of mid-battle jump to avoid taking damage, and I thought to myself in Venkman’s voice. “Nimble little minx, isn’t she?” And the movie lost my attention for another minute or two.
There’s also one or two bits of the ending that ring as too happy and contrived and contrary to the overall tone, like bones tossed to focus groups who insisted they get something heartwarming in exchange for their two hours spent.
So what’s to like? As conceived by co-creators John Ostrander and Luke McDonnell, the ’80s Suicide Squad series was The Dirty Dozen for comics in an era before antiheroes became commonplace and overdone. The give-and-take between well-known rogues, the grim-‘n’-gritty showdowns in which both sides were likely to have permanent casualties, the surprise characters added to the mix from time to time, the frequent angst over the heavy costs of doing good — it was a daring, unpredictable departure from standard super-heroics.
When David Ayer and gang are allowed that same latitude — to do their own thing, to shatter the corporate tentpole mold in a hail of gunfire and collateral damage — this rendition hits the same targets with a subversive verve. The big batch of character intros weighs down the first hour and seems a bit out-of-order and repetitive, but adds to the overall Big Picture if you step back and let it sink in while the team speeds ahead and leaves you contemplating their dust.
Smith, Robbie, and Hernandez are the Serious Drama VIPs, with Robbie double-majoring in buoyant comic relief as counterbalance to this occasionally too-macho boys’ club. But everyone takes a back seat to Viola Davis, who isn’t remotely repeating the same taskmaster she plays on How to Get Away With Murder. Her version of Amanda Waller lives out that TV title for real, ruling over this literally killer ensemble with a strict hand, sometimes shocking them and the audience in demonstrating how far she’ll go to protect her country and save her own neck, and not always in that order.
If you buy into the extensive setup and find it in you to root for these evil characters before they get down to business, it’s easier later to forgive the second hour’s major-studio clichés of video-game monster shootout leading to big flashy finale made of explosions. If this were the year’s only super-hero film and we weren’t seeing so many Armageddons in a row, theirs might feel more serviceable and less repetitive. The climax is its weakest link, but the actors do everything they can to compensate with the talents and tools at hand. After the letdowns of the last several DC films, Suicide Squad‘s overall average is closer to an A-game performance than they’ve come in a long time.
If it helps, I would also tentatively dub this the Greatest Jai Courtney Film of All Time.
How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene during the Suicide Squad end credits — after the main-cast highlights but before the fine print, which also includes a lengthy shout-out to the various comics creators whose ideas fed into this film, with the afore-mentioned Ostrander and McDonnell receiving top billing of that section. (Ostrander also receives a shout-out within the movie; if McDonnell received a similar nod, I missed it.)
About that end-credits scene: for those who fled the theater prematurely and really want to know without seeing it a second time…
…
[insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship]
…
…Amanda Waller meets Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne for dinner and thanks him for pulling some strings that will prevent her from being called out and prosecuted for her various losses and lapses over the preceding two hours. In exchange she gives him a binder that’s like the first edition of Who’s Who in the DC Universe, containing dossiers on the characters we’ve just met as well as the heroes from other DC films past and future.
They’re nonetheless testy with each other. Waller hints that she’s aware of his nighttime activities and mocks his comparatively goody-goody crimefighting methods. (“You value friends. I value leverage.”) Wayne responds in kind that he knows what she did last summer and leaves her with a word of advice about her precious, extralegal Task Force X: “Shut it down or we’ll take it down.”
So if the DC Cinematic Universe doesn’t crash and burn under the artless demands of tone-deaf WB figureheads, someday we might be in for a wild, crowded crossover event. Fingers crossed.
It’s that time of year again! Anne and I spent this weekend at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we generally had a blast surrounded by fellow fans of comics and genre TV/movies even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after three days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things.
In the first of our mandatory cosplay galleries, from the heart of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center we focus on the ubiquitous citizens of the DC Comics Universe — most, but not all, from the adjunct DC Cinematic Universe, including a special spotlight on a fun, silent skit we saw go down Sunday afternoon in the main lobby, in which Our Heroes from that recent #1 film meet an unstoppable force from another comic-book universe.
In a convention where roughly one out of every five attendees was dressed as Harley Quinn, we were worried about the state of this year’s cosplay, but were happy to run into some inspired choices. First up: the less common but no less celebrated DC heroes and villains:
Dr. Fate has been wielding magic and visiting phantasmagorical dimensions since 1940 and thinks it’s totally unfair that Dr. Strange gets a movie first.
DC Villains united! Luthor, Bane, Reverse Flash, and the Riddler representing for the not-Harley side of evil.
Pause for itty-bitty sampling from the wide, wide, wide world of Harley Quinns. I’m sure 99% of the Harley cosplayers are good people, but we’ve been doing so many cons over the past several years that, unless we’re seeing a multitude of creative variants (cf. Deadpool), we’re having trouble convincing ourselves to take pics of the same two or three costumes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Joker and the kind of Harley for which it’s tough to write a caption. Lurking in the background is Uka Uka from the old Crash Bandicoot games.
And then there was that Sunday afternoon showdown, in which the cast of Suicide Squad faced their least nonsensical opponent yet: Negan from The Walking Dead.
Before someone got her into this mess, Amanda Waller had been walking around, pushing buttons on a phone, and trying to make people explode. That’s Joker’s kind of woman.
It’s that time of year again! Anne and I spent this weekend at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we generally had a blast surrounded by fellow fans of comics and genre TV/movies even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after three days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things.
Tonight’s episode: the miniseries finale! The panels we saw! The comics-related pros I met! Some light whining, but not too much! And more!
Days before we stepped foot inside Illinois, Wizard World Chicago made headlines in advance with the disconcerting news that a gun dealership had purchased booth space inside Hall A. Some time later, follow-up reports claimed the folks at DS Arms would only be selling prop armaments, nothing real or explosive or requiring licenses or against the show’s own no-actual-weapons policy. I anticipated a modicum of protest drama upon arrival, maybe even the opportunity to take photos like a real comics journalist. I’m not sure if I was relieved or disappointed when the Chicago Tribune reported that WWC booted them from the premises shortly after opening on Thursday. My chance to take photos of a real live controversy evaporated.
(Anyone who’s attending Dragon*Con next weekend will have the chance to see some of their weapons and volunteers on site as part of an armory exhibit. Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has confirmed DS Arms won’t have an official vendor booth, but they’ll have a presence in other, less overtly labeled ways.)
Our three-day Wizard World Chicago weekend had its occasional snags, none of them related to gunpowder but at least one of them involving destructive forces: a severe thunderstorm that, combined with the eternal Chicago road construction, brought traffic to a standstill on the last leg of our usual three-hour drive to Rosemont on Friday.
I-90 is never my favorite stretch of road on a sunny day, let alone when other drivers have valid reasons for going a fraction of the speed limit.
To forestall another potential disaster, before heading over to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center we first ate lunch at the McDonald’s down the street so we could avoid con food for the rest of the day. We’d also been forewarned that on Thursday the bridge connecting the main parking garage to the convention center had been closed off as a security decision, forcing all attendees to enter through the same ground-level doors and submit to bag searches and handheld metal detectors. Fortunately a quick online check-in told us WWC and the center had reversed that inconvenience and reopened all the skywalks, but staffed them with separate security teams. Given the increasingly disheartening headlines we’ve been seeing throughout 2016 regarding tragedies at public gatherings, it was hard to complain. And to their credit, their searches were pretty much the opposite of invasive.
(Almost to a fault. I wasn’t told to empty my pockets, so whenever the detectors got a ping from my car keys, instead of asking me to empty them, they just asked me what was in my pockets and trusted my answer. I guess it’s nice to know I have such a reassuring demeanor and no compelling reason to sneak a tiny handgun inside.)
Artists Alley was among our first stops on Friday. In my mind its artisans and dealers broke down roughly as follows:
Longtime MCC readers will note the majority of this list doesn’t match my shopping patterns. I stopped at so few tables on Friday afternoon that I insisted on a second walkthrough on Sunday before we left, just in case we’d missed something awesome. I made sure to include the two farthest rows that were squashed against each other next to a pair of forgotten bathrooms, all of them forming a sort of forlorn, abandoned colony. The encore didn’t make a wide difference.
Regardless, the following creators successfully sold me new reading materials that I look forward to consuming in the future:
Jai Nitz, writer and co-creator of the most recent version of DC Comics’ El Diablo, later loosely adapted for the screen in Suicide Squad. The original miniseries sold about eight or nine copies, but was collected in a trade anyway for the movie fans.
Greg Weisman, best known as a TV producer on past series such as Disney’s Gargoyles, Young Justice, and Star Wars Rebels. I remember his comics work as far back as DC’s post-Crisis Captain Atom and thought his recent Kanan series was the most initially interesting among Marvel’s Star Wars launch titles.
We met Trevor Mueller at previous cons, but this time I made a point of picking up print copies of his Harvey Award-nominated all-ages webcomic Albert the Alien.
Pictured at right is Dr. Travis Langley, a psychology professor at Henderson State University who also writes books examining the inner workings of the various fictional characters everyone loves. His most recent book, Game of Thrones Psychology: The Mind is Dark and Full of Terrors, was selling impressively a the show. Also on hand but not pictured was his son Alex, an author in his own right with works published in a geek-humor vein.
Not pictured:
* Russell Lissau, one of the few regulars who now recognizes us on sight because we keep meeting again and again at these Chicago shows. His self-published Omega Comics are available both in print and digitally through comiXology.
* Steve Horton, whose creator-owned works include Amala’s Blade at Dark Horse Comics and the now-in-progress science fiction saga Satellite Falling at IDW. Featuring art by Steve Thompson, the latter was unquestionably the best-looking comic I saw at the show.
That’s regrettably, virtually it (save a few trivial tidbits and the ending photo) for our Wizard World Chicago 2016 experience as it related to the medium of comic books and/or graphic storytelling. Of the comics-related panels on the schedule, most were tutorials for aspiring writers or artists, while several others focused on diversity in the medium and/or the fandom. I get the reasons for their existence and presumable popularity, but we attended none of these.
Early Friday, we made time for one autograph over in the actors’ section in Hall G: William Sadler, whom you’ve seen in things. He’s been the President of the United States of America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Iron Man 3), the Grim Reaper (Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), an ex-military mass murderer (Die Hard 2), a greedy fireman turned treasure hunter (I was among the few who paid to see 1992’s Trespass in theaters), a future covert-ops manipulator (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), a loving father killed off in the pilot (Hawaii Five-O), and more more more.
Of all the things, my wife decided to bring up his brief recurring role on Roseanne. He cheerfully remembered the character!
We also attended his Friday afternoon Q&A, which was enjoyable except for the fifteen or twenty minutes of excruciating annoyance when some bottom-feeder pulled a fire alarm in the conference center that rang and rang and rang and rang and rang AND RANG AND RANG AND RANG AND RANG AND RANG till someone finally showed up to shut it off.
There was also that awkward moment when one fan cosplayer approached the microphone in the middle of the room and, while asking his question, thought it was a smart idea to raise his prop gun and point it at Sadler on stage. Sadler recognized it for what it was and quickly tossed in a word of assurance to the WWC security guys who were visibly tensing up at that exact awkward moment.
“Hi, I’m Bill Sadler! You may remember me from such films as ALL OF THEM.”
Otherwise, interesting panel with a cheerful guest, though he had to pause a moment when someone named Julie called his phone while he was talking. Random sample Q&A tidbits:
* Childhood likes include old Fantastic Four comics and the TV show Combat
* A wartime trench scene from the Tales from the Crypt pilot had to be abandoned for a while because someone thought it was a smart idea to construct it entirely from fresh, genuine, authentically pungent farm manure
* Thinks Kinsey is among his most underrated films and heaped praise upon director Bill Condon
* Was once a standup comic; knew music before he became an actor, well enough to write the Bogus Journey “Reaper Rap” himself as well as a couple of songs for the UPN series Roswell, in which he was the town sheriff
* Next appearance will be in an episode of the upcoming Epix series Berlin Station
The next panel in the same room had been completely off my radar till we saw it listed on the sign outside: a special screening of Amazon’s pilot for a proposed reboot of The Tick. I was a fan of the original New England Comics version way back when and was excited to learn creator Ben Edlund would be hosting the screening and doing a short Q&A afterward with a couple of the show’s stars.
About that pilot: the new Tick is Peter Serafinowicz, best known as Simon Pegg’s stodgy, short-lived roommate in Shaun of the Dead, or as Andy’s immature British royalty pal Eddie from two episodes of Parks & Rec. His Tick voice is a spot-on reproduction of Townsend Coleman’s animated version, and, more importantly, he has the jaw for it. The new version is set against a grim-‘n’-gritty backdrop not unlike the DC Cinematic Universe, where the criminals are merciless and the violence is disturbing and not-comedic, but Our Hero drops cluelessly yet valiantly into action along with the all-new Arthur (Griffin Newman from HBO’s Vinyl), reimagined as a jittery nebbish, a super-hero fan with a tragic past, who needs medicine and psychoanalysis and maybe isn’t ready to wear a super-suit and fight crime in his condition, but ends up having to anyway because “NO” isn’t in the Tick’s vocabulary.
Edlund mentioned the pilot would be the darkest episode of all, with future misadventures (should it go to series) getting lighter as it goes. As directed by celebrated cinematographer Wally Pfister (not remotely celebrated for his directorial debut Transcendence), the pilot looks expensive and shadowy and disturbing in one or two parts, but we in the crowd laughed at most of the right parts, which speaks to the skills of screenwriter Edlund, whose post-comics Hollywood work you may have run into in such shows as Firefly, Angel, NBC’s Revolution, and Gotham (I’ll never forget Bullock shouting “WHAT’S ALTRUISM?”). I’m not an Amazon Prime customer, but I’d totally buy this on DVD someday if they make more.
After the credits rolled, Edlund introduced his two guests: young Griffin Newman, starstruck and happy just to be working; and — thoroughly unannounced by Wizard World or any other source in advance — Academy Award Nominee Jackie Earle Haley.
Rorschach strolls in, calm and smiling while dozens of audience jaws hit the floor hard enough to break teeth.
Most of us didn’t recognize Haley onscreen in his single scene as The Terror, the big villain behind all the evil shenanigans in the City. He was hidden under a heavy helmet and a layer or two of evil makeup, but wins the entire episode in a flashback with young Arthur involving the ol’ quarter-behind-the-ear trick and some tasty ice cream. Even if we had recognized him incognito, none of us could’ve predicted his equally brief and memorable appearance at the show.
“Hi, I’m Jackie Earle Haley! You might remember me from such films, but then I’d have to kill you.”
A select few audience members who had special cards under their seats had the surprise pleasure of attending an autograph signing with the trio afterward. We cursed our cardless seats and hoped at least to meet Edlund later in the weekend. We’d heard a rumor that he would have an Artists Alley table, but the number we were given corresponded to a support column between tables. We checked the column a few times over the next two days, but never once saw him hanging around it.
After that unexpected pleasure came our John Barrowman photo op, swift departure, dinner over at MB Financial Park so they’d validate our parking (Adobe Gila’s, fast service, dishes around $10 each, would eat there again), and check-in at our usual hotel a mile down the road. Anne and I aren’t party people, don’t drink, never get invited to do things after-hours at cons, and appreciate a decent hotel with lower prices and free parking.
* * * * *
As with last year, we chipped in a few extra bucks for VIP badges, which allowed us a half-hour early entry on Saturday. This advantage would’ve been more useful for any Saturday morning appointments or high-profile guests. We’d had one planned, but my wife was crushed to receive word that Kate Mulgrew had canceled at the last possible second, not even an hour after she had tweeted her followers about her imminent arrival in Chicago, unfortunately due to a sudden change in Orange is the New Black filming schedules. As the former head of Star Trek: Voyager, she’s the only major Trek series captain that my wife hasn’t met yet, and this isn’t the first time she’s stood her up at a con. We weren’t happy, but we were in no position to order her to show up. Wizard World dutifully refunded Anne’s prepaid photo-op ticket, and that’s all that could be done.
Most of our afternoon itinerary remained a logjam to come, but Mulgrew’s withdrawal freed up our Saturday morning more than we needed it to be. We were tempted to substitute a panel instead, a one-hour clubhouse for unrepentant DC movie fans who loved Batman vs. Superman and will defend it to the death by any means necessary possibly including repugnant ones, but I wasn’t sure if our silent, undercover, ironic presence would be welcome. I doubt I could’ve kept a straight face, so it’s just as well.
Instead we wandered the halls for a while, well before most of the guests or dealers had shown up. Membership has its privileges, I suppose.
Getting Michael J. Fox as a guest was a huge deal for Wizard World. He was at the top of our list of Actors We Couldn’t Possibly Afford to Meet. One-percenter fans on unlimited budgets had the snazziest opportunity of all: a group photo op with Fox and his Back to the Future costars Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd for around nine hundred bucks. The photos we’ve seen online do look cool.
Or you could meet this guy. The number of disgruntled customers who’ve shared their bad experiences with us over the years is saddening and not really enticing us to add him to our want list.
We ran out of time and energy on Friday before we could peruse the dealers and exhibitors in the main section of Hall A, so they were high on our to-do list. I bought even less from them, though I’d like to give special thanks to One Stop Comics for being the first retailer ever to carry a copy of Nexus: Into the Past, which none of our local shops ordered and was nowhere to be found at our last several cons, not even the one where creators Mike Baron and Steve Rude were guests. I was elated to cross that off the high end of my graphic novel want list.
One of a few fun “how many heads do you recognize” floor mats by artist Terry Huddleston. I scored slightly better than Anne did in the video game section, but a not-pictured anime gallery had us both feeling ignorant.
Beth Zwolski Tobias, a.k.a. Chalk Girl, spent the weekend making elaborate chalk art live while onlookers watched and bemoaned how they can barely piece two stick figures together. Her official site has time-lapse videos of her WWC weekend works, along with shots of many other past pieces including one of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which means now you’re required by internet law to go check out her stuff.
Rather than walk a mile or two to the nearest professional restaurant, for lunch we settled on the Expoteria, a secret cafeteria whose entrance is hidden in the back wall of Hall A, easy to overlook, and closer to edible than their other grub stands. The two of us bought literally the last chicken tenders on hand, Anne receiving a full order of four tenders while I settled for chicken scrapple from the bottom of the pan that added up to 2¾ tenders but cost me full price anyway. Sincere apologies to fans in line behind me who had to settle instead for cafeteria “beef” burgers, overpriced lunchmeat sandwiches, or grilled chicken that looked like damp linoleum shards.
Saturday’s main event was the Back to the Future panel starring aforementioned superstars Fox, Thompson, and Lloyd, held in an upstairs ballroom that was packed near its capacity of 2200 by the time it started fifteen minutes late. Anne’s Christopher Lloyd VIP pass got her a cushy seat in the front section, while I was in the eighth row from the back, possibly in another ZIP code. My view was terrible, but the overweight fans on either side of me insisted on taking two seats apiece, leaving a half-seat of bonus elbow room on either side of me. I’m no size-zero specimen myself, so I refused to complain about this relative luxury. Sincere apologies to any fans who were turned away at the door and would’ve dearly loved having those two seats. If it had been up to me, they’d have been all yours.
Imagine the hijinks if WWC had somehow lured Crispin Glover back into the limelight.
All three seemed happy to be there, though Lloyd is a bit more reserved when not in character. Fox’s well-known case of Parkinson’s was noticeable only in the beginning syllables of some answers, which might take a few tries before launching ahead unimpeded. Even then, he just sounded mildly nervous, just as many folks might in front of a crowd of 2200.
Before the Q&A began, the moderator introduced a prerecorded segment from original BTTF screenwriter Bob Gale, greeting us with a two-question FAQ regarding the commonest topics in all of BTTF fandom.
Gale’s decrees were: (1) there will not be a BTTF 4 as long as Gale, director Robert Zemeckis, and any other directly interested parties are still alive; (2) there will not be a BTTF reboot as long as Gale, Zemeckis, and any other directly interested parties are still alive. Once the Q&A began, the moderator shot down any fans who tried in vain to ask theoretical questions about sequels or reboots anyway. A few fans who love redundant questions and/or who have knee-jerk allergies to wanton displays of authority may have been upset, but the “don’t ask about sequels or reboots” rule had been set forth from the get-go. In light of the concurrent headlines regarding moderator malfeasance at the same weekend’s MidAmeriCon II, Anne and I were surprised yet appreciative to see a rare instance of a panel moderator actually moderating so people can see what moderation looks like and why panel moderators are a necessary convention role.
Random sample Q&A tidbits:
* After Fox famously replaced original star Eric Stoltz and became the one true Marty McFly, Thompson appreciated that what they’d filmed prior to recasting be scrapped and reshot.
* Thompson still has her red wig from BTTF 2, which she stole after filming wrapped. Fox wishes he could’ve nabbed the guitar.
* Some light speculation ensued on how Marty and Doc first met, since they’re friends from the beginning. (No one mentioned it at the panel, but a recent comics miniseries from IDW had a short story answering that very question, co-authored by Gale. Worth checking out.)
* To one or two plot-nitpicking questions, the moderator recommended the fan consult with social media, where such topics have been debated to death and don’t directly concern the actors themselves.
* Fox loved the Enchantment Under the Sea guitar solo scene and studied hard with his teacher/consultant/whoever to approximate the movements and styles of specific famous guitarists for each section.
* Although the moderator stepped in on the question of “Who would you cast in a reboot?” the actors answered anyway. Should Zemeckis and Gale be assassinated and such a thing be greenlit, Fox thought the new Marty should be female; Thompson suggested Zoey Deutch as the new Lorraine, and Lloyd answered simply, “I would be happy to audition again.”
* The bugs Lloyd ate in one of the Addams Family movies weren’t real.
Exiting the ballroom at the same time as 2200 other fans was a time-consuming event in itself, riding the sluggish wave from the upper-floor conference rooms to the lower level across the main lobby and back to the actor booth areas and back up to the spacious photo-op area for our scheduled appointments with Rosario Dawson and the Daredevil trio.
Bonus cosplay! Kindasorta. To us it’s just an ordinary walk through a crowded convention.
And then we had to do an about-face and return to the upper-floor conference rooms to make use of my VIP badge for a special event: a solo musical performance by Christian Kane, costar of TNT’s Leverage and The Librarians.
The audience was given a thirty-second window to take photos before he began, then ordered by Kane’s right-hand man to stow all gadgets and enjoy the show the old-fashioned way — by sitting still, watching and listening.
Full disclosure: before this weekend, I had no idea Kane was a musician. Or that he has a loyal following, the self-styled Kaniacs, who love his music, have their own site, know all the words from the country-rock songs he’s recorded with his band, and knew said songs well enough to shout out the chords to him whenever he asked for reminders. Several of them sported official Kaniacs T-shirts. There were maybe two or three of us guys in a crowd of dozens of extremely excited women. One fan was lucky enough to be invited onstage with Kane and play guitar for one song while Kane sang. Mood lighting was in full effect. A cash bar was in the back, not unlike what we’d seen in multiple places around the show floor.
I, uh, I just liked him on Angel and Leverage. I tried not to feel like an intruder. Anne felt even more out of place sans Kane VIP badge, but she at least knows him from Leverage, and was allowed in as my plus-one. We each enjoyed the 45-minute gig in our own ways. At the end, the audience was gathered for group photos that Kane’s people should be sharing online in the future. (No sign of it yet as of this writing. Updates as they occur.)
Kane was honest about which songs he could or couldn’t perform solo on the spot. You can check out audience fave “House Rules” on YouTube, or choose from several mp3s on his official site.
After our evening as honorary Kaniacs, we had energy enough for one more panel: the guys from YouTube’s own Screen Junkies staging an all-new edition of “Movie Fights Live”, in which four of their movie-loving reps (including Epic Voice Guy Jon Bailey, whom we met at Indy Pop Con back in June) would debate movie questions — some typical, some stupid — with a quartet of fans from the audience.
Bailey is second from right. At far right is frequent channel host Hal Rudnick. The one in the redder shirt is Dan Murrell, whom I now consider the Smart One because I thought he did the finest job overall despite being so utterly robbed that I’m convinced the results were totally heinously fixed.
Sample debate question. Points should’ve been counted off just for misspelling “Shyamalan”.
I’m not recapping because I know they were filming and I’m assuming they’ll post it online on some future Thursday. (No sign of it yet as of this writing. Updates as they occur.) It was way more fun than I expected, though the greatest achievement in panel entertainment that entire weekend had to be watching Dan Murrell squirm when the terms of the cruel final question forced him to formulate a credible defense of the entire Twilight series. If Screen Junkies is a paying gig, Dan deserves a Christmas bonus for taking that bullet in the line of duty.
They had a meet-‘n’-greet afterward, but we were too tired to go on. Wearied departure led us to another parking-validation dinner over at MB Financial Park (Five Roses Pub, slow service, just-okay burgers, no urge to revisit) and returning to our hotel, where the Wi-Fi was running at free-AOL-disc speeds and leaving me no choice but to get some sleep.
* * * * *
We arrived at 8:30 a.m. Sunday, knowing the entire day would be the hardest — virtually nothing but lines, lines, lines. We steeled ourselves for a lot of standing, waiting, rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, sitting on bare concrete as needed, and draining our phone batters for amusement. Some time was passed and enjoyed in chatting with any other line-mates awake and game enough to return the courtesy. Line chats are always a favorite part of every con when they happen, though they’re not always guaranteed.
(Real talk from a life-long introvert: one photo-op line in particular had me so unengaged and left-out by the others around me, lost as they were in their own worlds and circles, that I got a little sullen over the silence and had trouble psyching myself up in time for jazz hands.)
Our early-VIP entry came in handier on Sunday than on Saturday because Anne still needed Christopher Lloyd’s autograph as part of her VIP experience. We were first in line at 9:30 for his 11:00 signing.
She packed this shirt specifically for her Kate Mulgrew photo op, but when that fell apart she postponed it till the day she got to meet the Klingon commander Kruge from Star Trek III.
Lloyd was twenty minutes late, so we kept our adulation short yet peppy. From there we made a beeline to Christian Kane’s autograph line, where I was second VIP up. All the other VIPs were attending his 11:00 Q&A, which I’d missed while waiting in line with Anne. I could’ve gone, but the Saturday evening shindig was satisfying enough for me. Also, CHRISTOPHER LLOYD.
Kane’s signing was scheduled at noon, immediately after his Q&A, which was on the opposite end of the convention center. He ran fifteen minutes late, which really isn’t bad for a Wizard World guest, all things considered. Again I kept it peppy and short, and added his signature to my Buffy/Angel collection.
From there we made another beeline to the line for Kane’s 12:45 photo op. If you look at all the schedules throughout the weekend, several actors were overextended like that, slated to pop here and there and everywhere with not much breathing space or travel time to keep traversing the length of the con back and forth. We weren’t there for the major X-Files reunion or the various Walking Dead guests or super-special guest Carrie Fisher (our Fisher story, in case you missed it), so I can only speculate how well they met their various appointments and demands.
To his credit, Kane was only eight minutes late to the photo op. I also couldn’t speculate on how things went with his autograph line either before or after, and I’d hate to ask. By the time I finished there, I’d now spent 4½ straight hours in lines and was miles away from “peppy”, the weight of the long weekend bearing down on me at last.
Lunch was overpriced convention hot dogs, because by then who cared. We returned to a few booths for last-minute purchases, did that one last walk through Artists Alley, did our 3:30 photo-op with Christopher Lloyd that was totally worth it, and fled the premises at the approximate walking speed of an elderly grandparent. We made one last, lengthy, unenthusiastic, parking-validation walk to MB Financial Park, where we bought a pair of three-dollar ice cream cones at the Sugar Factory so we wouldn’t have to shell out fifteen bucks for parking. Seriously, folks: unless the long walk is an issue, there’s no reason to pay fifteen bucks a day for Wizard World Chicago parking instead of cheap daily snacks at the Sugar Factory. Which, incidentally, gave me just the energy I needed to drive us out of Illinois alive.
Also, in between all the moments outlined above, we took cosplay photos wherever possible for You, The Viewers at Home, as shared in previous chapters. All a part of the service, a word here which means “giving people reasons to come here ever at all”. If you’re still reading down here around the 5000-word mark: hello! Thanks for being here and giving us moments of your time. There’s a 90% chance you’re just my wife, but that’s okay by me. You and I had fun, and that’s what matters, whether those around us get it or not. You’re the reason I share, write, and do things like this.
Well, that and the comics. Granted, there’s an entire semantics discussion to be had about an entertainment convention still calling itself a “Comic Con” even though the comics are a scant fraction of the total experience, in much the same way that only a scant fraction of today’s “comic books” are intentionally comical. The major publishers haven’t shown up in years. Not even the street-cred indies like Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, or Drawn & Quarterly have any representation. A handful of Big Two contributors and a whole lot of self-starters make the most of their time for the fans who really, sincerely appreciate their presence. I can’t donate to every artist in attendance, but I buy what I buy, based on the options provided and on my finicky criteria shaped by 37 years of comic collecting.
Between the comics and the actors, regardless of flaws, Wizard World Chicago keeps giving us good reasons to keep going. It’s funny that way, and so are we.
Whenever a comic shop closes its doors, Marvel kills off another Angel.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in July 2014 I expressed hopes and well wishes for the Android’s Dungeon, a new comic book shop that had opened in Avon, Indiana, in a heavily commercial area in otherwise comics-less Hendricks County. The owners were a nice young couple; the selection was diverse; the perks were kind. All signs pointed to potential success.
On August 31st, last Wednesday, the Android’s Dungeon observed one last New Comics Day before closing its doors for good.
It’s no secret that comic shops are one of the hardest small businesses to open nowadays. Between the fierce competition from other entertainment media and the advent of digital comics, the local comic shop isn’t an automatic draw for super-hero geeks anymore. Some fans press on nonetheless and cherish that dream of passing on a love of reading to others around them, of proselytizing for this wondrous medium, of building a new community focused on a single shared passion.
In my initial visits over their first few months, I saw the Dungeoneers implementing several fun ideas beyond merely ringing the cash register — a reading club, monthly prize drawings, free comic bags-and-boards with every purchase, in-store local artist signings, and more. Their first location was miles away from other Indy shops, which meant their objective wasn’t necessarily to poach clientele from existing shops, but rather to create and nurture a new fan base in their surrounding area. The crowds we saw were promising.
I had one concern early on: they ordered a lot of new singles every week. A lot. Like, three or four times as many copies as I’d see at my regular shop. Some of their new-comic stacks were so tall on the shelves, you’d need a weekly crowd the size of a Manhattan shop’s to break even. I have no idea how they calculated their initial orders, so for all I know maybe they did need all of those at first. They had more cover variants than any other shop around, all sold on the racks for cover price, same as the regular editions. That also differs from other shops’ strategies, but it’s certainly an option.
After the end of Year One, they were forced to relocate when their aging storefront proved more ramshackle than they’d realized, and their landlords turned somewhere between uncooperative and evil. As I recall from their old Facebook posts, the search for another Hendricks County location wasn’t easy and didn’t offer many viable alternatives. With much fanfare they eventually moved from Avon five miles south to Plainfield, from a decades-old hole-in-the-wall strip mall to a younger, fancier “lifestyle center” (read: outdoor shopping mall). They virtually quadrupled their square footage, and presumably their overhead, giving them more floor space than any other Indiana comic shop I’ve ever seen. The all-new all-different Android’s Dungeon would never be one of those decrepit, musty, 1980s shops where the back-issue boxes create a labyrinth that makes walking around the shop next to impossible. Of all their new perks, unlimited elbow room was among the most noticeable.
Meanwhile behind the scenes, things were falling apart.
Or so we found out a few months ago when Facebook deigned to show me one of their posts, which is a thing Facebook loathes doing for small businesses nowadays. (Or, y’know, for bloggers and other internet users who have a Facebook page that no one ever actually sees because their algorithms are miserable and miserly. LOUD COUGHING.) In the post in question, one owner invited followers to come in that weekend and “make me an offer on anything in the store”.
My stomach sank when I read that. They wasted no time in deleting their Facebook page since then, but I stopped what I was doing and perused their timeline for a bit, noticing signs of growing despondency over a confluence of problems. Large sums of money had been spent on pre-ordering comics for more than a few clients who never bothered to show up and pay for them, culminating in a recent declaration that all pull lists had been indefinitely suspended until and unless folks showed up, renewed their commitment, and paid for what they said they’d buy. Ordering a variety of products from different vendors besides just Diamond Distributors took a toll in keeping up with varying payment schedules. Worse still, at some point they’d hired another guy to assist with day-to-day operations who reportedly drove clients away and was ultimately more trouble than he was worth.
I don’t have screen shots of any of this, only my sympathetic memories of what I read in that one sitting. I shared one of their posts with my own Facebook friends — using my personal account rather than MCC’s so other humans might stand a greater than 5% chance of seeing it. But a large portion of my FB Friends list aren’t locals and couldn’t do much besides sigh. I took small comfort in the response I got from a fraction of the rest, but that’s not saying much. I make no secret that I’m kind of terrible at networking.
I wanted to make a point of driving out there sometime to spend some cash as a sign of support, but if you’ve been following MCC already, you should be well aware July and August weren’t docile, lifeless months for us. We’ve had a lot going on, and I regret I didn’t make the time till this Labor Day Weekend, when I discovered their current terminated status.
Part of me feels like part of the problem because I wasn’t there all the time, but I already have a regular comic shop where I’m on a first-name basis with the staff, they’ve got my peculiar wants covered, and their location is of utmost convenience in a way that no Hendricks County store will ever match. As I said, I came in a few times and donated to the cause by buying stuff, but I have neither the money nor the reading time to provide ongoing support for two different shops. Regardless, I feel sorry for their loss and can’t imagine what they’re going through right now as their hard-fought dream has come to an end.
I doubt it’ll make anyone involved feel remotely better, but if you’ll mote from my previous entry linked above, the following paragraph…
Curiously, the Android’s Dungeon isn’t the only new shop to open in central Indiana this year. I’m aware of two other newcomers some forty-odd minutes away from us. At a recent event I heard a sales pitch from one store owner who made sure I knew up front that he doesn’t order shelf copies of smaller titles. I didn’t have the heart to tell them those are about 85% of my monthly reading list. I know little else about the other new shop except that their name bugs me.
…an online spot-check tonight tells me the other two shops I mentioned both closed within a year. Kudos to the Dungeon for outlasting their combined life spans. Two years may not be a good run, but at least they ran for all they were worth.
It’s convention time yet again! This weekend my wife Anne and I have driven two hours southeast of Indianapolis to attend a show we’ve never done before, the seventh annual Cincinnati Comic Expo. In the past she and I have talked about trying cons in other Midwest cities, but the Expo is our first time venturing out to Ohio for one. In addition to proximity and complete lack of schedule conflict with anything else we had going on, CCE’s guest list includes a pair of actors we missed at previous cons who represented glaring holes in one of her themed autograph collections. With her birthday coming up in a few weeks, which usually means a one-day road trip somewhere, we agreed this would count as her early celebration.
Part One was our complete collection of cosplay photos. I regret we didn’t meet enough imaginative fans to fill five more galleries, but the truth is we accomplished so many of our goals on Friday that by 12:30 Saturday we’d checked off all the major items on our con to-do list and saw no point in trying to prolong the magic. Despite the reduced number of hours on the premises, we had a ball and would highly recommend the event to other fans.
Pictured above: Teddy Sears, a.k.a. Jay Garrick from The CW’s The Flash, my favorite show on the air, preparing to start its third season in October. I loved Sears’ performance as the beloved Flash of an alternate Earth who shows a shocking amount of weakness through the middle of the season, only to reveal a darker side toward the end that would be spoilers if you’re waiting for it to hit Netflix. He’ll next be seen in Fox’s upcoming 24: Legacy but would love to return to DC’s TV universe if time and story permitted. Very friendly guy who let me rattle on more than most actors normally do.
He was our main reason for sticking around Saturday, and was a little late like several other actors, but it was interesting to see who the early birds were on the guest list.
New rule: when actors are late for autograph sessions, con volunteers must regale us with song and dance till they arrive. #CCE16
Officially we weren’t at Cincy Comic Expo for me alone. Anne wanted to meet two people in particular, Star Wars actors that we could’ve met years ago if circumstances hadn’t worked against us. Gentleman #1: David Prowse, a.k.a. the man inside the Darth Vader suit for the original trilogy. He was a guest at Wizard World Chicago 1999, our first large-scale convention and our very first road trip together, but we were too overwhelmed by scope and too poor at the time to meet any of that show’s big Hollywood names.
Fun trivia: Prowse was a bodybuilder and trainer who helped Christopher Reeve get into shape for Superman: The Movie. Prowse pushed him so hard on day 1 that Reeve threw up later. Possibly the most sinister act Lord Vader ever committed was making Superman vomit.
Very special Star Wars guest #2: the one and only Billy Dee Williams, a.k.a. Lando Calrissian. He was previously a guest at 2002’s Star Wars Celebration II in Indianapolis, but by the time we’d escaped the 2½-hour line for Kenny Baker, we had autograph tickets to spare but just couldn’t bear the thought of another hours-long major-league wait. Here in 2016, we’ve now compensated for our underdeveloped stamina of fourteen years ago.
The suave, esteemed Mr. Williams made us feel crassly underdressed for the occasion.
Although Star Wars was a focal point for CCE this year, some guests had credits in other, differently legendary universes. Very few veterans of the world of Batman ’66 are still with us today, but one was in the house: Lee Meriwether — best known to us Gen-Xers as costar of Barnaby Jones reruns and one-time Catwoman in the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman movie.
MCC readers may remember the great John Barrowman from our Wizard World Chicago 2016 experience. Here he prepares to meet fans face-to-face for hours and hours with nary a fluctuation in energy levels.
John Barrowman may be the first actor I've seen signing con autographs while standing *in front of* his table. Awesome. #CCE16
I stopped watching Gotham partway into season 2, but bonus points are owed to anyone who remembers that time he was in an episode of The Office. More about him in a sec…
Naturally the con had more than just actors on the scene. Their Guest of Honor was the Stan Lee. Cincinnati thought so highly of him that Mayor John Cranley issued an official proclamation that Friday, September 23, 2016, would hereby be Stan Lee Day. I got the chance to meet him at Wizard World Chicago 2012 and would recommend the fleeting brush-with-greatness to anyone who hasn’t met him yet. Be warned: at age 93 Stan is winding down his convention circuit days and probably won’t be doing these shows much longer. He’s scheduled to return next spring for C2E2 2017, which their site currently touts as his final C2E2 appearance ever. Beyond that…I wouldn’t recommend procrastinating if you can help it.
I did make a point of saying hi to two longtime comics creators. First up: classic Marvel editor Larry Hama, who was a staffer for decades, renowned for his 13-year run as writer on their GI Joe series, and an early advocate for encouraging more than just white guys to join the field.
Currently he’s doing layouts for DC’s Deathstroke the Terminator, written by his former editorial protegé Christopher Priest. It was supposed to be a one-issue gig, but they keep needing him and as of this weekend he was working on issue #4. So far it’s my favorite DC Rebirth title.
Also in the house: artist Mark Bright, whose extensive resumé includes Power Man & Iron Fist, Iron Man (including Obadiah Stane’s final arc), Green Lantern, and a vastly underrated Falcon miniseries from back in the day. With the aforementioned Christopher Priest he co-created Quantum & Woody, one of my favorite ’90s titles; with the late Dwayne McDuffie, he launched Icon, my favorite Milestone Media title that really needs to be reprinted in full someday soon. In his time, Bright has drawn a lot of comics that rose to the tops of my reading piles.
He was a little late to his Saturday signing because he wanted to stop and say hi to Larry Hama first. 100% understandable. He was super excited to meet Billy Dee this weekend, too.
Other creators had lines of varying lengths, a couple of whom I regret missing. Arguably the biggest name in the house was controversial ’90s superstar Rob Liefeld — co-conspirator on Cable, Deadpool, and the original X-Force; founding member of Image Comics; and one-time star of a jeans commercial. He was the only artist with a booth over in the actors’ section. Superfans had the privilege of paying $150.00 for the Rob Liefeld Experience VIP admission package, which included lots of swag all covered in Rob Liefeld art, looking a bit like this enlarged New Mutants cover.
We were, shall we say, not there for the Rob Liefeld Experience.
I bought a few items for fun, but the important part was Anne enjoying the heck out of her early birthday shindig. And much enjoyment was had with the variety of displays and props provided courtesy of the 501st Legion and other local fan groups with fantastic ideas for taking the convention experience to a wilder level.
Anne climbing the nearest skyscraper Batman ’66 style, hoping the next celebrity to peek their head out the next window will be either Charo or Kate Mulgrew.
Preorder your Action Anne figure today! Accessories include a Bible, a replica of our dog Lucky, a stack of 8×10 hard plastic photo protectors, and a giant cookie.
Watto and the Jawas organize a swap meet, and Anne was there! Bargains found: zero.
Not everything was about her. Midday Friday, we experienced a bit of awkwardness when we tried to grab a seat at a table near the concession stands and rest for a few minutes, only to find we’d accidentally wandered into the Steve Jackson Games playtesting area. We own more than our share of board games but aren’t regular tabletop aficionados. Before I could sit down all the way, a very nice volunteer scrambled over and began to ask us which game we wanted to try. Rather than risk standing up some more, I grabbed the first game I saw standing nearby, and that’s how we wound up spending twenty minutes on a demo of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Board Game.
All things considered, I wouldn’t call it non-non-heinous.
The object: drive your time machine around the board and be the first to collect all the famous historical figures from the first movie, using the most bizarre movement methodology I’ve seen in a board game in years. I took to it more quickly than she did, so I tried not to nitpick when she moved incorrectly at least three times. The volunteer caught on and joined me in polite silence on that subject until our time was up and we had to go keep an appointment. As a thank-you for stopping by, the volunteer showered us with freebies — two Munchkin bookmarks, two free cards for two different Munchkin games that I have no use for, and a complete dice game called Trophy Buck that comes in a camouflaged pouch that would fit well on many Rob Liefeld costumes. She also gave us tickets for a prize drawing scheduled at 6 p.m.
I came away empty-handed, but milady won herself a stuffed, Fourth of July themed, Chibi-headed Cthulhu. Not really her thing. At all.
I like to think someday Chibithulhu will be bigger than Beanie Babies. Collectors strongly encouraged to send me your four-figure auction bids for this soon-to-be-classic collectors’ item right away. If no one bids, we feed it to the dog, as is the custom for unwanted stuffed animal prizes in our household.
To be sure, Cincy had other nifty random objects of fandom here and there around the show floor, many of them with Anne on the other side of the camera rather than playing MCC Lovely Assistant.
The Death Star Trench Run was a scale model of that classic scene in which the whiny dust-bowl bumpkin uses spirit-telekinesis to win a space carnival game with space torpedoes. At last, fans could have a turn replicating this feat.
With the American Presidential election six weeks away, the T-shirt makers at My Geekery have far better suggestions than literally anyone who threw their hat in the ring for real this year.
For $20 you could sit in this familiar-looking semi and pretend you’re Shia LaBeouf. You have fun with that.
Another high point of Cincy: this was the first convention we’ve ever attended at which I genuinely got excited about the food choices. For C2E2, Chicago’s McCormick Place makes a mean barbecue sandwich, but the Duke Energy Convention Center has them beat. Local restaurant Tom & Chee sponsors the con’s kid zone, has a catering truck on display, and has a booth selling a selection of their offbeat grilled cheese sandwiches. We have a Tom & Chee twenty minutes from our house, but I had no idea they brought scrumptious victuals with them.
With Tom & Chee, Skyline Chili, and LaRosa's Pizza in the house, for food alone #CCE16 is the greatest convention in American history.
My solid-A Friday dinner: their Grilled Cheese Donut (simple as it sounds, but TO DIE FOR), and the BBQ & Bacon topped with cheese, crumbled bacon, and BBQ potato chips.
We stayed over Friday night at the Hyatt across the street, one of the nicest we’ve ever seen. We got a nice discount thanks to the points I’ve saved up from our Wizard World Chicago stays as well as from some of our annual road trips.
Insider tip: if you drive into town, you can pay $30 for the Hyatt’s valet parking, or park for 24 hours for $15 in the third-party garage across the street. The entrance is down on 4th Street, just west of Elm. This is the view of the Hyatt lobby when you exit the garage skywalk.
Anne and I rarely stay at the hotels nearest to our conventions, partly to save money and partly to avoid loud parties. This show reminded us of one of the fun perks of said hotels: accidental brushes with greatness. When we left the con Friday to go check in, David Prowse was in the lobby on his motor scooter, chatting with fans. After we boarded the elevator to head up to our room, we were joined by David Mazouz with his head down, plus a motherly figure of some sort. Anne recognized and nodded at him, but otherwise kept it low-key. We don’t like to bother the actors when they’re “off the clock”, so to speak. They need breathing space just as much as we do.
Speaking of space…
Then there was the incident in which I came thiiiis close to ruining the convention for thousands of fans.
Early Saturday morning, we packed our bags and prepared to check out before returning to the con. I’m carrying a laptop bag, my conventioning carryall, and a large gym bag filled with all our laundry and the books I’d bought on Friday, including that weighty hardcover you see in the Larry Hama photo. It was heavy and kind of killing me. I expected my chronic back pain to kick in any second.
We and another older, non-geek couple wait patiently for an elevator to meet us at the ninth floor. The door opens. Four or five people are already inside, lined around the walls but leaving a good gap in the middle.
Anne’s in front of us four. Her eyes widen and she hesitates. A fairly muscled gentleman invites us aboard. She goes in first and I follow. I do an about-face toward the door and begin to step backward and to my right to make room for the other couple to join us. I know there’s someone scrunching into the corner behind me, so I’m trying not to back up too quickly.
Anne’s eyes grow to Powerpuff Girls size. She grabs the gym bag strap and yanks me forward. Hard. I presume I’m threatening the life of the corner dweller without realizing it. For a guy my size, I’m constantly trying to stay overly conscious of how much space I’m taking up in crowded areas, but I guessed by her reaction that I was about to miss the mark and injure someone.
The friendly muscle-guy says to me, “It’s okay.” I relax a tad, but keep myself locked in the same approved neutral position. Anne’s eyes contract only slightly.
The elevator lets us off at the main lobby with no further stops. The couple from our floor exits, then the two of us, then everyone else aboard.
As we’re walking to the front desk, she says to me in her sustained state of astonishment, “Do you know who that was?”
I was out of sight-line when we got on, then had my back to the guy in the corner for the whole ride. I confessed I didn’t get a good look at him.
“Stan. LEE.”
Now I have Powerpuff Girl eyes. And a slack jaw, and the sound of the world’s loudest needle-scratch clearing all other thoughts from my stunned brain.
I nearly snap my neck whipping around to look. Stan the Man and his friendly handler are walking away in the other direction, toward the hotel restaurant for breakfast before the mythmaker has to clock back in and go meet several thousand more fans over the next two days.
Me, oh, just nearly accidentally crushed Stan Lee to death in the hotel elevator with my heavy luggage, nbd. How's *your* morning? #CCE16
…and that’s the story of how my wife saved Stan Lee’s life and mine. If word had gotten out that Stan had to cancel his Saturday and Sunday appearances because some clumsy schmuck put him in the hospital, I doubt those thousands of fans would’ve let me leave town alive.
…
…and on that note of incredulity and relief, we conclude our Cincinnati Comic Expo 2016 experience. Look for future entries to cover what else we did in Cincinnati over that same weekend in a few future entries here on MCC.
Special thanks to the Duke Energy Convention Center for trumping both the Indiana Convention Center and Rosemont’s Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in one critical area: they leave the cel signals alone and make free live-tweeting possible for fans like me instead of being greed-heads about it. Sincerely appreciated.
Gotta love a convention center that doesn't throttle bandwidth and force fans to pay for Wi-Fi. Got a fine place here, Cincinnati. #CCE16
On the other hand, I do have one gripe about the Expo: their official Twitter account tried encouraging folks to live-tweet using the hashtag #CCE16. This acronym, which is also in use by another unrelated organization with an event coming up next month, went largely unheeded and outnumbered by folks using the more character-consumptive but fine-tuned #CincinnatiComicExpo instead. As a result, nearly all my #CCE16 hashtagging was a waste of time and I was largely exclaiming into a void occupied by a handful of awesome folks that I’d hug individually if I could. You can read more about my big corporate-hashtagging pet peeve in a previous MCC entry, “Dear Event Promoters: Please Don’t Make Us Pick Your Twitter Hashtag for You“.
when u live-tweet an event w/ the company's chosen hashtag versus what all the fans are actually using, then go check ur twitter stats like pic.twitter.com/EKkOTVPkF4
Will we attend again? Time will tell. If they can bring in Kate Mulgrew next year, I guarantee Anne will be there bright and early and banging on the doors till they let us in. Trust.
Baked goodie courtesy of the upstanding citizens at Max & Benny’s in Northbrook, IL.
If you were of a certain age in the ’90s, you watched Full House the sitcom on ABC’s TGIF. You dreamed of Full House: the Reunion Special. You binged on Netflix’s Fuller House, the sequel. And if you attended Wizard World Chicago 2016, you could eat Full House: the cookie! If the studio has their way, you’ll just never quit Full House for the rest of your life!
At every convention my wife and I attend, we’re bombarded on all sides by dealers and collectors trying to convince us to buy their new or used merchandise because it contains familiar faces and images, trying to jack into our childhood memories via colorful collectible Pavlovian tokens not unlike the above cookie, which would make a fine Golden Gate Bridge road-trip treat if you deleted that obtrusive corporate logo.
Merchandise is the bait, and our own nostalgia is meant to be the fishing line, reeling ourselves in to be netted and financially filleted.
Super-sized reproduction of Herb Trimpe and John Romita’s cover to Incredible Hulk #181 near the entrance to Cincinnati Comic Expo 2016, reminding you to think comics, buy comics, and please don’t leave unless you’re carrying at least six pounds of old comics in your bag.
We’re at an age where we no longer have the same old reflex responses to the same old prompts. Our early convention experiences saw us immersing ourselves in geek culture, wall-to-wall sensory overload from thousands upon thousands of comics, books, toys, costumes, knickknacks, DVDs, tapes, and other fanciful objects starring or rooting for the heroes and villains from our favorite fictional universes. Frequent overexposure in such wide-scale specialty-consumer playgrounds eventually begets a tolerance, when bedazzlement becomes expectation and what was shocking and awesome becomes status-quo interior decoration. In short, we’re so used to it that we utter “WHOA” a lot less often than we used to, and consequently have become slower on the draw with our wallets and our cameras alike.
At Indiana Comic Con 2016, Galactus reminds all who enter that if they really loved Jack Kirby, they’d go buy lots of back issues and reprints with his art in them. Or you can be reminded of the Fantastic Four instead, but that happens less often to a lot of fans nowadays.
I mean, sure, we still buy stuff, but the older you get, the more you accumulate, and the more room you need to store all your coveted treasures and junk. Some folks don’t mind moving into larger houses, building new sheds in the backyard, renting extra space from nearby storage facilities, or filling up their garage with boxes while their cars rot outside in the elements, thus nullifying the entire point of owning a garage in the first place. Sooner or later you have to draw a line on the amount of square footage you own or rent and say to yourself and to all these dealers, “I CAN’T TAKE ANYMORE!” No matter how intense your flashbacks are to your favorite episodes or issues, no matter how hard your inner child pouts and kicks and screams, you have to learn the self-control and the backbone to tell yourself no more.
Remember when you were five and they reran Looney Tunes cartoons on Saturday mornings or weekend afternoons? Porky Pig sure does! And he hopes you haven’t forgotten him or your cash!
I keep my nostalgia low-key nowadays, and get resentful when I think someone’s trying too obviously to pluck that particular heartstring without any other substantial reasons to care why they’re parading old-school stuff right at me. If it’s a really creative use of an intellectual property that provoke a deeper response than simply “Yes, I remember that person, place, thing, product, good, or service,” that’s cool. I’ll take a look.
Also worth noting: here in the 21st century, despite all the reboots and relaunches and protracted sequels and expanded extended extruded extraneous universes whose copyrights will never be allowed to expire, believe it or not we actually see new characters, worlds, and ideas popping up on occasion and converting us into their fans. We only have so much room in our heads for all these milieus, so sometimes that means we let go of other aging universes and let them fade into the distance behind us while we move on to greener, less crowded worlds with different perspectives, timelier attributes, and fresher takes on the moral and spiritual themes that resonate with us most in our respective walks today.
Nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s us. We’ve grown, but you haven’t changed and your owners are so very proud of that.
So yeah, I remember that face, and that face, and that one, and so on. We’ll let the younger generations pick up our grand tradition of stopping and staring at every scintillating sight and exclaiming to each other, “WOW, I REMEMBER THAT! SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!” while we keep on walking.
Well, four if you count The Flash, but they’re hardly an objective source on that.
It’s that time again! At long last my regular super-hero shows are seeing their season premieres on The CW this week and next — The Flash this past Tuesday, which I live-tweeted per personal standard procedure…
Barry's next masterstroke: give Caitlin a crash course in the 15 different sciences that his meddling wiped from her brain. #TheFlash
…followed by the relocated Supergirl this coming Monday, then Legends of Tomorrow the following Thursday. I don’t watch Arrow yet except for crossovers, but I can tell how Ollie and his aggravating pals are doing whenever other Twitter users start griping and throwing their phones at their TVs.
In the spirit of the proceedings, our local CW affiliate here in Indianapolis, WISH-TV channel 8, declared “Superhero Week” and has been featuring stories connected to the wonderful world of comics, possibly for the sake of hyping their own shows. Normally I’d toss them a Like in the appropriate social-media point of contact and leave it at that, but two of their segments spotlighted high achievers in the field of comics excellence that we previously covered here on Midlife Crisis Crossover. A third segment had a more personal connection to us.
Gathered together from the cosmic reaches of the universe, here in this great Hall of Heroes, are the most powerful collections of good ever assembled!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last May for my birthday weekend, we visited the Hall of Heroes up north in Elkhart, Indiana — one longtime super-hero fan’s toy, comic, and prop collections turned into a fun eye-candy museum. This week WISH-TV paid a visit and took a scenic video tour with owner Allen Stewart. Frankly, I’m not sure our humble photos can compete with a video tour. Video isn’t something we do here at MCC because it never occurs to us to try and I can imagine scores of things that would go wrong if we did.
I don’t read many webcomics because I’m sometimes a stodgy fussbudget about some aspects of new media, but I’m a big proponent of print collections.
Also previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: at three different conventions this year we met Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, Hoosier creators of the fantasy webcomic Little Guardians, whose official site contains the complete saga to date and offers extra tidbits a-plenty. WISH-TV visited their creative space, stepped back and gave them room to talk about the series, their creative process, and the fulfillment of designing a universe that readers love seeing explored.
To learn more about comics, be sure to visit your local library, stake out the 741.5-741.59 section, check out everything you find, and be prepared to fight other patrons for all the really good graphic novels and comic strip reprints.
Then there was the time WISH-TV drew connections between comics and reading, and the difficulties some youngsters can have in finding the right literary niche that speaks to them and opens their mind to the power of the written word, with or without pictures. They visited a local high school and chatted at length with one student who struggled for years with books and schoolwork alike, but who’s made tremendous strides in recent years thanks in no small part to finding a medium and format that resonated like no other.
Full disclosure: the student in that video segment is our nephew. As you can imagine, the story has been bandied about our Friends lists quite a bit the past few days.
Fuller disclosure as a grumpy but forgiving fan: I do recommend checking out the video on their site and skipping the accompanying transcript, which isn’t the best it could be. The story’s cumulative inelegant minutiae needed a heavy-handed red pen taken to some parts, and this entry very nearly took the form of a nostalgic diatribe called “Pow! Zap! Media Never Stops Making Batman ’66 Jokes When It Rediscovers Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Every Five Years”. My wife recommended heading in a different direction, and so here we are with a case made for the joys of reading wherever it’s waiting to be discovered, tinged with unabashed family pride.
And if any of these stories can pique a viewer’s interest in reading in general and/or graphic storytelling in particular, then Superhero Week wins on principle despite my urge to nitpick.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
