Always forward. Never backward.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

I will never finish binge-watching any series at the same time as the rest of the world. Never. TV has to wait its turn in line for my attention along with internet, writing, moviegoing, gaming, full-time day-jobbing, homeowning, husbanding, and whatever other errands and obligations lure me away from home. I get to things when I get to them even if it means I miss out on all the really cool chat circles.

By the time I held my personal Stranger Things marathon over Labor Day weekend, everyone else had already moved on to salivating over the nominal teaser for season 2 and whatever else was cool by then that I no longer remember. Without another three-day weekend at my disposal (alas, if only Halloween had been a federal holiday), I’m kinda proud I found time to finish Netflix’s Marvel’s Luke Cage before Christmas. Like the other Marvel series it has its flaws, but one of Cage‘s overarching themes resonated and stuck in my head even as the later episodes didn’t hold up to the promise of the first half.

(Some of this entry will have Luke Cage spoilers, but I assume if you’re interested in the show, you’ve already seen it and aren’t waiting for distant DVD release.)

The key line that has been bouncing around my head ever since came during one of the many heart-to-heart chats between our hero Cage and neighborhood mentor Pop: “Everyone’s got a gun. No one’s got a father.” As someone raised by Mom and Grandma, who later had a son and had to figure out fatherhood with only fictional role models to work from, I can’t deny the topic of deadbeat dads has influenced my life, as borne from my sports-free, handyman-less, anti-macho upbringing. I’m grateful the lower-class neighborhood of my childhood was more about comics and TV than about arsenals (except for occasional violent outbursts that at least didn’t involve bullets), but I wince to imagine what some minor American timeline fluctuations could’ve wrought upon my friends and me.

The effects of bad parenting permeate the entirety of Cage, most disturbingly of all with Cottonmouth and Mariah surviving their early years in Mama Mabel’s terror house, presumably after their parents failed or died. At first the cousins show talents that might let them rise above, but a life of everyday mayhem eventually warped them and spawned two of Harlem’s most powerful villains. Alfre Woodard has impressed in everything I’ve watched her in (remember when she and Picard had one of the best Star Trek arguments ever in First Contact?), but I really dug Mahershala Ali’s performance as Cornell “don’t call me Cottonmouth” Stokes, the frustrated potential piano genius who had to settle for ownership of Harlem’s Paradise as an outlet for his true passion while, behind the scenes, skewed family experiences led him to another, secret, more profitable, more shameful, survival-based career track. All he could do is what he was taught, which was more about evil than about music.

Meanwhile down in Georgia, li’l Carl Lucas and li’l Willis Stryker grow up as rival half-brothers in separate households thanks to an ostensibly holy man who played the field and neglected the consequences. And you know kids aren’t coming out proper or appreciated when they’re being thought of as “consequences” instead of as family, as sore spots instead of as sons. I’ve seen and lived out the canyon-sized rifts that can occur between half-siblings who never come together because of the sins of the parents. Sometimes the space between them is a chasm of eternal dead silence. Sometimes it’s an ugly gladiator arena for a never-ending battle over which kid is more “real” or whatever. I understand secondhand that stepchildren situations like the Brady Bunch have their own forms of strife, but watching two kids with the same dad be like, “My mom can beat up your mom!” was one of the hardest things to watch in Luke Cage.

Enter one man who could and did change so much for a lot of those Harlem kids: Frankie Faison as Pop, the most upright man in the neighborhood, a reformed gang-banger who came around and whose reputation and moral standings as an older adult were so sharp and so taken to heart, his barbershop was declared a no-fight zone by all the kids, gangs, and cliques around. Those first two episodes — in which he’s the Mickey to Luke’s Rocky Balboa, only wiser and less crotchety — deserve to have a textbook written around them about how to raise up new leaders in a generation that threatens to produce none of its own. I came away wanting Pop to be my adopted dad, and it broke my heart to watch his final moments when that chest-thumping fool Tone turned him into Black Uncle Ben. That wasn’t right, but sometimes that what happens to dads who care too much, I’m guessing, probably.

The topic of parenting has weighed especially heavily on my mind as I’ve watched America descend into panic, arguments, tantrums, and chaos in the wake of Election Day. So many things gone horribly wrong over the past year within every conceivable side. While I’ve kept my responses measured and infrequent while letting everyone around me have whatever primal-scream sessions will carry them through to their next, hopefully more informed and reasoned courses of action, I can’t help wondering how a lot of things could’ve gone a lot of different ways if better parents had shown up and taken life more responsibly, more seriously, and more maturely, and had buried their selfish predilections for prioritizing “fun” impulses and euphoria addictions over the younger flesh-‘n’-blood that needed their guidance and love, but instead suffered without, despite, or because of them.

…

Bringing it back to the geek level, a few other random thoughts:

* After Cottonmouth’s arc ended in such an abrupt and terrifying fashion, my interest level went waaaaay down. Despite my interest in the themes at play, I felt Diamondback’s wide-eyed, retro cornball approach would’ve been right at home fighting Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk. That’s not a compliment. Usually I bail right the heck out of any movie or show in which a villain begins misusing the Bible as their evil playbook, but I did what I could to see this through anyway and ignore his clichés.

* Same complaint I have about every Netflix show I’ve endured to date: just because you can make episodes any length you feel like doesn’t mean you should. It didn’t bother me as much with Jessica Jones, but Cage dragged a lot more than a jazzy big-city super-drama should. I got especially fussy when part 11 turned into a six-hour bottle episode about the basement at Harlem’s Paradise. I noticed and appreciated a few came in below the 50-minute mark, but future seasons desperately need some editors willing to make tough calls, trim the padding that they’re mistaking for texture, and stop imbuing Harlem with the numbing lethargy of Hershel’s farm from The Walking Dead season 2.

* If those Judas Bullets cost millions apiece, how did Mariah pull strings to afford enough clips for an entire SWAT team? And how’d they come up with so many on such short notice if they’re so pricey to produce?

* Misty Knight could be awesome at times, but whenever the plot required her to forget a few episodes’ worth of developments and turn on Cage in anger, that sort of Hollywood creakiness let me down. Rosario Dawson, on the other hand: 100%.

* Longtime MCC readers know I brake for anything and everything about The Wire, so obviously Cage earns 50x-multiplier bonus points for appearances by Kima Greggs (Misty Knight’s first captain), Cheese (Method Man as himself in one of the best scenes), Maury Levy (from evil attorney to the mad scientist who made Cage happen), Omar’s mentor Butchie (blink and miss him as a news vendor in episode 1), and, of course, corrupt Commissioner Burrell finding redemption here as Pop himself.

* I’d love a copy of the soundtrack, and Jidenna’s “Long Live the Chief” is my favorite tune of 2016. In my head now I hear “I don’t want my best-dressed day in a casket” every time I choose to wear a tie to work.

* I laughed harder at the predictable classic-Power-Man-costume scene than I should’ve. I wouldn’t have minded a ’70s-set series actually showing him in it for thirteen straight episodes, but I realize I’m alone and should be ashamed.

* If you’ve enjoyed Luke Cage and would like to learn more about him, I recommend hunting down the last several years of the original Power Man and Iron Fist series, particularly the issues written by Mary Jo Duffy or Christopher Priest under his original name Jim Owsley. Also worthwhile is Marvel’s current PM/IF series by David F. Walker and Sanford Greene, about which I had initial misgivings because Iron Fist didn’t used to be the jokey white dork he seems here, but it’s become a vibrant revisit to the same streets and the same ganglords of yore. I love that they gave me the most appropriate response to the big Civil War II crossover event, by which I mean Our Heroes rejected the premise and refused to participate in it until outside forces gave them no choice, which of course is the perfect metaphor for a fan like me who’s grown to hate crossovers.

* Speaking of which: I’m curious to see what The Defenders does with the assorted Netflix heroes, but I do hope these rumors about the main villain are utter bunkum. Comics sites seem to think the Big Bad will be Mephisto, a.k.a. Marvel’s most common version of Satan, but I’m more interested in seeing these heroes continue tackling street-level life and crime, and not remotely excited about having them punching and shooting at super-sized metaphysical superdemons. Don’t give me megaton explosions; just give me a little more Pop.

Thanksgiving is nigh again! Time for gratitude toward those wonderful people who endure us, another round of overeating, more complaints about What the First Thanksgiving Was Really Like in Case You Haven’t Heard That One Before, and both budgets and self-control thrown out the window for the sake of the longest Friday of the year.

And of course we turn to those time-honored traditions that families bonded over for generations, including but not limited to 1973’s animated TV special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, which you’ve seen ten or twelve times and don’t need me to recap that one time a bunch of youngsters thought it would be a brilliant idea to share a banquet cooked by a dog. To be fair, the round-headed kid probably couldn’t have done any better, but he’s also the one who let the dog go for it, either because his perceptions of reality are warped, or because he’s too lazy to care about food safety or quality.

That wasn’t Charlie Brown’s first public Thanksgiving, though. The Peanuts comic strip had been around since 1950 and racked up quite a few holidays before animators brought him a second life. Submitted above for your trivia collection is the Peanuts strip dated November 27m 1952, which marked the first time creator Charles Schulz had Our Heroes commemorating the holiday on-panel. Through the magic of the MCC WABAC Machine, we at long last learn why Charlie Brown was never put in charge of Thanksgiving. Not until after his family finished their sumptuous gluttony did he bother to venture outside, feed his faithful sidekick, and toss him a rote greeting dressed up in the archaic calligraphy that was all the rage in the 1950s. “Here you go, boy!” says Snoopy’s master as he tosses man’s cold, unwanted scraps onto the dirty ground. “Have some bits of fat and gristle that we were too stuffed and finicky to finish off ourselves! Sorry in advance if Mom undercooked it and left some dormant bacteria intact! And try not to choke on the bones, because you really don’t want to know what 1950s veterinarian hospitals are like!”

Snoopy, of course, is in no position to be picky yet and takes whatever he can get. His affluent master pats himself on the back and receives silent reinforcement from Patty, the Spare Girl Peanut That Time Forgot. All is well in their colorless neighborhood, in their nameless city with its imaginary adults. Not till many years later would Snoopy turn the tables when his personality turned peculiar, he realized he had the confidence to reject his master’s nominal appeasement attempts, and he would develop the tools to take culinary matters into his own hands. Twenty-one years later, that brave beagle would rebel against his limitations by making toast and popcorn for lunch, like any given lonely human bachelor might.

Good dog, Snoopy. Good dog. In your own way. I guess.

…

…on a barely related note, we here at Midlife Crisis Crossover wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, a wondrous weekend, and a mature, thoughtful Black Friday free of shoddy obsolete merchandise and Walmart fight clubs. May your family gatherings be warm and connective on all the right levels, and may your meals be streets ahead of Charlie Brown’s unfinished plate.

All 38 books on my list in order by size. For an explanation of the conscious lack of e-books in my literary diet, please enjoy this MCC treatise from 2013.

Time again for the annual entry in which I remind myself how much I like reading things besides monthly comics, magazines, and tweets by self-promoters who pretended to care about anything I wrote exactly once each. Despite the lack of MCC entries about my reading matter, I’m always working on at least two books at a time in my ever-diminishing reading time. I refrain from full-on book reviews because nine times out of ten I’m finishing a given work decades after the rest of the world is already done and moved on from it. I don’t always care about site traffic, but when I do, it usually means leaving some extended thoughts and opinions unwritten due to non-timeliness.

Presented over this entry and the next is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2016, mostly but not entirely in order of completion. As I whittle down the never-ending stack I’ve been stockpiling for literal decades, my long-term hope before I turn 70 is to get to the point where my reading list is more than, say, 40% new releases every year. That’s a lofty goal, but I can dream.

New for this year: I expanded the list to a full capsule summary apiece, because logophilia. I’ve divided the list into a two-part miniseries to post on back-to-back evenings (like they used to do with the ’66 Batman TV show) in order to ease up on the word count for busier readers. Onward!

1. Joseph Maddrey & Lance Henriksen, Not Bad for a Human. A souvenir from Horror Hound Indy 2015. The biography of character actor Lance Henriksen that contains so many lengthy, unedited quotes from him that it might as well be labeled autobiography. Covering the decades from his impoverished, nomadic upbringing to his NYC Method-acting stage days to his biggest moment in Aliens to his starring role in TV’s Millennium to the dozens of direct-to-video crapfests he’s done since then. Along the way he shared a lot of memorable times with better known actors, felt his share of heartbreak, and didn’t learn how to read till he was 30. The author cares way more about the zero-value obscurities in his back catalog than I do, but every so often Henriksen tosses out another weird moment or off-the-cuff thought that makes this a bit different from the usual bland tell-alls. (Fun trivia: Oliver Reed was kind of disgusting.)

2. Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, et al., Fables v. 21: Happily Ever After. The penultimate volume in the series, which was published at roughly the same time the creator found himself roasted alive on social media and lost some fans after conduct unbecoming at a “Writing Women-Friendly Comics” convention panel. The long-running fairy-tales-in-today’s-world series that Once Upon a Time basically ripped off legally remains fascinating on its own if you ignore the giant asterisk hanging over it now.

3. Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, et al., Fables vol. 22: Farewell. The conclusion to the long running series serves as both trade paperback #22 and as an epic-length issue #150. The long-brewing war between Snow White and Rose Red comes to a head in a manner that’s anticlimactic yet befitting previous resolutions-on-a-technicality from past storylines. And we say goodbye to hundreds of characters with the help of one last gang of all-star guest artists like Neal Adams, Bryan Talbot, Michael Allred, Mouse Guard‘s David Petersen, and more more more.

4. Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts 1997-1998. The 24th volume in the 13-year reprint series sees creator Schulz getting more impish and a bit daring in his old age as Rerun is suspended twice from kindergarten due to trumped-up sexual harassment allegations (I’m not even kidding), and Charlie Brown fends off dueling advances from both Peppermint Patty and Marcie, who don’t realize he has eyes only for the little red-haired girl who doesn’t know he exists. The final volume was released in 2016 (a Christmas present I’ll be reading in early 2017) and I can’t believe I lived long enough to collect the entire series.

5. Luther M. Siler, Searching for Malumba. A fellow WordPress blogger you can follow on his own site even though he and I disagree drastically on the qualities of Snowpiercer. The title sounds like a memoir by an African missionary, but it’s a collection of blog essays about Siler’s former life as a teacher in the public school systems of northern Indiana and south-side Chicago. He and I also differ vastly on our opinions of strong language, but his sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, frequently disturbing experiences with actual, disastrously parented 21st-century children are undeniable and scarring, like an expansion pack for The Wire Season Four.

6. Kieron Gillen, Michael Avon Oeming, Manuel Garcia, Travel Foreman, Dark Avengers: Ares. Two stories starring the Greek god of war living and warring in the Marvel Universe. One story has him pitted against his magically aged adult son with touches of authentic Greek tragedy tempered by being kind of boring; the other sees him taking orders from onetime American overlord Norman Osborn and leading a squad of angry military reprobates against another, angrier god in a bit of storyline left over from Incredible Hercules. Thankfully I was a fan of the latter, so that story worked better for me.

7. Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs. Essay collection by the Pulitzer-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, mostly focused on masculinity and parenting, and how much better he is at one than the other. Most of these are keepers, candid and funny and with slightly less SAT vocabulary than usual for Chabon, though I’m particularly fond of one piece in which he talks about what it was like to grow up as a solitary geek who now has four children with shared interests — all geeks, but not so solitary because they have the gift of each other.

8. Martin Pasko, The DC Vault. A history of DC Comics up to 2009 as written by the former comics writer who’s best known as the answer to the trivia question, “Who was the regular writer on Saga of Swamp Thing before Alan Moore took over and made it legendary?” Pasko covers DC from its early beginnings before Superman, through the tough Comics Code years, to Crisis on Infinite Earths and beyond. It’s more honest than I expected for a company-approved bio, especially in its frank talks of the sad mistreatment of Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Batman visionary Bill Finger. This massive coffee-table tome comes with a variety of objects as extras — reproductions of old comics pages, posters, paper merchandise, and more. Pretty keen, if outdated now and kinda peculiar in how it avoids talking about Alan Moore any more than it has to.

9. Mark Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics. The closest we’ll ever get to a definitive biography of definitive comics artist Jack Kirby, co-creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Dr. Strange, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, Galactus, Dr. Doom, the Silver Surfer, and Darkseid and his terrible friends over at DC. He rose from early NYC poverty as a scrappy Jewish kid into the non-glamorous world of comics at a time when they were cheap and plentiful and written off as kiddie fare. It was all about cranking out the work just to survive, until a partnership with Stan Lee would change the medium for all time. Too bad he was rarely paid fairly for what he did. Anyway, yeah, fantastic overview with oversize art reproductions for added weight and wonder.

10. Dave Gibbons with Chip Kidd and Mike Essl, Watching the Watchmen. The artist/co-creator of the groundbreaking graphic novel tells his side of the creation story and shares a metric ton of concept art, sketches, thumbnails, promotional pieces, rejected notions, and fuzzy memories of what it was like working with Alan Moore before Hollywood started ruining all his works and his mood. He also gives colorist John Higgins a few pages to provide his own reminiscing. Over half the book is just art, but there’s just enough text to justify its inclusion here IMHO. Fair warning: anyone looking for controversy will be disappointed — Gibbons wanted this to be a celebration of the work, not a tell-all. Also, this was published when the “Before Watchmen” cash-gab sequels were still an unrequited proposal from DC Marketing that he’d rejected and optimistically presumed would never get off the ground. So in hindsight the ending of this book turned out a lot more ironic than he intended.

11. Gene Ha, Mae. A Kickstarter’d graphic-novel prologue to the Dark Horse Comics series about a Purdue student named Mae whose world gets upended when her years-missing older sister reappears one day out of nowhere with a weird outfit, a pair of axes, a forfeited claim to royalty in another dimension, and murderous monsters on her trail. Lovely book in which the women outnumber the men, but it’s a pretty fast read. Longtime MCC readers may recall my copy contains a sketch of my wife by Ha, which remains one of my all-time Top 5 Comic Convention Mementos.

12. Ed Piskor, Hip-Hop Family Tree, Vol. 1: 1970s-1981. A graphic-novel history of rap music’s origins in the boroughs of NYC, covering a wide who’s-who of names in the game, from early pioneers like Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa, Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, and Grandmaster Flash to kids who’d grow up to be somebody, like Chuck D (a former graphic-arts major), Run-DMC before they knew each other, and producer Rick Rubin (purportedly a spoiled rich kid whose parents drove him to CBGB gigs so his own Fiat wouldn’t get stolen), plus tangential appearances by Jean-Michael Basquiat, Deborah Harry from Blondie, two members of Talking Heads, future director Ted Demme. and a meanwhile-in-California-when-he-was-young cameo by Dr. Dre. To me it’s all fascinating, anyway.

13. Keiler Roberts, Miseryland. Collection of single-panel quotes, comic-strip memories, and a few multi-page anecdotes written and illustrated by a mother with sharper storytelling acumen than any five armies of internet mommy-bloggers. Most parents can stretch out “My kid said the cutest thing the other day!” to three or four paragraphs and wait for the validating clicks, but it takes practice and discernment to toss out the filler, cut straight to the jaw-dropping parts, lay bare your own flaws when they’re revealed, detour only a few times to touch on your own bipolar issues, then move on to the next bits without waiting frantically for applause or approval.

14. Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, 1999-2000. The 25th volume in the 26-volume series collects the long-running strip’s final fourteenth months, which concluded the same weekend he passed away. He was no less sharp in his final years than he was back in the 1950s, and it shows in a pair of arcs in which Linus and Lucy’s brother Rerun is suspended from kindergarten for “sexual harassment” when he makes the mistake of saying nice kiddie things to girls. Filling out the collection is a complete reprinting of Schulz Li’l Folks, the single-panel gag strip that ran in a local St. Paul paper from 1947 to 1950, till Schulz got tired of being underpaid and unappreciated and moved on to bigger, better-paying things. Mostly disposable except from a historical standpoint, though I laughed a few times at what served as his training ground.

Sample Li’l Folks one-panel gag starring Great Moments in Patriarchy.

15. Ande Parks and Chris Samnee, Capote in Kansas. A nonfiction graphic novel about the making of Truman Capote’s famous nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. Whereas the Best Picture-nominated film Capote focused on his talks with the two killers, this book focuses on his interactions with the townspeople — some grieving, some skeptical, some starstruck, a few willing to hook up with him. From that standpoint it’s not so redundant, but anyone who’s liked Samnee’s work on Daredevil or Black Widow needs to add this forgotten gem to their collection.

16. Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus. Another in a series by the former Chicago Tribune editor who became a famous author of Christian apologetics. It covers some of the same ground as his previous books, but feigns objectivity a lot less convincingly in reaching the same conclusions. If you’ve read the predecessors, you’re already caught up.

17. Kel McDonald, Misfits of Avalon vol. 1: The Queen of Air and Delinquency. In which four girls of varying dysfunctional temperaments are united to become heroes in our world with powers granted to them by forces from another fantasy world. Our Heroes loathe each other immensely and spend most pages snarling at each other and hating every second of being in this book. Call it “Four Characters and One Reader in Search of an Exit”.

18. Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle, The Kitchen. Gritty ’70s drama about four Irish-American Mob wives trying to make the most of a life of crime while their men are indisposed. Kind of like First Wives Club with more drugs and bloodshed. Recently optioned for film adaptation, which makes sense because most of this, while well dialogued, feels hurried along and sketched-in like a pitch document. Looks great, but no time for the four friendships to develop before they’re mutually torn apart.

19. Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, Little Guardians, vol. 1: The Zucchini Festival. Collection of an ongoing webcomic by local talents that’s like Switched at Birth set in an old Final Fantasy world. Some nicely paced character building lifts this above the superficial webcomic level that would normally turn me away at the main page. Volumes 2 and 3 are near the top of my stack for 2017.

To be continued!

My ten personal favorites from the pile of 38, but not the only good ones in there.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Time again for the annual entry in which I remind myself how much I like reading things besides monthly comics, magazines, and tweets by self-promoters who pretended to care about anything I wrote exactly once each. Despite the lack of MCC entries about my reading matter, I’m always working on at least two books at a time in my ever-diminishing reading time. I refrain from full-on book reviews because nine times out of ten I’m finishing a given work decades after the rest of the world is already done and moved on from it. I don’t always care about site traffic, but when I do, it usually means leaving some extended thoughts and opinions unwritten due to irrelevance.

Presented over this entry and the next is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2016, mostly but not entirely in order of completion. As I whittle down the never-ending stack I’ve been stockpiling for literal decades, my long-term hope before I turn 70 is to get to the point where my reading list is more than, say, 40% new releases every year. That’s a lofty goal, but I can dream.

New for this year: I expanded the list to a full capsule summary apiece, because logophilia. I’ve divided the list into a two-part miniseries to post on back-to-back evenings (like they used to do with the ’66 Batman TV show) in order to ease up on the word count for busier readers.

Once more: onward!

20. John Jackson Miller, Star Trek: the Next Generation: Takedown. Admiral Riker attends a peace conference with representatives from other warring factions in the Trek universe, becomes nigh-omnipotent, begins disabling communication arrays around the quadrant, and only the combined efforts of Captain Picard and Captain Ezri Dax can stop him. Above-average for a Trek novel, though the ultimate villains are from a Next Generation episode I can’t recall watching. The book’s true breakout star is the Romulan equivalent of a military middle-management schlub, ignored and mocked by his peers and superiors alike, desperately scrounging for recognition and power, overdosing when he finally gets some. I wanted more of him and 60% less of all the other original non-TV characters that filled out this above-average Trek novel.

21. Owen Gleiberman, Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies. Deeply introspective memoir by Entertainment Weekly‘s original film critic, who stuck with the magazine for 24 years until changing times, reduced print space, and anti-intellectual new management paved the road for his exit. Along with Roger Ebert, Gleiberman is one of the critics I followed the longest, though the book delves into waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more of his sexual history than I ever needed or wanted. But if you’ve ever subscribed to EW for any length of time and charted its gradual downgrade from glossy proto-hipster zine to disposable corporate puff-piece pamphlet, the behind-the-scenes tell-all aspects are informative and riveting in spots, especially whenever his reviews made EW’s Time-Warner overlords cry.

22. Jai Nitz, Phil Hester, and Ande Parks, El Diablo: The Haunted Horseman. Before the Suicide Squad movie, there was a poorly selling miniseries that upended the original cowboy-hero concept and bestowed it upon a hot-headed Latino gang-banger whose trip from villain to antihero is nowhere near as poignant as the movie version’s. He’s a grating idiot who spouts tough-punk anti-establishment clichés when he’s not simply 24-7 revenging guy. When he gets to fight Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, his spouting gets stupider and more offensive and I wanted Uncle Sam or even Doll-Man to feed him his own teeth. Making matters worse, the six-issue miniseries tried to stuff in 24 issues’ worth of characters and plot points, skipping scenes between scenes to create a severely disjointed read that feels more like the Twitter Moments version of a book instead of an actual narrative.

23. Joe R. Lansdale, Hap & Leonard. When I was a teen, the Texas author was all about horror with whacked-out fare like The Drive-In and the story that would become the Bruce Campbell movie Bubba Ho-Tep. Sometime when I wasn’t paying attention he shifted gears and now he has a long-running southern-fried crime drama series on his hands that was recently adapted into a Sundance Channel series costarring Omar from The Wire. Hap is a rough-‘n’-tumble white guy who can punch well, shoot better, and take violent odd jobs from the local private detective. Leonard is his best friend, a gay black Republican Vietnam vet. They fight crime with self-defense and sometimes also crime! This particular book is a collection of H&L short stories, all limber and funny, bloody R-rated medium-boiled rural gunslinging and fist-fighting shenanigans, with snarky brotherly camaraderie and whatnot.

24. Tom King and Barnaby Bagenda, The Omega Men: The End Is Here. Back in the ’80s, the Omega Men were an alien rebel alliance super-team from various planets united to fight their nefarious overlords. The plot may sound familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a movie. In this reboot, Our Heroes are now terrorists aiming to win if not outright conquer by any means necessary, even if it means manipulating an actual hero like Kyle Rayner into betraying his own beliefs. Writer Tom King, a CIA operative with an extensive literature background who’s now one of the best new writers on the comics scene, turns a bunch of C-listers into the starring antiheroes of a jarring cautionary tale about the nature of rebellion and the moral compromises that win or lose it. This was the absolute best result to come out of DC’s New 52.

25. Greg Weisman, Rain of the Ghosts. YA novel from the celebrated mind behind Disney’s Gargoyles, about a girl who lives on a tropical island outside the Bermuda Triangle, inherits a bracelet from her grandpa that lets her sees ghosts, and finds herself embroiled in a strange mission involving a WWII plane that disappeared with Grandpa’s team on board. Intended as the first in a series (of course), it’s light and occasionally spooky, has hardly any white characters in it, but made me roll my eyes when it literally ended with a happy dance party.

26. Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Boy meets girl, girl belongs to the same maiden-mother-crone triumvirate that pops up in every other Gaiman story, evil creature wiggles its way into our universe and threatens to ruin everything, and the eventual solution promises to do even worse. When the creature turns itself into a conniving harlot of a nanny that takes over our li’l hero’s everyday life, Gaiman strikes hard into one of the rawest possible nerves in a kid today — the fear of watching their family torn apart from within. Poetic and unsettling at the same time, Gaiman’s favorite double-major.

27. Nick Hornby, High Fidelity. Americans may be more familiar with the Stephen Frears film adaptation starring John Cusack and Jack Black (one of my Top 5 Films From The Last 10 Years), but the original British novel delves more deeply into its unreliable narrator, a protagonist who doesn’t realize he’s a horrible, selfish, sexist loser for the first couple hundred pages. The book has some notable structural differences (Cusack’s epiphany near the end of the film appears within the first 100 pages), and our pig Rob is so boorish and British at the same time that the book really clicked once I decided he should have the voice of Anthony LaPaglia as Daphne’s brother Simon from Frasier. Hornby’s prose contains more nuance than was translated into the film, and was more than strong enough to support my imaginary voice casting.

28. David F. Walker, The Adventures of Darius Logan, Book One: Super Justice Force. Before he became one of the few nonwhite writers current working for Marvel or DC, Walker cut his teeth on the first book in a proposed YA series about a former honor student who turns hoodlum after his entire family dies in a calamitous skirmish between super-heroes and a rogue robot army. When he punches the wrong cop at the wrong time for the worst reason, a super-hero he once met gets him out of a trial and into an experimental work-release program that, instead of sending him to jail and lifelong failure, sets him up with a home and menial job at the nearest super-team HQ. Either he plays at Suicide Squad: Cleanup Crew or he goes back to the slammer. It’s occasionally predictable (by page 60 one character might as well wear a black cowboy hat labeled EVIL BACKSTABBER) and there’s one chapter that seems more poorly proofread than all the rest, but thoughtful in its takes on criminal reform, recidivism, and the hard-hearted cops who don’t believe people can grow or change, who think anyone charged with a felony might as well be tossed in a woodchipper. Bonus points for fascinating portrayals of repentant villains and the heroes who accept their change of heart.

29. Stan Lee with Peter David and Colleen Doran, Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. Naturally the long-awaited autobiography of Stan “The Man” Lee is a graphic novel. Lee recounts highlights of his life from growing up poor in Washington Heights to finding random jobs as a young adult, from his entry into the nascent comics medium to that momentous occasion when Marvel became a thing. We know up front his memories may have differed over the decades, and I’m sure a lot of his collaborators would have second opinions on some of their stories here. Lee also glosses over some of his later failures (about one publishing disaster in particular, he candidly admits he’d rather not talk about it), but even when you know some things have been left out, downplayed, or gotten 100% wrong, the bits that ring true, combined with Lee’s famous huckster enthusiasm, make for anecdotes both hyperbolic and affecting, and not always the shameless puff piece you’d expect.

30/31. John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, March, Books Two and Three. The graphic-novel autobiography of Georgia Congressman John Lewis, one of the few surviving leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, continues where his childhood left off. #2 focuses on his young-adult adventures in learning the techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience and enduring the resulting damage from all those Southern racists, whether at marches, diner sit-ins, “freedom rides”, or multiple times spent in racist jails meant to quiet him and anyone associated with him. #3 picks up with the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in ’63 and covers the timeline up to the signing of the Voting Rights Act in ’65, packing in far more detail than Ava DuVernay’s Selma did. Essential reading for fans of the shameful side of American history and those who persevered through it.

32. Chelsea Cain, Kate Niemcyzk, et al., Mockingbird vol. 1: I Can Explain. The former Avenger and SHIELD agent with a poorly selling series is now the star of a bestselling trade collecting the first half of the same series, all because dudes online turned their hate-goggles toward her and lost their minds. It’s fun, not-so-straightforwardly structured super-hero action-adventure in which the woman is the smartest character in the room, so I guess that’s an online reaction that’s gonna happen, though it shouldn’t because this is really good, self-aware entertainment.

33. Mike Baron and Steve Rude, Nexus: Into the Past. New adventures starring the ’80s indie-comic sci-fi super-executioner of mass murderers/refugee planet guardian. Fun for us old fans, maybe not an easy sell for anyone else.

34. Evan Dorkin, The Eltingville Club. One of the most savage satires of heartless, single-minded fanboys ever put to paper, about four alpha-nerds whose intense love of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and comics take our seemingly harmless, oft-rewarding obsessions to the most selfish, offensive, damaging extremes and beyond, nearly every story ending with immature self-absorbed bro-vs.-bro slapstick savagery. A collection 20+ years in the making, from the earliest short stories dating back to 1994, to Dorkin’s final word on the subject, a two-issue Dark Horse miniseries that wrapped up their morbid, insular universe in 2015. If and when society reaches a point where “post-geek” truly becomes a thing, Eltingville needs to be among the movement’s primary textbooks.

Until Squirrel Girl is brought to life on the big screen, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a hollow sewer overflowing with the gunky dross of empty lies.

35. Ryan North and Erica Henderson, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe. The most awesomest Marvel super-hero of the 21st century (action! adventure! humor! trading cards! ACTUAL SCIENCE LESSONS!) stars in her very own hardcover graphic novel, in which the titular event does indeed occur — not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story, but it might not necessarily be that Squirrel Girl. As written and drawn by the same creators of the only Marvel super-hero series that my wife reads regularly, our team does an equally stellar job here, of course.

36. Brian K. Morris, Santastein. A humorous riff in the vein of Young Frankenstein and Hitchhiker’s Guide, in this version our Dr. Frankenstein is trying to build Santa Claus out of corpses, with mixed results. I have no idea if the jokes would take with younger audiences, but for my generation it feels exactly on-key, if somewhat twisted — as the author himself warned me, so I can’t say I wasn’t. FULL DISCLOSURE: the esteemed Mr. Morris and I have crossed paths at several shows (Gen Con! Indy Pop Con! Metropolis!) and his wares are eminently perusable.

37. Travis Langley, ed., Psych of the Living Dead: The Walking Dead Psychology. Langley is a psych professor/geek whose fan specialty is compiling essays by other scholarly geeks about various genre universes. Since I quit The Walking Dead partway through the season-6 premiere, I figured it was best to get through this anthology while I still had the characters fresh in mind. The contributions span both the TV and comics versions, up to and including the Whisperers, with discussions and examples teaching readers how Our Heroes exemplify Maslow’s hierarchy, masculinity narratives, clinical sociopath diagnoses, existentialism, defense mechanisms, and more. Much of this makes creator Robert Kirkman sound as smart as Grant Morrison, but if you’re interested in picking up some extra terms and getting ideas for further Wikipedia surfing, it’s thorough and largely not as dry as I’d expected.

38. Paul Dini and Eduardo Risso, Dark Night: A True Batman Story. Comics, animation, and TV writer Paul Dini was one of the next-level contributors who made Batman: The Animated Series the pioneering series that us comics fans have never shut up about. This autobiographical graphic novel tells the sickening true story of the night a pair of anonymous muggers thrashed him within an inch of his life, pulverized parts of his skull, and left him for dead. The long, painful road to recovery, from hospital to therapy to everyday terror and isolation, was overseen by his overactive imagination keeping Batman, the Joker, and other characters alive inside his head as imaginary angels and devils talking to him in the waking hours while he tried to find a way to heal and go on living. Dini bares his soul in a candid exploration of the personal weaknesses that led up to the event, that made it worse when he tried to brush it off and refuse hospital treatment, and that complicated his recovery all the more when he wouldn’t listen to anyone except those fictional voices in his head. The last book I finished in 2016 was also one of the best, most haunting works of the year.

-30-

Eight comics a week times 52 weeks, plus a few extras from conventions and Free Comic Book Day…

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

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

For reference and maybe unconscious oblique insight, here’s what I’m currently buying every Wednesday at my local comic shop, series and miniseries alike, budget permitting, broken down by publisher as of the very end of December 2016:

Marvel Comics:

Black Panther — Acclaimed scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates revisiting all the best parts of Christopher Priest’s grand yesteryear, referencing several years’ worth of Avengers comics I never read and have no desire to catch up on, and writing more filibusters than we’ve seen in the field since Don McGregor bowed out. Frequently thought-provoking, sometimes over my head, occasionally dry, but FINALLY getting to the point these past few months. And as one of the six guys who bought every issue of The Crew, it was all worth it just to see that forgotten idea back in full effect.

Great Lakes Avengers — The only Avengers title I’m buying because it’s the one least likely to get snagged by crossovers. Bonus points for funny stuff.

Hawkeye — The Jeff Lemire/Ramon Perez run had great art but fizzled by the end. The Kate Bishop relaunch is only one issue in, opinions pending but leaning toward more favorable.

Karnak — Warren Ellis revamps one of the real Inhumans into the Most Nihilistic Man in the World. I wouldn’t want to be him, but I’m curious to see where this is eventually going if and when the conclusion arrives before the end of the world.

Moon Knight — Marc Spector’s fractured personalities brought to life and to cross-purposes by four different artists working in four different realities, edging toward either a merging of the personae or a new, even more warped mind-state. Looks great, but I’m concerned whether or not this really is going somewhere.

Mosaic — The current Inhumans books are like the Roman Reigns of the Marvel universe, but this tangential spinoff, about a pro basketball player given the Terrigen-mist powers of Jericho from the Teen Titans plus the memory-retention power that Rogue used to have, is spinning their premise in a different direction with themes involving the differences between strangers and the secrets held by those we thought were on our side. And I love to pieces that I recognized the Queens subway station that was used as a scene setting in #1 (111th Street, on the R line, half-mile north of the Unisphere). I knew we took that trip to New York City last year for a reason.

Ms. Marvel — One of the year’s most heartbreaking titles, in which our young heroine suffered the dual anguish of walking away from her idol Captain Marvel (thanks heaps, Civil War II) and severing ties with her once-BFF Bruno, both as a result of the hardest of choices, and not always making the best ones. Can there be happiness for a teen super-hero after a crossover ruins everything? I look forward to finding out.

Power Man & Iron Fist — I was leery at first of Iron Fist’s reimagining as a big white dork, but those concerns fell by the wayside when the Heroes for Hire got real as Civil War II reared its ugly commercial head. Not only did they fight back hard against its Minority Report consequences, but Luke Cage gave the best speech about why the entire idea was stupid in the first place.

Silver Surfer — Dan Slott and the Allreds continue the greatest blatant Doctor Who homage of all time, in 2016 celebrating fifty years of Norrin Radd as well as 200 comics with a “Silver Surfer” title on the front. Norrin and his companion Dawn Greenwood in their amazing universal travels have become one of my favorite ongoing comics couples. Most memorable moment: Norrin decides to reunite Dawn with her deadbeat mom without asking, only to learn the very hard truth that some people were never ready to be parents and will never try to be.

Star Wars — I buy the entire line for my wife until and unless we both agree we’re wasting our time. I’m much happier with this book whenever the stories star anyone but Luke, Han, or Leia because that’s how my fandom rolls. Also, I’d like Stuart Immonen back on art chores, please and thank you.

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra — I’m pretty sure I like this one more than my wife does. This Darth Vader spinoff has lightened up quite a bit from the previous series without the Sith Lord as the center of attention, leaving more space for the evil droids Beetee and Triple-Zero to shine. True confession: I had absolutely no idea Aphra was Asian (or, uh, space-Asian?) till Twitter broke out in flame-war over the subject last month, despite her two preceding years of comics. Make of that what you will, though to me, given the nature of Salvador Larroca’s art, the entire discussion wasn’t removed far enough from “oh hey btw Dumbledore is gay” territory.

Star Wars: Poe Dameron — Writer Charles Soule has nailed Oscar Isaac’s voice and quirky lines just right in my mental readings, and Poe’s nemesis Terex, the former ‘trooper graduated to officer, is proving a worthy, complex adversary.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl — When I write an entire entry about a single comic book instead of limiting myself to capsules, that means I super-like it and I need say no more. Ryan North and Erica Henderson continue making best comics even bester.

DC Comics / Vertigo / Young Animal:

Astro City — Kurt Busiek’s long-running creator-owned super-book is an old friend that stays comfy and familiar while sometimes trying on new clothes. Not every issue is a keeper, but I’ve enjoyed the run of guest artists visiting town. Most memorable story: the one where Quarrel contemplated the pros and cons of super-heroing in middle age, and looking for that thin line between “I still got it” and “I’m too old for this”. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a super-midlife crisis quite like hers.

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye — My favorite of Gerard Way’s “Young Animals” imprint, cowritten with Jon Rivera, is also the most linear and has the most supporting roles for the original Wild Dog. The dispirited Mr. Carson and his estranged adult daughter have an interesting dynamic and bring out the best in flashy adventure from artist Michael Avon Oeming

Deathstroke — Stamp the words “written by Christopher Priest” on any comic and I’m all over that new-release shelf. I’d buy a Marmaduke reboot if he were involved because I know it would be the greatest Marmaduke in world history. I haven’t liked Slade Wilson since the 1980s, but Priest has dialed back the “antihero” copout persona of the past two decades and turned him into an actual villain protagonist, one mired in tricky world politics, stymied old foes, and burned acquaintances from past eras. Timelines shift forward and back, complex schemes remain hidden until the final pages, and the reader has to work to keep up — wants to keep up, in fact. All of these make a Priest comic a Priest comic. Not just the best DC Rebirth title out there, but one of the best titles on the stands, period.

Doom Patrol — At long last, Gerard Way can let his Doom Patrol homage The Umbrella Academy rest easy in retirement while he takes the wheel of the real deal. Pacing was iffy at first as Way and artist Nick Derrington rush to cram all their ideas in at once, but by #3 more of it is shaping into a cohesive narrative with friends old and new. Casey Brinke is fun for a viewpoint character, though I’m irritated that her eventual code name was revealed in the Young Animals back-matter months before we’ll be seeing its first usage in the story itself.

Future Quest — Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, the Herculoids, and other Hanna-Barbera sci-fi characters in this super-group jam were in reruns by the time I started watching Saturday morning cartoons, but I remember just enough of them to make this kindasorta worth it for the time being. If guest artist Steve Rude keeps popping in now and again, that surely wouldn’t hurt.

New Super-Man — Prior to this series, my only exposure to the work of Gene Luen Yang was the Avatar: The Last Airbender short stories he wrote for every Free Comic Book Day. And every time, they were the best things about FCBD. I’m not wild about DC’s New 52 in general, with or without the “Rebirth” rebranding that hasn’t cured all its ills, but this title is an outlier happily borrowing continuity elements from it while plotting its own course. In a world where China decides to create its own living, state-supervised knockoffs of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, our young wannabe Kenan Kong — a schoolyard bully when we first meet him! — struggles in the mighty Peter Parker tradition to adapt to his unstable Kal-El-ish powers, bossy peers, older heroes who scoff at his immaturity, loopy new villains, and a disapproving father who’s more than meets the eye. For anyone who misses them good ol’ days when “fun” wasn’t banned from the DC Universe, here’s solid evidence that someone’s willing to change that.

Shade the Changing Girl — The original Peter Milligan version had fantastic artists on fractured tales that drove a younger me away after the first year’s worth of frustration. With the Young Animal relaunch, Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcone have a bizarre act to follow and at this point are still setting pieces in place as the original Shade’s #1 fan has come to Earth to inhabit the body of a teen girl gone comatose under shady circumstances. Hallucinatory imagery, shifty classmates, and the aliens left in her distant wake make for a disjointed narrative at times, but I’m trying to hang in there till at least the end of the first arc to see how much of it adds up.

Wonder Woman ’77 Meets the Bionic Woman — When DC’s digital-first retro titles (see also: Batman ’66) show up on paper, I pick them up for my wife the classic TV-super-hero fan. I’m old enough to remember when writer Andy Mangels was writing about comics in the pages of Amazing Heroes, so for me it’s neat in a different retro way seeing him have a blast with the MeTV Saturday night lineup.

Dark Horse Comics:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 11 — Christos Gage and Rebekah Isaacs are my favorite Buffyverse comics team ever, and seeing them throw the Scoobies against a kaiju as the Big Bad may prove to be their best comics season yet. Fingers crossed.

Groo: Fray of the Gods — Sergio Aragones! Mark Evanier! The same old characters and jokes! The definition of “mulch”! Fans of old Groo comics can find more of the same here, and more!

Mae — Sad but real talk: I’m close to dropping this one. I wondered how in the world writer/artist Gene Ha would pull off a monthly title, especially one so packed with fantasy settings and creatures and made-up fantasy names and whatnot. The most recent issue had an answer: guest contributors who very much aren’t Gene Ha, and who are several years away from that level. I have concerns.

Image Comics:

Descender — Dustin Nguyen’s watercolor art and Jeff Lemire’s shades-of-gray flawed cast are kind of a sci-fi dream team, one that gambled on spending the last several issues letting each character take a turn in the origin spotlight. The overall story slowed to a near-halt, but together the new details add depths to the players that should bear great fruits in the rendezvous to come.

Injection — Once again Warren Ellis science-fiction comics win the top of my reading pile in this not-too-distant-future conflict between a rogue AI and the disbanded think tank that spawned it. It helps that Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire are my favorite art team of the moment, so I don’t mind the months between arcs quite so much.

Lazarus — The Greg Rucka/Michael Lark dystopian sci-fi (there’s that genre again) skipped a month here and there, but gave us some surprising, revelatory twists in the true nature of Forever Carlyle’s super-soldier nature as well as her counterparts working for the other rival families. We’re long past the point where new readers can hop aboard without starting at #1, though.

Manifest Destiny — I remain the only “Lewis & Clark & Monsters” fan I know, but I’m in for the long haul, even though the heavy use of flashbacks in the “Sasquatch” arc could’ve used some trimming.

Paper Girls — Comics bylaws require every collector to follow at least one Brian K. Vaughan series, so as a prude I choose the least R-rated one, in which time-traveling doppelgangers, dystopian future armies, and misshapen monsters team up to send 1988 and 2016 smashing into each other with disastrous consequences for our four heroines. I’m not convinced my home state ever had a grand total of four teen-female paper carriers back in the yesteryear when teens were encouraged to deliver newspapers, but if it did, I imagine they were at least as resourceful and savvy as this team is.

Rumble — Otherdimensional hero trapped in a straw body but retaining his giant super-sword has to rely on a pair of well-meaning barflies to guide him through our world while defending himself against the creepy-crawlies who’d see him dead. In the hands of creators John Arcudi and James Harren, this adventurous romp slowly cultivated a supporting cast and a stylish look that’s become a monthly favorite, though I hope its low sales haven’t doomed it. That would be just like me to kill a good comic by liking it too much.

Snotgirl — Somehow Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley has me following the tale of a self-absorbed fashion blogger who thinks she’s smarter and deeper than she actually is. Between him and co-creator/artist/co-writer Leslie Hung, I can’t put it down and I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe it’s those little hints that there’s more going on with her competing bloggers and quote-unquote “friends” than our dear shallow Lottie realizes. But I don’t know if I’m anticipating her learning the valuable life lessons she desperately needs or simply looking forward to her next comeuppance.

Other publishers:

Archangel — Trendsetting author William Gibson comes to comics with a tale that mixes time travel and alternate Earths with a sensible truce that sorts out how both could work at the same time without begetting constant plot loopholes. I’m not even bitter that of course WWII is involved because it’s William Gibson. And some friends, I guess.

Archie — The Mark Waid reboot lost a little steam in Year Two and I’m not sure the introduction of the all-new all-different Cheryl Blossom is helping. Still miles ahead of the perfunctory sub-sitcom grocery-aisle Archie from my childhood.

Betty & Veronica — Twitter tells me I’m supposed to hate what Adam Hughes is doing here, but so far I don’t exactly yet. With only two issues to date I’m not offended or bored yet. I’m relieved it’s not wall-to-wall cheesecake, but that may be just me.

The Comic Book History of Comics — IDW Publishing presents a colored, remastered version of the Fred van Lente/Ryan Dunleavy self-published nonfiction comic-about-comics series that I never saw the first time around. I know a fair bit about comics history, but not everything. It’s light-hearted and informative and worth a look to anyone who wants to know where the field has been, not just what’s approved on Tumblr today.

4 Kids Walk into a Bank — From the creators of We Can Never Go Home, one of my favorite comics of 2015, this is an engagingly talky crime drama about a quartet of kids who decide to rob a bank before thugs force one of their dads to do something he’ll regret. In a recent interview, co-writer Matthew Rosenberg confessed his own problems brought on the recent publishing delays, but I’m cool with being patient for this one.

Jughead — The first several issues written by Chip Zdarsky were witty and wild, but now that he’s been usurped by Unbeatable Squirrel Girl‘s Ryan North, this is now even better than Archie. If that had happened in the old days, the Goldwater patriarchs probably would’ve had aneurysms and ordered beheadings in the office. Thankfully those days seem long gone, though I’m still not sure what I think about the current regime allowing The CW to move forward with Sexy Riverdale Murder Soap.

Comics that haven’t been publicly canceled but appear only once every other blue moon:

Copperhead — On hiatus, purportedly resuming sometime with a new artist.
The Dying & the Dead — Is this still going? it’s been lots of months since the last issue.
Nonplayer — One issue published in 2015 (bring total published issues to two), nothing since.

Series and miniseries that were canceled or ended as planned:

Angel & Faith
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10 (greatly improved over seasons 8 and 9)
Howard the Duck
James Bond 007: Eidolon
Prez (if this is never finished, I promise I’ll be upset)
The Sheriff of Babylon (Tom King and Mitch Gerads’ intense Iraq crime drama is one of the Year’s Best Comics)
Starve
Star Wars: Darth Vader
Star Wars: Kanan
Superman: American Alien (I don’t agree with all of Max Landis’ choices, but a few issues were powerful)
The Vision (Tom King again with one of the Year’s Best Comics — an outstanding, tragic treatment on Robots Aspiring and Failing to Be Human)

Titles I either dropped, or tried once but opted out of continuing:

Aliens: Defiance
Animosity
The Autumnlands
Batman (bringing in Tom King helped till I realized the New 52 continuity wasn’t actually going away)
Black Monday Murders
Black Panther: World of Wakanda (romance isn’t for me, but major props for bringing back thought balloons)
Blue Beetle (20 pages per issue of just Ted Kord and Jaime Reyes arguing and arguing till it’s not funny)
Cage
Captain Kid
Captain Marvel (making her the villain of Civil War II was a massive misstep)
Circuit Breaker
Daredevil
Doctor Strange
Green Arrow
Hercules
Invisible Republic
Jessica Jones (#1 was more depressing than the Netflix series, which I thought was impossible)
The Killer Inside Me
Micronauts (without Bill Mantlo or the Marvel-owned half of the cast, why bother?)
Mother Panic (grim-‘n’-gritty antihero bringing the Young Animal batting average down to .750)
No Mercy
Punisher
Rom (the crossovers came far too soon)
Shipwreck (not all Warren Ellis titles are created equally)
Slapstick (the cartoonish, once-jokey hero is now a murderous antihero? really?)
Spider-Man/Deadpool
Starbrand & Nightmask
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (a year-late line-by-line adaptation with zero variance? exactly why?)
Vigilante: Southland

And that’s kind of an overview of my 2016 comics highlights. Apologies for a few miniseries may have fallen through the cracks, including a new Atomic Robo miniseries I’m sitting on till I find the missing issue #2. I hate when that happens.

July 17, 1999, a day that shall live on in the hearts and minds of at least two geeks.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken a road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. Every tradition begins somewhere. As longtime friends and readers might expect, ours began with a convention.

Enter Wizard World Chicago 1999. It was probably the largest comic con within 500 miles of home. We figured if we could handle a 2½-hour excursion southeast to Kings Island, then we could handle driving three or four hours northwest to Chicago.

Thus did two twentysomething best friends embark on their first real road trip, arrive at their destination in the Chicagoland town of Rosemont, and walk into the largest geek convention they’d ever seen in their lives.

We had each been to our own Indiana Convention Center at various points in our lives, but never for anything hobby-related. The Rosemont Convention Center, which would become the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in 2006, was a Leviathan compared to the hotel that sheltered our tiny sci-fi gatherings back home. If you’re familiar with their floor plan, WWC 1999 only took up Hall A and the first-floor conference rooms near the front door for the sake of containing 750 exhibitors and entertaining over 25,000 attendees, with maybe Halls B, C, and/or D for check-in and lining up. By comparison, WWC 2016 gave some tens of thousands of fans leeway to frolic and shop through the entire Convention Center, adding Halls F and G and all remaining conference rooms, effectively barring any other organizations from sharing the weekend with them anymore.

What’s this? A con so large, it had its own glossy program? With more than two pages in it? NO. WAY.

For us, Hall A alone was sufficiently mind-blowing — 250,000 square feet (nearly five football fields) filled with publishers, dealers, collectors, fan groups, autograph booths, comics, toys, more comics, probably bootleg VHS movies, still more comics, and for some reason a wrestling ring. I’m pretty sure somewhere in my head, blood vessels were popping from a level of excitement strong enough to level an entire nursing home. Entering the WWC exhibit hall for the first time was like a five-year-old’s first trip to Toys R Us. You wonder how anyone could arrange this many wonderful objects into a single, all-encompassing space, and you wonder why anyone would ever want to leave. Compared to this spectacle, Indy’s sci-fi con was like a hot dog cart, and our comic shows were like a high schooler selling band candy out of an art-supply box.

Right there in the lobby, a giant inflatable Ripclaw welcomes guests. If you don’t know who Cyberforce were, rest assured they’re now inessential personnel.

Adding to my disorientation were the frequent announcements broadcasting at volume 11 throughout the show floor at regular intervals, which might have been more tolerable if I could’ve understood any of them. Every ten minutes or so, the same thing: “ATTENTION! GRBLBLBLB MNBNMBN, THE FLFLBER OF WHRFBLBN SPMGKGBF, IS NOW SIGNING AT THE GLGLBLBLB BOOTH, NUMBER 266.” I could bear them for the first hour or so, but after the joint got packed, they became grating and not particularly helpful.

First order of business: meeting people who wrote and drew great comic books. At first glance they might seem like normal people. They are, in reality. To me they were rock stars shaping the universes I’d been visiting and following since I was six years old. Artists Alley had its fair share of creators, but most of the following appeared for autograph signings at the DC Comics booth throughout the day. Older fans who still attend WWC today can remember it’s been ages since either DC or Marvel cared enough to buy booth space. It’s no secret WWC has transitioned into more of an “entertainment” con with some comics in it than a true comic-book showcase about The Comics. That’s kind of what C2E2 is for, though in recent years they’ve been trying to serve both worlds in equal measure with varying results.

Anyway. The creators we met and photographed:

Tim Sale! Best known as the artist of Batman: The Long Halloween, he was there promoting the first issue of its sequel, Dark Holiday. I’d been a fan since the days of fantasy adaptations like MythAdventures and Thieves’ World. As the first artist I approached, he had the privilege of hearing me babble like a madman while my brain was still short-circuited from sensory overload. He was gracious, encouraging, and thankfully understanding.

(Status update: last seen in print on the Captain America: White miniseries with his Long Halloween collaborator Jeph Loeb, who’s now a Marvel Studios exec.)

Grant Morrison! I loved Animal Man and Doom Patrol, but JLA had made him a more mainstream superstar by this point. I didn’t quite get The Invisibles, but had decided perhaps to revisit that in the future. When it was my turn at his table, a middle-aged, redhead woman in some official capacity chose that moment (my moment, of all possible moments!) to sit next to him at the table and talk his ear off for a good two or three minutes. Morrison nodded at her every so often while keeping one eye turned toward me as a reminder that this wasn’t his idea.

(Status update: he would later spend several years on a Batman storyline so continuous and complicated that not even the New 52 could shut it down. His All-Star Superman became a fascinating DC animated film. He completed his stay in the DC Universe with 2015’s Multiversity and is now doing weird, self-fulfilling projects beyond super-heroes.)

Garth Ennis! This was indeed the heyday of DC’s Vertigo line, whose stellar talent lineup included the co-creator of Preacher and the writer of my favorite Hellblazer arc (“Dangerous Habits”). Hearing him repeat my name back to me in his Irish accent stuck in my head the rest of the day.

(Status update: creator-owned books for Avatar and Dynamite such as Crossed and Red Team; a couple of outside-the-box Hitman spinoffs set in DC’s New 52; and Preacher is now an AMC series.)

James Robinson! His 80-issue Starman series would be among my DCU favorites of the 1990s, but smaller books like Firearm and Leave It to Chance were likewise acclaimed and on my reading piles. He was in the process of launching DC’s first real JSA series since the Golden Age. He seemed quiet, and I thought he deserved a longer line.

(Status update: Robinson took occasional breaks from comics after writing the screenplay for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. After a discontent stint in DC’s New 52, he’s over at Marvel handling Scarlet Witch and Squadron Supreme.)

Joe Kelly! The man who made Deadpool ten times funnier and turned him into the fourth-wallbreaker we know and spend too much money on today was in the middle of transitioning from that gig to becoming part of DC’s Superman writing team. In hindsight I kind of wish I wasn’t in that photo, but he invited me into it, so why not. Photos like this remind me how my previous employer didn’t permit beards. When I changed career tracks in September 2000, I couldn’t get mine started fast enough.

(Status update: his Action Comics #775, “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” (pencils by Doug Mahnke), quickly became one of my Top 5 Superman Stories Ever, and was later adapted into the animated film Superman vs. the Elite. As a member of Man of Action Studios, his influence reached across media and generations as their creation Ben 10 became one of my son’s favorites. In comics he was last seen back at Marvel on Spider-Man/Deadpool.)

Kurt Busiek! He was instrumental during Marvel’s post-Heroes Reborn/Return recovery phase at the helm of both Iron Man and Avengers. His creator-owned Astro City universe was a mere four years old, having moved from Image Comics to Wildstorm’s underutilized Homage Comics imprint. We met him at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund booth, where he and a couple of friends were toiling away at fundraising, signing and sketching and writing out word balloons and whatnot. We waited forty-five minutes for the privilege, which by our nonexistent 1999 convention standards was like a lifetime. Today, forty-five minutes is an eyeblink to us hardy, swaggering con vets.

(Status update: Astro City continues as a regular series today, just about the only sign of life in DC’s Vertigo line. Over at Image, his fantasy series The Autumnlands boasts amazing art by Ben Dewey, who has yet to appear at a con near us.)

George Perez! Busiek’s Avengers artist and CBLDF booth-buddy. (Their Avengers colorist Tom Smith was likewise in the house but barely visible in the pics. Sorry, Tom.) From New Teen Titans to Wonder Woman to Avengers and beyond, his art has been around practically my entire comics-reading life. If you squint, you’ll note that classy Hawaiian shirt is covered with Lambchop.

(Status update: we later saw Perez again at two Superman Celebrations and last year’s Indiana Comic Con, where we found he’s nowhere near my girth today. His comics work is more intermittent but never loses that attention to detail. To this day he’s the only comics creator ever to leave a comment here on MCC, though it was to correct a misunderstanding that I’d expressed in kind of a dumb way.)

Creators met but not photographed:

* Young upstart Greg Rucka, whose Whiteout I’d bought at the Oni Press booth and devoured while in the CBLDF booth line, and left me itching to get to the sequel. He’d recently been hired to begin his renowned Detective Comics run, so I found him seated at the DC booth next to Robin writer Chuck Dixon’s long, long line. After signing Whiteout he directed me over to Artists Alley, where co-creator Steve Lieber cosigned and sketched in it for me.

* Cartoonist Jon “Bean” Hastings, creator of the fun black-‘n’-white book Smith Brown Jones: Alien Accountant.

* Nexus co-creator Steve Rude, who had to explain to a disappointed fan that he wouldn’t sign his copy of Action Comics #600 because he didn’t actually work on it. He had declined to draw the story offered to him by DC, who assigned it to someone else but forgot to remove his name from the cover. We later saw him again at a Superman Celebration and very briefly at last year’s Indy Pop Con.

* One artist/painter who’d worked for Comico and First Comics but who seemed so miserable that I felt sorry and intrusive and tiptoed away.

I attended two panels that day: a 2 p.m. Q&A about Wildstorm Comics’ fringe imprints Homage, Cliffhanger!, and America’s Best Comics; and the last activity of the con, a 5 p.m. JLA/JSA panel. My memories have mingled both panels because I wasn’t in the note-taking habit back then, but I know the former included Kurt Busiek, Ford Gilmore (no idea whatever happened to him), a mostly quiet Tomm Coker, and Gene Ha before that time he did a wonderful sketch for us in 2016. The latter panel brought in Grant Morrison, James Robinson, and Mark Waid (who had to refuse a tacky autograph request from a fan who walked up to the stage at the end), with a surprise cameo by DC Publisher/Executive VP Paul Levitz.

While in various lines I had the pleasure of chatting with fellow starstruck comics fans who couldn’t believe the size, the bustle, the ubiquity of COMICS COMICS COMICS that now immersed us everywhere we walked. The conversations alone were bizarre to me because I’ve spent so much of my life surrounded by people who don’t get me that I rarely talk about comics out loud. When I do, I’m so unpracticed at it that the words are difficult to piece together because I’m used to having all the time I needed to deliberate and type about comics. Even at the comic shop every Wednesday, I’m usually in and out in five minutes in humble silence. Other fans have their own forms of awkwardness and social deficiencies; this, I discovered, was one of mine.

In between events and Artists Alley and long lines: old comics! Back issue boxes are fun to dive into when you have a mile-long want-list and nobody tapping their watch at you.

At last, late-’70s issues of The Incredible Hulk, you will be mine.

Anne tagged along with me for some of this, but she didn’t deserve to wallow in boredom while I indulged. Occasionally she wandered of her own free will and did her own thing. Mostly she remembers browsing the celebrity autograph section, home base for those Star Wars actors we knew would be there. Sadly, their autographs were not included free with our ticket prices. We had some cash on us, but not that much. We weren’t ready to shell out dozens of bucks for what we used to get for free at the old cons back home. Then again, those old cons didn’t invite Star Wars actors. Times and marketplaces have changed since then, and so have we.

In the meantime, she enjoyed the window shopping as much as she could.

Anthony Daniels, costar of The Phantom Menace!

Kenny Baker, also costar of The Phantom Menace! Next door is Caroline Blakiston, the original Mon Mothma.

Darth Vader’s body David Prowse, off in the distance to the left.

Also on display: cosplay! Of course! These were simpler times before monetized cosplayers became a career track, a guest-list qualifier, or a reason to rent a booth. Folks did what they could with the tools at hand to represent the characters they loved. And we liked it.

Look, in these primitive times before the advent of social media and armchair critics on every virtual street corner, there was a reason The Phantom Menace made $431 million in its initial U.S. run. No one held us at gunpoint and forced us to see it six or ten times each.

The duds on those corporate mascot cosplayers weren’t much fancier than what fans wore in for free.

” HEAR ME, PEASANT! DOOM has time-traveled from the future to stop Marvel from licensing the Fantastic Four to Fox!”

We never got anywhere near Ray Park that year, surrounded as he was by constant throngs. Far as we know, we were never within two hundred feet of WWC 1999’s Guest of Honor, director Kevin Smith. We did walk past the table of B-movie actor Robert Z’Dar, who’s appeared in at least two episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and whose unique jaw you might remember from Tango & Cash, but our thought on that differently priced opportunity was, “…nah.”

The program lists another dozen or more comics talents we missed. Curiously, despite its glossy pages and non-mimeographed nature, upon closer examination the same program is shoddy and incomplete, listing none of the actors except Ray Park, providing a map of the show floor with nothing labeled, but taking care to devote a space to quasi-cosplay quasi-guest Keep-Squeezin’-Them-Monkeys Lad. (Hey, don’t give me that look. I never worked for Wizard.)

Also, here’s what passed for rules of conduct and harassment guidelines in 1999. The short version: “Please don’t make us have to act like grown-ups at you. Pretty please? Guys?”

Eventually we stopped walking back and forth across the show floor and convinced each other to stop looking for comics people or actors or action figures or reasons to spend our last pennies. Closing time became a reality and not just last year’s earworm. But in all the fun, the chaos, the lines, and the overwhelming geekiness of it all, we realized we’d skipped an event.

We’d forgotten to eat lunch. At all.

Adrenalin and water fountains had carried us through the entire day on a wave of euphoria that had been like a renewable energy source until we realized it and broke the spell. Hours after entry, we were suddenly dying. Thankfully we still had that cooler filled with lunchmeat, toppings, and drinks out in the car. As we exited the Convention Center and walked across River Road to their colossal garage, we realized we’d overlooked something else.

We’d forgotten where we parked.

Approximately seven thousand minutes passed while we searched up and down the length of the garage floor where I was almost certain I’d parked, until my trusty ’96 Cavalier revealed itself on the next level above. Naturally.

We popped the trunk and sat in the car for a while, emptying the contents of the cooler into our stomachs, listening to the radio and wishing our feet would stop aching and swelling and crying out for amputation. We were in any number of pains, but the experience and the present company were all we needed in that moment.

And then the radio interrupted and broke the news to us that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was missing and presumed dead when his plane disappeared after taking off from Martha’s Vineyard. As if someone in charge of the airwaves had been listening in and decided to remind us what real problems look like.

Not that we needed reminders, thank you very much. We would have Sunday to recuperate and readjust to the outside world, but Anne had already scheduled off work on Monday to attend her great-grandfather’s funeral.

But that was Monday. For now, on this Saturday, we’d proven a lot to ourselves about our capabilities for planning, for working together, for diving headlong into new experiences far from the safety of home, all without getting lost, mugged, crashed, or worse. Wizard World Chicago 1999 represented multiple huge steps for us.

And we still have some of the souvenirs to prove it.

The bag that once contained free swag courtesy of the Dark Horse Comics booth.

Sampler of forthcoming works from still-young Oni Press, future publisher of Scott Pilgrim.

The word balloon that Kurt Busiek hand-lettered for me in exchange for my CBLDF donation. Note the extra care Busiek put into gilding the balloon edges to resemble Comicraft-style Iron Man dialogue. Gotta love that attention to detail.

We didn’t conclude the weekend by declaring that we should make Wizard World Chicago an annual tradition. We didn’t return until 2010, though it’s been an annual event for us since then.

We also didn’t look at each other and decide, “We have to do a road trip every year!” We took away enough new confidence to know that maybe, just maybe we could find other things like WWC to do in the future — cons in other cities, actor/creator shindigs on weekends other than Thanksgiving, or even amusement parks besides Kings Island. Whatever would be, would be.

The following year, a convention in another state jumped out at us that opened yet another new horizon in an unpredictable fashion. The year after that, we pushed our distance and our definition of “convention” even farther at the opposite end of Illinois. Over time we started finding reasons to detour from Indiana that had nothing to do with organized fandom, as unlikely as that would’ve sounded to us in 1999.

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

“Hey, everybody, come look! Alex and Maggie did a cute thing again! Awwww, I love their show!”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I thought so highly of that new CBS series Supergirl that we met four of its stars at two different events last year — Mehcad Brooks and Peter Facinelli at Metropolis’ Superman Celebration; and before that, Chyler Leigh and the Melissa Benoist at Chicago’s C2E2. Fun folks from a fun show.

At launch, Supergirl was a bright, optimistic series about one of the most frequently mishandled members of the Superman family, of which Anne has been a lifelong fan. As an adult she’s been to the Superman Celebration five times with me; as a girl she read all the Superman-related books she could find at our local library and watched Superman: The Movie on videodisc so many times that she memorized it. Literally. All of it. Could recite the entire movie line-for-line from beginning to end. She never could say the same for Supergirl’s movie, which was…well, I haven’t watched it in thirty years, so I can’t fairly say how it ranks compared to Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, but it’s down there. She hasn’t kept up with any of DC Comics’ other TV shows since Smallville, but she was intrigued at the idea and generally happy with season one. Same went for me, despite the intermittent bits of cheesiness I was fine with shrugged off.

Then the series moved to The CW.

(Housekeeping note up front: this entry dives into developments from the March 6th episode. Consider this your courtesy spoiler warning.)

Subsequent headlines after the announcement made it clear the show wouldn’t be the same. Moving production of “National City” from Los Angeles to Vancouver ushered in a new era of grungy nighttime warehouse fights for Kara Zor-El/Kara Danvers and her amazing friends. Our concern turned to worry when the move meant losing Calista Flockhart’s Cat Grant, the undisputed MVP of season 1 and a beacon of sharp-witted boldness that could redeem even the goofiest of episodes with just a look and a ludicrous Hollywood name-drop. As a big fan of The Flash and assuming their staffs had plenty in common, I held on to hope for a smooth transfer with minimal drop in quality.

On the other hand, this was The CW, the network that drove us nuts with the soap-opera sins of Smallville, which lost Anne as a viewer about halfway through its ten-season run. I held on a couple seasons longer than she did till they murdered Lionel Luthor. I returned out of curiosity for the back half of the final season only to regret my choices (except for the Booster Gold episode, which for them was top-notch). In fact, Smallville is why I don’t watch Arrow — it was just too soon when it premiered, I hadn’t let go of Justin Hartley’s comparatively sunny version, and I wasn’t ready to trust The CW yet. (I was also still bitter about Veronica Mars season 3. Ugh.) Maybe someday I’ll catch up with Oliver and company, but it hasn’t happened as of this writing.

Supergirl season 2 kicked off promisingly with a short-term visit from Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman, a bit young but every bit the positive, smiling Man of Steel that some of us older fans hadn’t seen since his WB animated series, double-majoring with a perfectly bumbling, goody-two-shoes Clark Kent juggling the kind of down-home lingo we older Midwesterners know quite well. We knew he had to leave because it wasn’t his show, but he was a welcome sign of heroic inspiration to come, preferably from his cousin the actual star.

Fast-forward a few months later: the one change most highly revered by the internet in recent weeks has been the gradual coupling of Kara’s sister Alex and police detective Maggie Sawyer, transplanted from her original Metropolis setting in the comics as the easiest choice for a high-profile love interest. Alex’s journey and their resulting relationship were unheralded moves for live-action super-hero TV and immediately crowned Best Show of the Decade by large portions of Twitter and Tumblr.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve noticed the two of them are now practically all the show is about.

The showrunners, encouraged by the attention, have doubled down on it and moved their story to the forefront, while apparently letting interns make up subplots for the other characters. Losing Cat Grant was hard enough, and we’ve seen no indication of a reunion anytime soon. Meanwhile down in the ranks, seeing Winn suddenly change career paths from newspaper IT to government covert-ops hacking was jarring, but not 100% unbelievable for the son of Toyman (maybe 55%? 60% at worst).

But the first hard needle-scratch for us fell early on when Kara and best pal James Olsen, whose serious friendship by all signs was heading straight toward romance that probably would’ve delightfully aggravated racists and any intransigent readers who treat comics as holy writ commanding all adaptations thereof must be panel-for-panel faithful. I would’ve been excited for that, but then they were forced to call it quits because. Because why? Because because, SHUT UP THAT’S WHY said the show. To me that came off as a pure Smallville moment — not an organic development for the characters, but a switch-up the writers mandated to facilitated plans that they convinced themselves would be even better. The moment rang false and we made faces at it.

How does James bounce back? By becoming a super-hero in his own right, the Guardian (who was not Jimmy Olsen in the comics), to prove to himself he’s still an independent person with something to contribute to society besides professional news photography. Or that he’s a character who still belongs on the show despite being pre-dumped. Or that he’s worthy of Kara’s attention as a love interest who can handle himself and isn’t a liability in fights. Or because comics-based movies and TV shows are always in a hurry to transition as many intellectual properties from page to screen, which is why every new X-Men film offers at least forty new merchandising options to action figure manufacturers.

Meanwhile back at Catco, the erstwhile publisher’s invigorating presence has been replaced with Snapper Carr, a Lou Grant homage so curmudgeonly and devoid of people skills that he’s clearly meant to be the office bad guy, and yet, if you strip away the snark, nearly everything he says represents how Actual Journalism actually works. But it’s bent in such a way that you resent him trying to maintain ethics and integrity if it means the other, younger characters can’t just do anything they want. How dare he act like a mean dad telling them how to do the jobs they’re demonstrably lousy at?

Over at the DEO, J’Onn J’Onzz, the Martian Manhunter, has been doing what he could sharing a long arc with Miss Martian, showing us more of life on Mars while learning a very important lesson about judging others by the color of their skin, which is a lesson that also could’ve been imparted in a Kara/James romatic entanglement but whatever. He didn’t bother me overmuch up until this past Monday’s episode “Exodus”. In a situation where her dad Dean Cain appears to have turned to the Dark Side, Alex gets so emotionally involved in the case that she proved to J’Onn’s disguised face that she’d be willing to blow off any and all security protocols if it meant a chance to redeem Daddy. J’Onn rightfully suspends her from duty for disobeying orders and jeopardizing the entire cast. Alex goes behind his back and stays on the case anyway. At the end of the episode, J’Onn begs her forgiveness for doing his job competently and acting like a rational adult. I imagine this moment of repentance impressed the heck out of middle-school viewers.

And that’s just the supporting cast. Then there’s Kara herself.

Once upon a time last year on CBS, Kara was a young hero who still had lessons to learn, but wasn’t a downright fool. With James benched for the foreseeable future, Kara’s dance card was empty until the insertion of Mon-El, a longtime member of the Legion of Super-Heroes in good standing whose introduction to the CW-DC Universe saw him reimagined first as a foreigner whose home planet Daxam shared a Hatfield/McCoys feud with Kara’s own Krypton, which they set aside once the two of them learned a very important lesson about judging others by their homelands. Once we dug more deeply, Mon-El revealed himself as a selfish, loutish, lying, womanizing dudebro from beyond who was all about scoring the chicks and the beer and the other addictive consumables for the manliest of manly men on Earth and Daxam alike. Kara smartly rebuffed him, but agreed to keep mentoring him on Earth living as well as Earth crime-fighting, somewhere between “just friends” and “just business”.

Now? Mon-El is still obnoxious, but he’s, like, so learned his lesson and totally changed and he’s now so cool, you guys, so now he and Kara have hooked up because you just really have to get to know the person inside and then you’d see how sweet and caring he really is if you’d just give him a chance. And in the last episode, when Dark Dean Cain had everyone bamboozled, only that doubting jerk Mon-El questioned what was going on, and technically his obnoxiousness helped save the day. Yippee! Go, Kara! Convince yourself this is just like that time Buffy and Spike started dating! From where we sat, Mon-El’s “progress” was too speedy to swallow and obviously done to force the plotlines where the writers wanted them to go instead of where they should’ve been heading based on how much of a corrupted buffoon he was at the start.

One would hope we could at least see Kara accomplishing great things at Catco, where she’d stayed invested in her wannabe career as a real journalist based on her zero credits from journalism college and publishing ethics learned apparently from 1950s Lois Lane comics. I wish I’d taken notes on the number of missteps she’s made that Snapper has called her on, but it’s hard for me to live-tweet the show and take notes to build a case for her termination at the same time. Last week’s episode was head-shaking enough on its own: after Snapper shoots down Kara’s story idea that counts as its sole source thin, unsubstantiated allegations from Supergirl (read: herself), Kara deliberately violates the non-compete clause in her employment contract (presumably it has one if it has any pretense of realism) and self-publishes the article herself on “danvers.com” — her very own blog!

(I could not stop laughing or criticizing that. Honestly, that’s another entry in itself. Suffice it to say former blogger Iris West from The Flash should probably give her pointers, starting with “just don’t”.)

What happens next? Snapper rightfully fires her her from Catco for disobeying orders, for conflict of interest, and in a sense for basically publishing “fake news”. At the end of the episode, Snapper does not beg her forgiveness for doing his job competently and acting like a rational adult. I imagine this moment of true adulthood enraged middle-school viewers. How dare he interfere with her self-righteous crusade? Sure, Cat was the role model who first encouraged “Kee-ra” toward the news reporter track, but Cat probably also planned to mold Kara personally into a top journalist, because Cat of course could do this for anyone hands-on with The Wisdom of Cat at her command.

But Cat isn’t around anymore to save Kara or the show, is she? Bottom line: with its titular character now a sucker for a “nice guy” and newly unemployed thanks to her own thoughtless stubbornness, Supergirl has somehow transformed into the second coming of Smallville and we’re not happy. I miss the smiling super-hero who made National City a better place to visit, and Anne — with two sisters of her own — misses the show we used to have about Superman’s best relative ever, and the show about these two cool sisters who stay really close through thick-‘n’-thin despite their differences, who used to end every episode hanging out together with ice cream and a movie, and without an entire network coming between them and us.

“Wow, Cyclops is an even bigger jerk in the comics. Maybe I should give these a chance after all.”

Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Logan the Greatest Wolverine Solo Movie of All Time!

That’s not a hard claim to make after the soggy mishmash of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the mostly not-bad The Wolverine, a Japanese action-adventure yarn that held up well until the final boss battle pitted Our Hero against a vengeful geezer-mech. The latter’s director James Mangold reunites with The Hugh Jackman for one last assembly with Marvel’s once-merry mutants in what may be the X-Men film least likely to sell a single action figure.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Mutants are over! In the not-too-distant future, nearly all the characters you loved or hated from the last nine X-films died, and new mutants stopped being born, Evolution performing an unexplained bit of reverse natural selection. After a vague east-coast incident mentioned twice in passing without explanation, only two mutants remain: our man Logan, now a grumpy limo driver whose adamantium skeleton may be shortening his lifespan; and formerly esteemed Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart returns!), whose every utopian hope has been shattered and whose torturous movie life has left him feeble, demented, and fighting off seizures that can have destructive consequences every time the world’s most powerful telepath loses control of his superhuman functions. Living out their golden years on a dusty Texas hideaway, the grumpy old mutants fritter away their remaining minutes, both of them clearly having been too distracted by Evil to put any thought into long-term financial planning.

Then Logan the caretaker finds himself saddled with another unwanted burden: a tiny young clone of himself named Laura (newcomer Dafne Keen) grown in an evil lab with advanced versions of Logan’s own abilities, unlimited youthful energy, no parents, and a very tiny moral compass. Laura, lab-name “X-23”, has escaped her creators and needs an escort to a possible safe house that’s naturally hundreds of miles away. In another film you’d normally see Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman as the surly senior citizens joining forces to do the right grandfatherly thing, but they and their accompanying chuckles are nowhere around. It’s up to Sergeant Stabby and Carnac the Magnificent to make the road trip from Mexico to North Dakota in Logan’s 2024 Chrysler limo while on the run from near-future science baddies: the cyborg Reavers, who were an actual thing in ’80s Uncanny X-Men comics over a decade before Firefly repurposed the name for even meaner villains.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Heading the Reavers is Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook, bulked up in the years since Milk), an imposing, charismatic figure who barks orders and threats, but who doesn’t seem to do much of his own fighting. His boss (Britain’s own Richard E. Grant) is a covert-ops mad scientist trying to concoct a grand army of young clones of all the characters you loved or hated from the last nine X-films, but who keeps getting mixed results.

If you saw X-Men: Apocalypse and scratched your head at their version of B-list mutant Caliban as a seedy power broker, he’s back but more sympathetic as played by Stephen Merchant, co-creator of the UK’s original The Office. For a pastoral intermission on their road trip, Our Heroes spend a Midwest evening with a black farming family headed by ER‘s Eriq LaSalle and Elise Neal from Scream 2.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? We know from previous films that super-heroes can die, but Logan answers the question a youth-oriented Hollywood has been loath to ask: what would happen if they got old? Set aside the super-powers and it’s a scenario rarely played out on the big screen except as a foreign film or a comedy (cf. the upcoming Going in Style). The shocking answer: if villains or shallow directors don’t murder them, they’d age less than gracefully, like too many of us. Logan and Xavier are cranky and unkempt and don’t care what you think about the horrible things they say to each other or to you. They’re far, far beyond their prime world-saving days. Xavier is the worse off of the two with his unstable mental condition and his still-paralyzed legs (one scene where he needs help getting to a bathroom is funny because it’s so depressingly realistic), but Logan finds himself trapped in the unenviable position of trying to tend to the needy elderly while he himself is falling apart. Welcome to a potentially prescient glimpse at 21st-century retirement if you’re not careful, kids.

While Logan and Xavier count down to the end of their days, in walks Laura as the face of a new breed. She’s rough, rowdy, and occasionally homicidal if you don’t take the time to tell her “no”. She and her equally young peers were designed with soldiers’ templates and temperaments, but giving up and letting Nature win over Nurture is a quitter’s response. It’s up to the current generations to step up, be the parents they need, frame the world in a better context, teach them the difference between Feels Right and Actual Right, and hopefully pave the way for a next generation of heroes, problem solvers, and/or film franchise stars.

With mutant genes basically extinct in the wild, the shadowy government dudes refuse to let that mysterious fade-away signal the end of human battlefront advancement. Whether nature helps out or not, bad men will always keep researching ways to make or become better killers. Hence the cyborgs and the super-clone kids.

Another important lesson Logan teaches for those unaware: yes, there really are black farmers in America. They have a nationwide organization and everything. As the movie illustrates, it’s not easy out there by any means, especially if racist neighbors want your land or if the government intrudes on your tranquility in the pursuit of mutant fugitives.

Nitpicking? Hey, kids! You don’t get to be X-Men completists for a while. After the runaway success of the R-rated, extra naughty Deadpool, Fox gave the makers of Logan their blessing to go darker. No time is wasted in exploring life beyond the PG-13 frontier as Jackman drops the F-word in his first line and doesn’t let up for a long while. It’s supremely disconcerting hearing Logan and Professor X, the stars of all-ages comics for decades, cussing each other out like angry sailors now that they’ve seemingly lost all reasons for self-control.

Likewise, in the wake of Deadpool as well as Marvel’s successful Netflix shows, Wolverine hacks and slashes and makes with the bloodletting like no movie fan has seen from him before. Evildoers are gouged, impaled, julienne-sliced, and subject to spontaneous limb loss that would’ve made comics’ Professor X weep for Logan’s soul. Comics readers have seen this level of ferocity in a smattering of mature-readers-only books over the years, but by and large, Wolvie’s fight history has been downplayed for the sake of the former Comics Code Authority, often as sanitized as the average 1980s Saturday morning cartoon, like when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles used to use their martial-arts weaponry only against robots, bloodless aliens, or inanimate objects, or just didn’t hit anything they aimed at. Logan is assuredly not for the squeamish, least of all when adorable li’l Laura snaps into a frightening high gear with her own adamantium assortment and triples her de facto dad’s body count.

Logan, then, is X-Men comics pushed to uncomfortable yet logical extremes. Logan and his protege, along with Jon Bernthal’s Punisher in season 2 of Daredevil, demonstrate how crime-fighting would look if you left it up to unchecked vigilantes who fight evil with blades or bullets instead of with controlled punching or benign lasers. These were the costumed crusaders that once mesmerized legions of readers partly because their lethal methods were sealed under child-proof safety caps and safeguarded from any actionable consequences. In that sense Logan removes its characters from the traditional super-hero mold and refits them as adult science fiction. Fans of old-school super-heroics are no longer the target audience.

Also turned away at the door: anyone who thought ’90s X-Men comics were awesome. Some nostalgic hangers-on may be unhappy with a scene in which Logan dismisses those erstwhile bestsellers as contemptible pabulum and calls them “ice cream for bedwetters”. This is definitely not your father’s X-team.

Two unrelated, annoying nitpicks from other perspectives:

1. The final boss battle sees our rapidly deteriorating Logan squaring off against the next project after Laura, another clone code-named X-24, who suffers from a problem all too common with clones in fiction: magical aging. Whereas Laura’s class are close to each other in age (from 8-ish to mid-teens), which makes sense given that they were created within a narrow time span, somehow the next clone project after them is already a full-grown adult.

2. One of Laura’s lab-product peers is a black kid with electrical powers, following in the footsteps of Storm, Black Lightning, Black Vulcan, Static Shock, Aqualad from Young Justice, and who knows how many other black super-electricians I surely haven’t encountered yet. And I won’t be surprised if Cyborg’s screen debut in Justice League sees his various attachments and options exchanged for a single “super-shock” ray or something. Why does the black member always get the electrical powers? Why can’t the black hero be the one with super-strength or super-intellect? Can someone please buy a round of Milestone Media comics for Hollywood and give them some new ideas?

So what’s to like? Ultimately, Logan wouldn’t be a movie for kids even if Mangold were limited to the usual PG-13 marketing line in the sand. Thematically it’s a tough, unflinching look at the hard choices made by stubborn old men refusing to lay down and die despite the incessant begging from every cell in their body. Jackman and Stewart are in finest forms as curmudgeons not going gently into that good night, but I’m not sure how enthusiastic the tween set would be for a movie about dueling grandpas in decline.

For those intrigued by that concept — especially us over-40 folks with illnesses and calamities lying in wait for us around the future’s darker corners — in between the tough-love moments are some of the X-movies’ most dynamic, stylish, intense fight scenes to date, from nighttime Mexico to amber-waving heartland to the panoramic Dakotas. Wolverine and his final foe each give as good as they get, but the big breakout is Dafne Keen, the ragamuffin MacGuffin at the center of it all who’s infused with adamantium, rapid healing, martial arts and light-speed gymnastics. Stuntmen struggle to keep up with the deadly human cyclone that is our X-23; the grown actors revel in matching talents with hers even in the early scenes when she’s silent but glaring, ever glaring at their poor role-modeling and persuading them to save the day one last time without saying “please”.

In the present Marvel comics, X-23 has already inherited the name of Wolverine for herself. Now in Fox’s X-universe, its elders have delivered their final performances on the main stage with flourishes at times graceful or brutal, but they exit assured that theirs doesn’t have to be the last stand for cinematic mutantkind. We all leave this world sooner or later, but the noblest way to go out is to leave the right legacy for your successors to follow. Once your time is done, all you can do is hope they paid attention.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Logan end credits, but you can stay through the first half for mandatory Johnny Cash, in the form of “The Man Comes Around”, one of the best songs from his later albums recorded with producer Rick Rubin. At the very end, comics fans can take note of the usual round of Special Thanks to the creators who made the characters possible, this time including X-23 creator Craig Kyle and her frequent writer Marjorie Liu. And I learned near the very end that the X-Men prop comics used in the film as a meta-joke were drawn in intentionally crappy ’90s fashion by talented ’90s pros Joe Quesada and Dan Panosian.

Cosplay flashback: X-Men villains Mojo and Sebastian Shaw at C2E2 2011.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Anne and I like conventions! Pleas enjoy these four photos never before posted on MCC while we dive in.

Being the married couple we are, cons are among our favorite shared activities, all the better if a given event has elements we can both enjoy rather than just one of us. I look for a strong comics presence; Anne brakes for classic-TV stars, be they from Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or any other shows she watched over and over as a kid. And longtime MCC readers know in recent years we’ve made a new hobby of collecting jazz-hands photo ops. Thankfully here in Indianapolis, we have disgustingly convenient access to more cons than ever, whether at our own Indiana Convention Center or in the surrounding states. Our state motto “The Crossroads of America” isn’t just a tourism slogan — it’s an apt caption for any map showing our bicycle-spoke interstate layout.

After another inert winter, it’s that time again! The return of our favorite conventions is on the horizon, which means it’s time for us to plan ahead — review guest lists, buy tickets, draw up budgets, schedule our vacation time, dig up objects for autographing, redo our budgets, and get in shape to handle the long walks and longer lines. It’s all part of the game.

For new readers, here’s a general overview.

Cons that receive first consideration:

C2E2 (Chicago)
Indiana Comic Con
Indy Pop Con
Superman Celebration (Metropolis, IL)
Wizard World Chicago
Starbase Indy

As middle-class middle-age geeks, we stress for the sake of fiscal responsibility that none of these are an automatic annual purchase. We don’t buy tickets a full year in advance, nor do we ink them on our calendar before they post a guest list. But more often than not, they find reasons to pull us back in.

Autograph flashback: John DeLancie, a.k.a. Star Trek’s Q, wowing Anne at Wizard World Chicago 2010.

Other cons we’ve done in years past:

Gen Con — They graced Indianapolis with a geek presence years before we had anything remotely resembled a true “comic-con”. We’re not gamers, but it was fun to immerse ourselves in tangential fields and hobbies for lack of any competition.

HorrorHound Indy — We’re also not big horror fans, but the past few years they’ve brought in actors whose resumés just so happen to include cool non-horror highlights.

Cincinnati Comic Expo — Tried it for our first time in 2016. It impressed us on many levels and Cincinnati is a shorter drive than Chicago. An encore visit is highly likely someday.

Star Wars Celebration — We attended both the 2002 and 2005 occasions, and don’t think we weren’t grateful for Lucasfilm deigning to show up for the Midwest. They’ve maintained a minimum safe distance of 900 miles from our house ever since.

Hall of Heroes Comic Con — Our newest addition to the list, from three weeks ago. Rough-edged but fun for a first-time con, and also closer than Chicago.

Cartoon Crossroads Columbus — Launched in 2015 as a small-scale, multi-venue gathering devoted to intellectual discourse on graphic storytelling free of Hollywood sparkles, CXC Year 1 lured me in (kind of dragging Anne along with me) and made up for the decades I’ve lived without ever hearing anyone engage comics on that high-minded a level. But we found that trying to do it as a one-day outing was taxing (Columbus is farther away than Chicago) and left me missing out on too many of their best offerings.

Autograph flashback: X-Files Lone Gunman Dean Haglund at Starbase Indy 2011.

My convention bucket list:

San Diego — We’ll have to get rich first or wait till it becomes so uncool that everyone else stops attending and leaves more room for us. We don’t believe in holding online fundraisers for road trips or comic cons, and we openly judge those wannabe freeloaders who do, but if we decided to sink to that level for reasons, San Diego would be our first stop in my new era of hollow hypocrisy.

Dragon*Con — We have friends who attend every year, but it’s in Atlanta and it’s always on Labor Day weekend. Atlanta isn’t that close and I hate taking vacation days before or after holiday weekends. There’s a short speech that explains that last clause, but I’ll save it for another day.

RIP cons no longer with us:

Gateway Sci-Fi Con (St. Louis) — Our second annual road trip in 2000 took us there to meet the cast of MST3K. The hotel was demolished the following year and the con disbanded.

Wizard World Indianapolis — The bad boys of the convention world (insert your choice of laughter here) spent a few years trying to establish beachheads in multiple American cities. For our own beloved Circle City someone thought Valentine’s Day weekend during the winter of 2015 was an awesome idea. When WWIndy failed, they gave up on us rather than reassess their mistakes and call do-over.

Awesome Con Indy — Their flagship show in Washington DC seems healthy, but the guest list for their 2014 spinoff comprised a combination of stars who do lots of conventions and actors that only people like Anne and I would recognize. I’ll always be grateful for the one con that was so underattended, it gave us an unprecedented chance to chat with one actor for twenty minutes while no one else was in line behind us. A planned follow-up show in Milwaukee was axed not long after and the showrunners retreated to DC.

Appleseed Comic Con (Fort Wayne) — A smaller show that happened to fall on my 2015 birthday weekend and brought in a few artists and writers of surprising note. 2015 wasn’t their first attempt, but sadly they announced an indefinite hiatus three months later.

Generically named “Star Trek Celebration” (Lafayette) — Early into our best-friendship, Anne and I drove up for a day to meet Garrett Wang from Star Trek: Voyager. I have no other memories of that day except the smile on her face as we drove home.

Tentative 2017 con schedule so far:

Indiana Comic Con: 4/14 – 4/16 (tickets bought!)
C2E2: 4/20 – 4/23 (tickets bought!)
Superman Celebration: 6/8 – 6/11 (no tickets required per se, but one guest is on Anne’s bucket list)
Indy Pop Con: 7/7 – 7/9 (extremely tentative — they picked a bad weekend for us)
Wizard World Chicago: 8/24 – 8/27 (guest list pending, but they tend to come through)

Who knows where else the roads will take us in the months ahead. Earlier this evening Anne was perusing guest lists in Raleigh, Virginia Beach, and Lexington (which we just missed), pondering the notion of expanding our con boundaries in much the same way that we have with our annual road trips. Updates here on MCC as they occur!

Cosplay flashback: Bat-Villains take a break from running amuck at Gen Con 2009.

Y’like super-hero tales with costumes and exotic locales? Ha. SUCKER.

Netflix’s Marvel’s Iron Fist, based on the kung-fu super-hero I’ve followed off and on since childhood, is the first time I’ve watched a TV series and wondered to myself if it might’ve worked better as a mid-’90s Pauly Shore vehicle.

Follow along, if you opted out of it: American orphan kid is raised for fifteen years out-of-country by strange men with stranger ways. Orphan returns to America as a grown-up with no knowledge of anything that’s happened since the invention of the iPod and stumbles through an unbelievable chain of circumstances that turn him into the majority shareholder and head honcho of a Big Pharma corporation even though he has no degree, no diploma, no job history beyond “defender of sacred mystic hidey-hole”, no experience with any operating system since Windows XP, and no working knowledge of any drugs beyond aspirin and maybe Children’s Robitussin. Adult orphan makes EvilCo look stupid by mandating they sell one (1) new product at-cost, then makes it worse by being nice and candid with someone who’s suing them. Wacky evil characters do evil things that make orphan-man sad. Our Hero saves the day by tapping into his innate awesome excellence and beating up everyone except the two evil execs he likes best, but it’s implied with minimal redeeming acts that henceforth they shall only run EvilCo as a force for good. Our Hero and his new girlfriend celebrate victory with an exotic vacation that hints at a sequel.

Is that timely fish-out-of-water tale not the sweetest direct-to-video pitch Pauly Shore never got? Call it Pharm Boy and get some former child star to direct. Toss in an Aerosmith B-side over the end credits. Have Brendan Fraser cameo as himself doing a TV commercial for some EvilCo product and reading off a long, scary side-effects list. Cut it down to ninety minutes instead of dragging it out to thirteen hours. That could’ve been quickie Blockbuster gold.

Unfortunately, our actual star Finn Jones is no Pauly Shore. Jones lacks Shore’s effortless stoner-surfer confidence, can’t irritate white-collar foils quite like Shore could in what passed for his “prime”, and, worst of all, approaches this soap-opera malarkey with all the gravity and earnestness of a grass-roots PAC trying super-hard to direct you to change.org so you’ll sign their Petition to Make Businessmen Illegal. Danny Rand knows as much about pharmaceuticals as President Trump knows about international diplomacy, he tries playing at it with about the same level of bravado, and the results are nearly as head-shaking.

The worst part is, from the comic fan’s perspective, Iron Fist isn’t even supposed to be a drama about the evil one-percenters do. It’s supposed to be about the martial arts. That’s why we’re here. That, and because we’re under marching orders to watch every show that leads up to The Defenders so that we can grasp every nuance and appreciate all its callbacks and congratulate each other for being unconditional Marvel Netflix completists. I’m worried now that The Defenders won’t be a super-team show but will instead be a reboot of the old EG Marshall/Robert Reed version of The Defenders, so it’ll be thirteen hours of courtroom drama and board meetings with exactly zero minutes of Jessica Jones and her dudes punching out ninja armies.

Sadly, the martial arts don’t quite save Iron Fist. I had problems when the early episodes fell back on the en vogue method of letting the editor create each fight scene by editing six hundred lousy takes into one thirty-second, 300-cut sequence. That’s as opposed to, say, choreographing and directing a complete, continuous, fluid, non-fakey-looking fight scene from start to finish. I’ve hated that method ever since I first picked up on it in Batman Begins and XXX: State of the Union (yep, I was the one guy who saw it in theaters) and it’s tough to respect such shoddy patchwork after watching much better sequences from The Raid and its sequel, or the long, single-take hallway fight from Oldboy, a.k.a. the one scene these Marvel Netflix shows won’t stop copying.

My opinion worsened when my equally disappointed son pointed me to that Finn Jones interview in which he admits his training and the fight scenes were rushed to such a ridiculous degree that they couldn’t have hoped to rise to the level of, say, Agents of SHIELD. To their credit, the melees improve a bit in the later episodes, but those first few set the tone and lowered the bar, and they’re bookended by a season-finale anticlimax in which the final boss battle comes down to Our Hero versus one dude with a pistol.

Madame Gao gazes upon her works and weeps, for there are no super-hero shows left for her to conquer.

Let it not be said that Iron Fist is wholly irredeemable. Part of my fun in watching productions like this is deconstructing them to admire the inner gears that work well despite the defective machinery surrounding them. If a more serious editor went to town on this season with a butcher knife, the good-parts version would absolutely include the best showdown, from episode 8 in which Danny faces actor/stuntman Lewis Tan (who auditioned for the lead role first) as essentially an homage to Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master. Tan is a rare opponent with any style or personality beyond Tackle Dummy, and deserved more than one appearance. It’s probably no coincidence the episode was directed by Kevin Tancharoen, who’s helmed episodes of many a super-hero show (SHIELD, the DC/CW ‘verse) and apparently knows what to bring to the party.

Honorable mention, villain category, goes to episode 6 for the Bride of Nine Spiders, brought to life straight out of the comics by actress Jane Kim and our special guest director, RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan (Man with the Iron Fists), who takes an otherwise pointless Mortal Kombat tournament and injects the most visual flair of the season. I had hopes for Ramon Rodriguez (Omar’s sidekick Renaldo from The Wire) as the mysterious Bakuto, a figure who throws a wrench into the works when he tells everyone Everything You Know Is Wrong, but his extended ambiguity irritated me after a while. Among the other fighters, Jessica Henwick (one of the X-Wing pilots from The Force Awakens) more than holds her own as Colleen Wing, who in the comics eventually partners with Misty Knight from Luke Cage, but I’m not sure how well that’ll work in this universe.

Late in the game, Danny gets a helping hand from his childhood friend Davos (Sacha Dhawan, last seen as Mary’s ex-teammate Ajay from Sherlock‘s “The Six Thatchers”), stepping into the ring with his own distinctive poses, though his script-mandated rage-aholism threatens to overshadow his nuances. For what it’s worth, most of his anger can be summed up in the question, “Why does a white guy get to be Iron Fist and not a qualified nonwhite candidate like me?” so in a sense he’s representing on behalf of the parts of the internet that disapproved of the show sight unseen and on casting decisions alone. By season’s end, his question is left dangling, either to be answered in a future season, or on the expectation that merely asking the question was answer enough. Or something.

The mostly human characters I could take or leave. David Wenham, a.k.a. kid bro Faramir from The Lord of the Rings, alternates between Harold Meachum the doting father figure and Harold Meachum the scheming Big Pharma overseer, but seemed a bit too hammy to balance both sides convincingly for me. At first I hated, hated, HATED Tom Pelphrey as his son/proxy Ward, who came off as Fred Armisen playing Donald Trump Jr. for a Portlandia sketch, but as his character begins to dabble in drugs and wave farewell to pieces of his sanity, Pelphrey seemed readier than anyone else to shrug off the stiffness and embrace full-tilt looniness in a comic-book setting crying out for some.

Claire Temple: saving super-hero shows one stitch at a time.

Tellingly, Iron Fist‘s best features are characters who drop by from the other Marvel Netflix shows to say hi and share what they’ve learned. Carrie-Anne Moss returns as Jeri Hogarth when extensive lawyering is needed. Wai Ching Ho, as the elusive Madame Gao, finally steps to the foreground and makes Danny look foolish at every turn in every way. In my book, Best of Show belongs to Rosario Dawson as the returning Claire Temple, once again playing doctor every time someone else gets mangled in action. Not merely content to supply bandages and ointments, Claire has HAD IT with the wannabe crime-fighters using up all her antibiotics and ignoring their own shows’ major plot holes and idiot plots. She seems to have been inserted by one writer just to mock everyone else in the writers’ room, thus making her the closest thing we have to a viewer’s advocate. I hope she’s here to stay in perpetuity, because let’s face it: Dawson is so indispensable to the Marvel Netflix universe, at least three of its four super-heroes would be dead if not for her. The Defenders would just be Jessica Jones and whoever’s buying drinks at the bar that night.

None of that is impressive enough to fully compensate for the show’s saddest disappointments. No one wants to root for evil corporations, but the underpinnings of Danny’s company seem to lack fundamental understandings and come off as tired caricature, especially in that whole impetuous “at-cost” kerfuffle. Business has to have profit to stay in business. They don’t have to overcharge on a Martin Shkreli level of fiendishness, but they can’t sell all their products at-cost, either. Should the show and Rand Enterprises continue, I expect a bankruptcy subplot midway into season 3 at the latest or else they’re fooling themselves.

Iron Fist’s worst sin: wasting the Iron Fist itself. In the comics, Danny Rand could break anyone or anything by summoning a sort of temporary, impenetrable energy field around his hand that made it, in his immortal catchphrase, “LIKE UNTO A THING OF IRON!” It’s his ultimate weapon, like Voltron’s sword or Popeye’s spinach. Danny still summons his Iron Fist, but 95% of the time he’s using it as a universal door opener. Sometimes a wall comes down with them, or becomes a doorway. There’s one painful moment in which he uses it to bust a pair of brass knuckles instead of smashing their wielder’s face. In the finale (and shown off in the trailer) he uses it to create a massive shockwave in a high-rise office by punching the floor superhumanly hard, which you’d think wouldn’t cause waves but would in fact smash through the floor. But mostly it’s all about the doors. Call him the Human Skeleton Key. And he never says his hokey catchphrase. Not once.

Instead of Actual Iron Fist, we get a hero-wannabe who has much learning to do but wants to run before he can walk, crawl, or tell which body parts are his feet. Instead of focusing on his super-heroing, he spends over half the series in a cautionary tale called “What if Eli Lilly were run by Michael Scott from The Office?” And in case you were hoping that perhaps the portrayal of a Zen Buddhist superhero might somehow be enlightening, you might want to ignore the recurring theme of repressed anger that haunts both Danny and Davos, who each have to endure lectures from other characters about how they’re not working through their issues and implying that their belief system is dumb and not helping them at all. Maybe they can spend season 2 sharing their feelings and attending therapy sessions, or, like, hey, maybe they can just take a lesson in chilling out from Pauly Shore.

The Queen of Hearts and Robin Hood welcome you to Indiana Comic Con!

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I attended the fourth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. Once again Anne and I found a few intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by. Unfortunately Anne had to work Friday, leaving me to my own devices at a con for the first time in…possibly ever?

For all of Saturday she was once again at my side as we went about our various lines and shopping and panels and whatnot. While we recuperate and wait for our feet to forgive us for their punishment (to say nothing of my bum knee), please enjoy this collection of cosplayers who brightened my day and gave me purpose and inspiration around the show floor on Friday before the Saturday crowds overran everything. The actors, comics artists, and objects of note will be shared at the end of this special miniseries. Enjoy!

Beardpool! Because it wouldn’t be a con without at least one Deadpool variant. That’s a federal guideline now.

This may be the same Yuna from Final Fantasy X I encountered last year, but this time the lighting is better.

Hellboy (dragging around the undead Tam O’Clannie from “The Corpse”), Canary, and season-1 Daredevil.

Maka from Soul Eater and Snow White, Jedi Knight.

Matt Murdock, attorney at law, complete with blind cane action.

Harley Quinn and Kevin Smith’s Bluntman. After I took the pic, their adorable son waved up at me to show off his really cool lanyard!

Princess Leia and a pair of Mandalorians, because not all of us fans could afford to fly out to this same weekend’s Star Wars Celebration in Orlando.

A representative of the nefarious Organization XIII from the Kingdom Hearts game series.

Catwoman (Nolanverse) and Harley Quinn (Suicide Squad).

The Riddler, appearing on behalf of The Toy Pit, a new collectors’ shop up on Indy’s northeast side.

Bender from Futurama! Actual bending and beer sold separately.

To be continued! Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 2: Costume Contest Highlights
Part 3: More Saturday Cosplay
Part 4: Who We Met and What We Did

One of several families that cosplayed together: Eleven, Sheriff Hopper, Nancy, Joyce with Christmas lights, and Barbara from Stranger Things.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I attended the fourth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. Once again Anne and I found a few intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by…

We spent 11½ hours at the Convention Center on Saturday because we wanted to be there early to head up one particular actor’s line, and had to stay late for one particular actress’ near-sundown photo op. In between we had a lot of hours on our hands — some of it scheduled, some of it free time. By mid-afternoon we were beat, had exhausted nearly all our entertainment options, and weren’t finding much else to do on the panel list. On a whim and in need of seating, we decided to check out our first convention costume contest in two years.

Longtime MCC readers may recall the overlong essay explaining why I decided to stop attending costume contests. I stand by that essay and the problems I developed, but in this case: (a) I had planned to sit back during the contest and watch from afar rather than trying to go full-bore full-coverage amateur photojournalist again; and (b) instead of frustrating herself with fuzzy zoom-lens results, Anne decided to get up, head over toward the contestants’ milling space, and start capturing faces and souls up closer because she’s awesome like that. All but two photos in this entry are her handiwork, and represent the folks who caught our eyes most sharply and who held still. Enjoy!

Third place in the kids’ costume contest. If you can’t find the Funko Pop you want, make it yourself. Or as young Mason did, make yourself it. I love how the snazzy Red Lantern T-shirt is on the box, too.

The Deadpool variants continued with the first of two Pimppools we saw this weekend.

“Come to the Pool Side. We have chimichangas!” Thus is the questionable T-shirt slogan from Darth Pool, probably.

The Dude from, like, The Big Lebowski abides.

Count Chocula was the tallest and wielded the most complicated rigging of the contest. As I type this, I’m just now realizing this might be the work of the same mad scientist who brought the super-sized FrankenBerry costume that followed us to several cons.

Starfire’s evil sister Blackfire from Teen Titans. I’m old enough to remember her from the comics before she leapt to animation.

X-24 and the titular hero from Logan. Uhhh, P.S.: spoilers for Logan in this pic and contest.

Bat-Villains united! And not just from movies or TV! Red Hood, Scarecrow, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Hush, and Black Mask.

Mandatory Star Wars! On a related note, our hearts go out to the fans in Orlando who’ve been trying to enjoy this weekend’s Star Wars Celebration Orlando despite the horribly mismanaged lines, ruder-than-rude security, and occasional pervading greed and selfishness on either side of the cash registers. From what we’ve heard.

They’re regal and they’re ruling / They’re always ever dueling / Their tempers never cooling / Asgardian family!

They’re eminently Arabian / Steal every scene they be in / They’re way cooler than Fabian / Aladdin Family!

Mandatory group shot of all the finalists crowded on stage at the same time. Best one we didn’t get in a solo shot was at far right, the sinister Venger from my Saturday mornings’ Dungeons & Dragons.

Post-contest shout-out: Princess Mononoke.

Mandatory quadruple bonus points as always to costumes I recognize from video games I’ve played: Big Sister from Bioshock 2. Her character was particularly — HEY! STOP THAT, DARTH POOL. STOP THAT RIGHT NOW.

To be continued! Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Friday Cosplay
Part 3: More Saturday Cosplay
Part 4: Who We Met and What We Did

Sam Wilson, Captain America; Sam Wilson, the Falcon; and Jedi Knight Phoa Toe-Bhomm.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I attended the fourth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. Once again Anne and I found a few intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by…

And now, the part everyone’s always waiting for: all the rest of our cosplay pics from our Saturday walkabout. As with every such con, the following represents a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total number of attendees, cosplayers, and characters on hand. One of the innumerable beauties of the internet is that no two convention cosplay photo galleries will ever be alike. This one is ours.

But first: a great big cosplay mob! On Saturday morning a bevy of professional photographers and dozens of cosplayers rendezvoused outside Hall J for one colossal photo shoot. Anne and I happened to be walking toward the food-truck exit when we found them at work and took a few minutes to ignore our appetites and marvel at the dynamic spectacle.

Now or in the days ahead you’ll find the expertly crafted results of their respective efforts — whether at Indiana Comic Con or at other fun events — posted online at the following participants’ pages, all of whom we highly recommend over our own meager fan-work:

* Photography by Homme
* Daxorr Studio
* Kaminsky Kandids Photography
* Michael P. Hoover Photography
* The Portrait Dude – Cosplay Photography
* Dillon Taylor Photography
* Spectra_HD Photography
* Gabe Duval Media

Special thanks to Brittany at Bsquared Cosplay for providing us with the complete lowdown, and for coordinating this fabulous congregation on behalf of the cosplay community.

…and on a lower level, here’s our rendition of us peeking over their shoulders:

…yeah, I’m not labeling all of these.

Cosplayers to the left of me…

Cosplayers to the right of me…

As cosplay above…

…so cosplayers below.

Very nearly escaping our lenses: our second Pimppool of the weekend, hiding in plain sight.

Meanwhile, back on the show floor…

Men in Tights from Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights starring Cary Elwes as Robin Hood and men in tights as Men in Tights.

Colonel Sanders, hero to American chicken lovers everywhere.

Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones! MEET THEM. MEET THEM NOW.

Chucky from Child’s Play, literally lurking in a dark corner.

Thor and Wolverine, crossing the film universes. Wolverine was one of our early Saturday morning line-buddies this year and last.

Silent Hill‘s Pyramid Head and Nurse, plus…uhhh., a Big Boy muscle mag, or something.

Hawaiian Wookiee, another fellow Star Wars fan probably keeping this weekend’s Star Wars Celebration Orlando in their thoughts. Not that we Midwesterners are bitter.

HAWKGUY! Or, I guess, just “Hawkeye” to you movie-only fans.

Once again I brake hard for Final Fantasy characters: Squall and Rinoa from FFVIII.

Leprechaunpool! A month later, people still be chasin’ his Lucky Harms.

Another happy couple: Goku and Chi-Chi from Dragon Ball Z.

Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon.

Disney presents three princesses and a goddess: Belle, Aurora, Ariel, and Storm.

Deadman welcomes you to the convention life!

I snap the pic thinking, “They look familiar, but I’m blanking on names. My son should know.” So later I email the boy, “Do you recognize the characters in this photo?” He responds, “…a Donkey Kong carrying a baby Peach,” and I’m like, THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT.

A rare moment of Image Comics cosplay: Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon.

Moon Knight, patiently waiting for Marvel to let him make the leap to any other medium beyond comics. Someday his turn will come.

After a ghastly incident involving a depraved felon and a brutally butchered Jigglypuff, Pokemon Trainer Rorschach was born.

Pink Panther. No, not that one.

That’s it for our Indiana Comic Con 2017 costume photo galleries but we’re not done yet. Coming soon in our candid finale: jazz hands and storytime!

Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Friday Cosplay
Part 2: Costume Contest Highlights
Part 4: Who We Met and What We Did

Dearest farm boy Wesley himself humors a couple of weirdos. As we wish.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I attended the fourth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. Once again Anne and I found a few intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by…

In our first three chapters you saw all our costume photos that were remotely fit to print, but wandering the halls and capturing people’s handiwork and souls isn’t all we do at cons.

Modest banners hung around the streets of downtown Indianapolis.

DAY ONE: Friday, April 14th.

My employers let us have Good Friday off every year. Anne isn’t so lucky and had to work that day. That meant a major milestone: my first time attending a full-size convention alone. At first it was lonely, especially in that first long line to pick up her one-day wristband and my lanyard. I arrived unaccompanied shortly after 11 a.m. and found a few hundred people ahead of me in the line for pre-order pick-ups. Meanwhile the eight or ten volunteers manning the lines for onsite purchases assisted eight or ten fans that first hour.

If nothing else, that first line gives you time to get into character.

Most of the things we wanted to do were scheduled for Saturday, or were meant for the two of us together. Conversations went on around me. A hurried discussion about where to find batteries for a megaphone. A fan wishing some con would invite the voice of Count Chocula. A lot of volunteers in cheery states, in top shape and not yet worn down by the long weekend ahead.

I decided to spend my “me” time in the exhibit hall perusing the comic racks and clearance stacks, but at a measured pace of my choosing. For once I didn’t have to feel self-conscious about boring Anne while immersing myself in so many longboxes. Usually she’s sweet and tolerant of it, but I don’t like to take her patience for granted. I picked up a few minors deals. I stopped at my local comic shop’s booth and said hi. I met a few comics creators over in Artists Alley.

First up: Gerry Conway, the man who murdered Gwen Stacy. As one of the writers to guide the fates of the Marvel Universe after Stan Lee stepped away from monthly scripting, Conway was a longtime contributor throughout my childhood there as well as at DC Comics. The two-part “Death of Gwen Stacy”, which I read as reprints in Marvel Tales, was probably the first story I ever read as a kid that showed a “good guy” dying. And when Norman Osborn got his in the next issue…that was the stuff of high drama, something I certainly wasn’t learning about from my steady diet of cartoons.

Over at DC, Conway co-created Firestorm the Nuclear Man and any number of characters surrounding him, which included future hacker Felicity Smoak from TV’s Arrow. We chatted for a bit about one of my fave DC heroes and agreed that Victor Garber’s version of Professor Martin Stein on Legends of Tomorrow is letter-perfect.

Also a pleasure to meet: artist/writer Ron Randall. Throughout the late ’80s to the ’90s he worked on various DC titles including a run on Justice League Europe. Randall’s own Trekker was among the early creator-owned works to grace the pages of the original Dark Horse Presents, and among the few at the time to feature a female protagonist. Recently he co-penciled issues of the Hanna-Barbera crossover maxiseries Future Quest for DC, did a fun issue of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, and tries to find time for more Trekker adventures, which has so far included two trades’ worth of new stories in addition to the original DHP shorts (now available in omnibus form!). We spent a few minutes dwelling on the good things about comics today, including but not limited to agreeing on the prowess of Kurt Busiek.

…and that was it for my short, simple, shopping Friday. Walking in, about, and out calmly and without scheduling pressures was a nice, relaxing way to spend some geek downtime.

DAY TWO: Saturday, April 15th.

Full conventioning mode on. As is our established procedure whenever we mean to meet a popular actor, Anne and I arrived at the Convention Center around 7 a.m. and were the second and third folks in line to enter Hall H when it opened at 9 a.m., a bit early compared to other cons. Other fans slowly joined us as time went on and we began the annual trading of the convention anecdotes, always the best part of every line. Highlights included behind-the-scenes joys from a guy who worked as a volunteer at both Star Wars Celebrations II and III here in Indy, and one guy who got slightly, accidentally choked by an actress at a Wizard World Chicago photo op.

Conversation halted when we were approached by a security guard we remember from last year who likes tossing us weird trivia questions to which he wished he knew the answers. This year’s prime example: “Who was the first super-hero?” which is one of those time-honored controversies that can yield a dozen answers from a dozen fans unless and until you can get all dozen of us to agree on the parameters of the word “super-hero”. If your response to the question is “Superman!” without even pausing to think, you get a pat on the head, a “Good Job!” sticker, and a seat in the Peanut Gallery while us olds try to dredge up past discussions and debates from Comics Buyer’s Guide and the like about every character we can think of who predated Superman — with or without powers, with or without a costume. Frankly, that’s hours’ worth of work you’re asking from us.

Promptly at 9 we all rushed the open doors and headed toward the autograph lines of our choice. Unfortunately my sprained knee and a couple other obstacles hindered us a bit and made us roughly twelfth and thirteenth in line to meet the Cary Elwes. You might remember him from such films as The Princess Bride, Glory, Saw, Liar Liar, Hot Shots, The Crush (my mom made me watch it), and more more more. For our money, he was Priority One. We spent our line-time chatting with a young schoolteacher from Naperville who made us aging folks shake our heads with regret at his tales of The Kids These Days.

Curiously, Elwes was one of only two stars who weren’t positioned at a mere table out in the open. His was inside an enclosed booth, where he did autographs and photo ops at the same time, rather than doing separately scheduled professional photo ops elsewhere.

Do you dare enter…the Dark Booth of the Dread Pirate Roberts?

As we found out, Elwes is fond of the idea of letting each fan or couple have a separate moment apart from the crowds — just you, him, the cashier, and the volunteer who’d take a pic with your camera. He was scheduled to commence at 10 a.m. but arrived at 10:30, better than the average actor by our experience. Elwes was exactly as gracious and courteous to meet as you’d hope, and then some. I got the impression that he’d already had to shake far too many hands before meeting us, so we did our own jazz hands without imposing on him. When he realized what we were doing after the pic was done, he laughed the kind of hearty laugh that only a true British gentleman can laugh, and we magically became ten years younger in his presence that day.

We departed the booth in high spirits. Anne couldn’t get over the fact that he was apparently wearing the greatest cologne in world history. Her exact words: “He smelled so good.” She was so elated, she didn’t share this just with me, but with every fifteenth or twentieth woman she passed in line as we headed off. Because every lady in the house deserved to know.

As for the other actor who insisted on autographing only in a shrouded booth…we suspected that was with a slightly different motive. Behold the foreboding fortress of Val Kilmer.

NO CELL PHONES. THIS MEANS YOU. ALL OF YOU. NO MONEY, NO VAL-FACE.

Kilmer appeared at C2E2 a few years ago. As we recall, he was hours late, and the consensus among the post-con fan discussions Anne witnessed was that he seemed…standoffish. Based on this, and on the fact that at ICC he was charging twice as much as any other guest, we declined to include him in our itinerary. Therefore I can’t tell you what his booth experience was like. To his credit, he arrived shortly after 10, a bit before Elwes and well before some of the other actors down the way.

Later, though, we saw what his photo-op experience was like. While I was doing a thing, Anne wandered over to the pickup table, where all completed photo-op photos are spread out for fans to find and grab the ones containing them, she noticed a pattern in Kilmer’s pics. I give you the following exhibits as examples:

Every photo was the same: in the chair, hands folded, no motion, no reaction, and an expression that says, “If I don’t do this and play nice, they’ll send me to my room without supper.” It looked like every set of fans posed with the backdrop by themselves and had the same “Sad Val” image Photoshopped next to them after the fact. Anne noted at least one unhappy fan at the pickup table lamenting, “I paid $80 for this?”

At the other end of the actor joy scale, you have cheery folks like Jewel Staite, costar of TV’s Firefly.

Learn from a professional, kids.

We met her previously at Awesome Con Indy, but on a tighter budget at the time. I opted for having her sign my Firefly DVD set alongside several other costars’ autographs I’ve collected over the years. Now I’m thrilled to have a photo op to match.

To kill a bit of time between events, we wandered the exhibit hall so Anne could get a gander at what I’d already browsed on Friday. She rarely buys anything from dealers, but she appreciates the opportunity. You never know when inspiration might strike.

I counted at least three different dealers selling vast Lego armies.

We’re old enough to remember when Beanie Babies were a hot commodity and could turn housewives and retirees into billionaires. Today they make great chew toys for our dog.

We also made a point of sitting in on Cary Elwes’ Q&A. At the prompting of moderator Christy Blanch, he told so many stories from the set of The Princess Bride that not much time was left for questions from the audience. First one up was a nine-year-old asking him about what convinced him to star in Saw. So that was lively.

Grainy image from the seats reserved for those of us who joined the line at the last minute, because we refused to hurry for anything else Saturday.

Our final event was scheduled at 5:45. That left us with large, hours-long gaps in our schedule to fill. The panel schedule was a light one compared to other cons — virtually none of the comics guests were doing panels, and we weren’t interested in sitting in on the various voice actors’ Q&As.

(Tangential note: if you wanted to see the largest cosplay gathering outside of professional group photos, you could find many of them in the autograph line for monetized cosplayer Jessica Nigri, who seems to have a plethora of followers.)

On a whim we sat in at the Costume Contest, arriving late and hanging out while our feet rested. The spirited judges and hosts gave it their all, though one MC’s words wee largely muddled either by poor acoustics or my bad hearing. That meant missing most jokes and far too many character names. But the costumes were nifty, as you saw in Part 2.

Later still, we arrived late for another, smaller panel — a “con survival tips” mini-seminar given by a woman whose introduction we missed. “Eden” was either her name or her cosplay character’s. As stodgy old folks, not all her tips or tricks applied to us (though the idea of getting my own EZPass for the Chicago toll roads is tempting, considering how often we’re in the area), but if you’re new to the convention scene and aren’t sure how to navigate hotel rooms on as few dollars as possible, she has notes for you.

Last event, and last photo op, was with a legendary actress we’ve met at previous cons, but didn’t have the best pics of the experiences. The one, the only, the talented, the Nichelle Nichols. If I have to explain her identity to you, you’re at the wrong website.

Oddly, as we approached the booth and the door (where the con staffer remembered my shirt from the Jewel Staite op and joked that now he could finish reading it), we noticed every fan was doing the exact same pose with Nichelle: a Vulcan salute. Every. Single. One.

Telling me “Everyone else is doing it” is the best way to get me not to do something. Nichelle’s smile beamed with every new entrant. She seemed in high spirits despite her advanced age and the lateness of the hour. The time seemed right.

When we approached, Anne led with, “Do you mind if we do jazz hands?”

Nichelle’s dignified response: “Yes, I do mind.”

That was a first. Usually if stars think we’re loony for asking, they’ll respond, “You can do whatever you like!” and proceed to stand back while we bring the pizzazz. We couldn’t tell if she was just kidding, or if the Vulcan salute was the only gesture she could manage without pain, or if it was in her contract that she was limited to a single pose, or if it would be sheer blasphemy for the grand matriarch of the Star Trek universe to do anything but a Vulcan salute. Or maybe she hates jazz. Or has very specific ideas about quality jazz hands and doesn’t trust the attempts of unlicensed amateurs.

No time was allowed for extended conversation on this communication gap. So we split the difference.

At least the photographer was amused, so I got that going for me before I burn for my heresy.

By the time our photos printed, it was 6:30 p.m. The vendors were closed, most of them already vacated from the premises. At long last, 11½ hours later, our Indiana Comic Con experience was concluded. We went home and died.

Psychedelic 3-day badge art by ICC2017 guest Alex Nino.

DAY THREE: Sunday, April 16th.

That was Easter and a Sunday, so we missed out on the only day to feature super-special guest Millie Bobby Brown, a.k.a. Eleven from Stranger Things. She’ll be at C2E2 this coming weekend, where we’ll also be even though we won’t be rested in time. I’ve already bought a new knee bandage for the occasion.

Side note: if you decide to scour the internet for more Val Kilmer photos, you can tell which ones were taken on Sunday because someone put a suit jacket on him.

The End. Till next con, far too soon from now.

Thanks for reading! Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Friday Cosplay
Part 2: Costume Contest Highlights
Part 3: More Saturday Cosplay

Is the reign of the Deadpool cosplay variants at an end? Is C2E2 truly Negan’s world now, judging by the 10,000 Negan cosplayers we saw this weekend?

It’s that time again! The eighth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″) just wrapped another three-day extravaganza of comic books, actors, creators, toys, props, publishers, freebies, Funko Pops, anime we don’t recognize, and walking and walking and walking and walking. Each year C2E2 keeps inching ever closer to its goal of becoming the Midwest’s answer to the legendary San Diego Comic Con and other famous cons in larger, more popular states. My wife and I missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team.

In this special miniseries I’ll be sharing memories and photos from our own C2E2 experience, in all its vivaciousness and vexations. Caveats for first-time visitors to Midlife Crisis Crossover:

1. My wife and I are not professional photographers, nor do we believe ourselves worthy of press passes. These were taken as best as possible with the intent to share with fellow fans out of a sincere appreciation for the works inspired by the heroes, hobbies, artistic expressions, and/or intellectual properties that brought us geeks together under one vaulted roof for the weekend. We all do what we can with the tools and circumstances at hand. We don’t use selfie sticks, tripods, or cameras that cost more than a month’s worth of groceries.

2. It’s impossible for any human or organization to capture every costume on hand. What’s presented in this series will be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the sum total costume experience. Other corners of the internet will represent those other fractions that we missed, which is the cool part of having so many people doing this sort of thing.

3. We didn’t attend Sunday. Sincere apologies to anyone we missed as a result.

4. Corrections and comments are always welcome, especially when we get to Part 2, which will include a few anime and/or gaming characters we young geezers didn’t recognize. I do like learning new names and universes even if you’re more immersed in them than I am.

5. Enjoy!

First up: the heroes and antiheroes of Marvel, DC, and other comics, who made up just over half our costume photos. And as usual, we wound up spotting far above the FDA recommended annual allowance of Deadpool variants…

Ultimate Spider-Man and a funky fresh skateboard-dancing Deadpool welcome you to the show floor!

My Little Ponypool, or possibly WeirdSlumberPartyPool.

Westboropool thinks your favorite heroes are stupid and unholy.

Linkpool says Westboropool can cram it.

Steampunkpool with Victorian rubber chicken. Or something. Honestly, this one kind of lost us.

Tijuanapool is proud to tell you what an authentic chimichanga tastes like.

And now, back to anyone but Deadpool, already in progress:

Power Man and Iron Fist share a toast to friendship and Netflix residuals.

Angel from X-Men: Apocalypse.

Logan from Days of Future Past, smacking a dude down for trash-talking X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Black Panther, soon to be a major motion picture.

Aquaman, soon to be a major motion picture.

Doctor Strange, already a major motion picture.

Batman and Lego Batman, no slouch at the box office themselves.

Flash, Hawkwoman, Speedy/Arsenal/Red Arrow/whichever, and Nightwing.

Aquaman and Superboy straight outta the early ’90s.

Hellboy. I mean Hellgirl. Or Hellwoman! HELLPERSON. You get the idea.

The Tick, soon to be a major Amazon series. Voldemort in repose is not impressed.

Cosplayers of Wisconsin reminding you that cosplay in and of itself is absolutely never an open invitation to leering or groping, no matter how great or how minuscule the temptation.

My five personal faves from this section:

Squirrel Girl! Squirrel Girl! SQUIRREL GIRL!

Squirrel Girls! Squirrel Girls! SQUIRREL GIRLS!

Marvel’s Moon Knight. in his dapper yet unhinged “Mr. Knight” suit.

A more recent Moon Knight variant from the current hallucinogenic Jeff Lemire/Greg Smallwood run.

For fellow old-school fans of DC/Vertigo and Grant Morrison: Buddy Baker, a.k.a. Animal Man!

To be continued! Other chapters in this miniseries:

Part 2: More Cosplay!
Part 3: Comics Creators Cavalcade
Part 4: Who We Met and What We Did

This year’s new reading haul. I may have to work more overtime to pay this weekend off.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The eighth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″) just wrapped another three-day extravaganza of comic books, actors, creators, toys, props, publishers, freebies, Funko Pops, anime we don’t recognize, and walking and walking and walking and walking…

…and the densest Artists Alley we’ve ever seen. Eleven double-length rows of writers, artists, cartoonists, painters, print makers, button sellers, novelists, professionals, amateurs, up-‘n’-comers, elder statesmen, internet sensations, and quiet ones you gotta watch. It was an array so nice, I had to walk it twice, and I still missed a few people I’d wanted to meet. Some had autograph lines longer than the voice actors’. Some just weren’t at their tables when I passed by. A few called in sick, but are hopefully feeling much better now.

But before we got that far, we managed to make time for a pair of panels — one about comics, the other about Star Wars.

As soon as we arrived at McCormick Place on Friday and got our bearings, we headed up to a 12:15 Q&A with Timothy Zahn, one of the most celebrated authors ever to bring the Star Wars Expanded Universe to life. My wife Anne first met him several years ago when he did a Barnes & Noble signing here in Indianapolis, but a lot’s changed since then.

Zahn and his congenial moderator, Del Rey Books assistant editor Tom Hoeler. An anonymous source who hung out with Tom the week before at Star Wars Celebration Orlando tells me he’s “super awesome”.

Zahn’s previous work in the Expanded Universe included such novels as Heir to the Empire and Outbound Flight. Though the Expanded Universe in general has been rechristened “Star Wars Legends” and superseded by the new canon in the wake of The Force Awakens, one of Zahn’s most memorable creations, the devious Grand Admiral Thrawn, was recently recruited as a major Big Bad for the animated series Star Wars Rebels. For value-added synergy, Del Rey and showrunner Dave Filoni invited Zahn to rejoin the fold and provide an origin tale. Hence his latest novel, Thrawn, which debuted up high on last week’s New York Times bestseller list.

Zahn spoke a bit about the book without spoilers and about the collaborative process with the Lucasfilm Story Group, for whom he had nothing but praise. He may or may not have hinted that he’s not finished with Star Wars yet. And he kindly shared his thoughts about his place in the old Expanded Universe, particularly the fact that his Star Wars novels by and large haven’t been wholly nullified by the newer books or works yet. Thrawn is a prequel that takes place well before his original trilogy and interlocks with the majority of it rather nicely. Even if parts are ultimately removed from continuity, he described their standings as “campfire stories” — tales that retain a basis in their reality and are still worth telling and hearing. If there was anyone in the audience dying to make an obnoxious “Bring Back Legends” protest stand, they kept their mouth shut and their manners in check.

After the Q&A, Zahn and most of the audience adjourned to the celebrity autograph area in the exhibit hall for a round of book sales, signings, and happy exchanges with the author.

In her B&N file photo from years ago, Anne wore a heavy winter coat and Zahn had derp-face. This is a massive improvement.

Later on Friday afternoon, I was glad to fit in a comics-related panel, what with C2E2 being a comic convention and me being a comics reader. Seems like a natural idea, but too many cons pass by with me missing all such chances, or lamenting the dearth thereof. In this case the lucky event was an Image Comics panel focusing on “relevance”, which took on different definitions depending on which guy was speaking.

Seated left to right: Jonathan Hickman (Black Monday Murders, The Dying & the Dead, East of West); Paul Azaceta (Outcast); Kieron Gillen (the internet-popular The Wicked + the Divine); and relative newcomer Daniel Warren Johnson (the recently launched Extremity). Not pictured: scheduled panelist Jeff Lemire (Descender; A.D.: After Death; Royal City), who was unable to attend due to illness. Each had their own thoughts to contribute about their approaches to art, theme, sociopolitical ramifications, and so forth, though to be honest I got the impression Hickman would rather have been either writing or partying than talking about writing.

Kieron Gillen deep in thought, either answering a tough question or brainstorming terrible new puns to inflict upon his Twitter followers.

And then there was Artists Alley. Lengthy and scintillating and jam-packed with sellers and buyers and gawkers alike. Best of all, I found reading material! Longtime MCC readers may recall I’m on the prowl for comics and graphic novels wheneve I’m angling to empty my wallet in an Artists Alley. In my darker moments I’m tempted to look into printing a standoffish T-shirt that reads “NO PRINTS, NO POSTERS, NO PLAYTHINGS, JUST GOOD COMICS.”

The following talented creators put up with my wife and/or me within the space of a valuable moment of their time at C2E2 in between finishing commissioned sketches and other, more desirable endeavors. I made a point of throwing money at them and amassed quite the presumably amazing addition to my reading pile.

Erica Henderson! Co-conspirator behind Marvel’s unbeatable Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, about which I’ve gushed before at length. It’s also the only Marvel super-hero comic Anne reads regularly.

Aforementioned panelist Paul Azaceta, whose Image horror series Outcast (written by Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman) is now a Cinemax TV series.

Greg Burnham and Marcus Williams, the minds behind the successfully Kickstarter’d Tuskegee Heirs, which extrapolates from the WWII history of the Tuskegee Airmen and builds a bridge toward sci-fi giant-mech action.

Mike Perkins, who’s drawn a variety of Marvel series over the past several years, as well as a short-lived revival of a book I rather liked called Ruse. He’s recently kicked off their new Iron Fist title.

Writer/cartoonist/columnist Kate Leth, whose Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat will be wrapping up this coming Wednesday with #17.

The very enthusiastic Isaac Goodhart, artist of the Top Cow series Postal, up to three volumes and counting.

Goodhart’s table mate Nick Kaplan, writer of his own Top Cow sci-fi book Eclipse, whose premise might strike a chord with anyone who recalls the classic Twilight Zone episode “Midnight Sun”.

Khary Randolph, artist/co-creator of one of Marvel’s best new series from last year, Mosaic. Randolph gives the body-hopping young Inhuman the kind of high energy level a hero-in-the-making needs.

And the Atomic Robo guys made their C2E2 debut! The space around their booth was hectic when we passed by, so we failed to get a shot of either Brian Clevinger or Scott Wegener, but I promise they were there and Robo is still cool.

There was one more very special name hanging out in Artists Alley, but we’ll get back to him in Part 4. Not pictured but a pleasure to spend with:

* Ale Garza, artist of Get Jiro, a DC/Vertigo graphic novel written by TV chef/foodie Anthony Bourdain.
* Writer Charles Soule, who’s been listed in previous years’ write-ups and for whom I may need a frequent-buyer punch-card.
* Trevor Mueller, whose Albert the Alien is a delightful all-ages science adventure romp worth seeking out.

The list of great folks we didn’t get to meet is ten or twelve times this. For curious comics fans out there, the longest autograph lines I saw in Artists Alley belonged to writer/novelist Greg Rucka, the UK comedy team of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, and former jeans model Rob Liefeld.

To be concluded! Other chapters in this miniseries:

Part 1: Comics Cosplay!
Part 2: More Cosplay!
Part 4: Who We Met and What We Did

For those unfamiliar with the origin of this blog’s name, the clues lie in these DC Comics from 1985.

I launched Midlife Crisis Crossover on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, applause for, revulsion at, and/or confusion arising from various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollow marketing, geek life, and sometimes food. That’s more or less what MCC’s About page says, but with a different set of words because verbosity is my shtick.

The simpler reasoning is I like writing, sharing, connecting, expressing, joking, crafting sarcasm, deconstructing, synthesizing, and forcing myself to articulate my opinions even when they’re wrong. For years Usenet and message boards gave me an outlet for creative goofing, storytelling, and occasional venting, As those circles diminished in traffic and feedback over time, what else was a habitual typist to do?

For years social media was an encouraging supplemental environment for endeavors of the written word. It still has its uses, but only in modicum. Twitter is a nice tape recorder for random thoughts and the perfect vehicle for chatting with other TV fans whenever our shared stories are on, but doesn’t respond well to longform expression except in the modes of sociopolitical tweetstorms or in-jokes about game theory. Facebook has similar functionality but has become a bit more problematic for me — partly due to the stubborn tribalization of American politics, partly due to the influx of family who don’t “get” me, and (more recently) mostly because the Facebook app has refused to update on my Galaxy S6 every month from November 2016 to the present. That pervasive nexus of all communities basically self-bricked and excused itself right out of my everyday routines.

I had choices. I could continue limiting myself to message boards with dwindling populations. I could stop writing and just fritter away my days as an intellectual hermit, confining my writing joy only in emails to my wife. Or I could find another medium. Some people with more ambition and/or publishing connections might decide it’s time to start writing books because it’s just that easy. Some would buy a diary and write only to themselves and God and hurtful snoops. After months of deliberation I went with blogging, even though the internet cool kids had decided it was a “fad” and it was over.

I had vague visions of what to do with such a virtual playground of my own. Initially I had assumed my primary foci would be:

* Comic book reviews, informed by 35+ years of fandom
* Jokey headlines a la The Onion
* Essays informed by our faith and Bible studies
* Travelogues drawn from our annual road trips
* Geek thinkpieces, because if you’re a geek online, it’s what you do to keep renewing your geek license
* Movie trailer reviews, which are like message-board posts but you spend fifteen minutes writing them instead of two

As with most experiments I’ve conducted throughout my life, I figured let’s try just it for a while without overthinking it and see what happens. I’d either burn out and go mad, quit in bitter obscurity, embarrass myself mightily and flee the internet in disgrace, or click a wrong button and accidentally delete everything. It wasn’t exactly a firm five-year plan, which I understand is a thing people do. Sometimes their lives turn out better than mine; sometimes their lives turn into substance-abuse cautionary tales.

My brainstorm session of possible blog names drew up dozens of names, nearly all of them taken. Assuming that comics would remain my go-to subject now and forever, I invoked the Wheel of Fortune “Before & After” nonsense phrase-making technique and fused together two seemingly unrelated concepts:

1. The midlife crisis, that dreaded dysfunction inflicting males over 40 with spontaneous stupidity, latent immaturity, mindless euphoria obsession, and/or intense fear of dying monogamous. Age 39 was perhaps a bit soon to worry about this possible future breakdown in my reasoning skills, but I’ve seen far wiser men than myself do unexpected, stupendously awful things for more selfish, out-of-character reasons.

2. DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths, the comics crossover that begat all modern company-wide blockbuster crossover events in all their epic, sprawling, world-changing consequences and sales boosts. No mere 12-issue maxiseries could contain the full narrative scope, which spread in varying degrees to other series in the DC Universe, whose tie-ins were labeled “SPECIAL CRISIS CROSSOVER!” The “on Infinite Earths” part was still there but in much tinier type.

Sample “Crisis crossover!” trade dress scanned from my copy of Infinity Inc. #20, which also includes the best example of the story’s recurring “red skies” end-of-the-world motif that’s subtly informed what passes for MCC’s “blog design”.

I had a blog title. I had a smattering of ideas. I had one entry I’d spent days writing. On April 28, 2012, I pulled the trigger. And I’ve been alternating between entertaining and stumbling ever since. I posted seven days a week for the first fourteen months before allowing myself to relax in the face of demonstrable evidence that I could in fact do it.

Five years later, here’s MCC entry #1,532 and the well hasn’t gone dry yet, though some results have been surprising in hindsight. I’ve doubled down on the road trips and other travel experiences in no small part because of reader response. (Having a new wealth of material to mine every year helps, of course.) I’ve left the thinkpiece competition to other, more appealing writers with larger, more vocal fan bases. The tongue-in-cheek style remains my favorite approach to most entries, but I don’t demand humor entries of myself, indulging only when it feels natural and never with the stern concentration of a paid joke writer who has to think of amusing things or else starve.

And despite my lifelong fandom, I generally avoid the topic of comics because most of the medium’s fans are over on Tumblr, where I’m not. Also, the majority of today’s individual issues contain too little content to warrant issue-by-issue analysis. a The idea of a 500-word overview of a twenty-page, three-minute read makes as much sense as a New Yorker article about a single chapter in a novel. To make matters worse, it’s my understanding that in 21st internet comics community, if you give any comic less than a B-plus and point out flaws in a flawed comic, you’re a hideous monster who should be banned from all comic shops nationwide forever. If you can’t be constructively candid about the positive and the negative, you’re not a critic or even a reviewer. You’re just an unconditional worshiper with a podium.

The status of the MCC experiment as of today, then, is a site where I can write about whatever I want, which most of the time is not the subject championed in the site’s own name. Not to mention how snarky I’ve been about DC in recent years, from the letdowns of 2011’s New 52 reboot to Batman v. Superman in general, and yet here I am with a site name that owes its very inspiration to how fond I was of their universe for entire decades up until the current one.

Comics fans who read closely can see at least one ongoing resemblance between the funnybooks of my youth and the patchwork playground that is MCC: entries and episodes that frequently refer back to each other. From the Silver Age to the Bronze Age, all the best Marvel and DC comics had their characters mentioning previous adventures in passing, imbuing every issue with a sense of continuity and time progression. The writers and editors would add brief footnotes informing new readers of the issue and number about which the character was reminiscing. That way, kids could find out what comic they’d missed and go back to their regular newsstand to hunt down a copy, get caught up, and feel all the more enriched by the expansive comics-universe experience.

Just as Marvel and DC were about the interconnectedness of all things within their corporate worlds, sames goes here for anyone running across MCC for their first time. Whenever I add links to previous entries, they’re not driven by a hunger for hits. Those are my version of comic-book footnotes. They’re the voice of Stan Lee or Rascally Roy Thomas or Bob “The Answer Man” Rozakis offering to add another level to your reading experience. They’re the “Would You Like to Know More?” narrator from Starship Troopers. They’re MCC’s version of Wikipedia surfing, except instead of learning about practical or fascinating things, you’re wandering further into the official MCC universe, by which I mean our lives and the world around us.

It’s the long-term crossover that keeps on going, keeps on publishing for as long as my wife and I have stories to tell through the good and the bad, through the triumphs and the trials, through the celebrations and the crises. Hopefully all the bad, the trials, and the crises aren’t my fault. Hopefully MCC doesn’t live long enough to see me become the villain.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for anyone and everyone who’s made a positive impact in this half-a-decade-long special crossover event. Here’s to future road trips, to epiphanies and Top 10 lists yet to come, to maybe finding reasons to want to write about comics, and to happier red skies ahead.

Harley Quinn, Spider-Gwen, and Ms. Marvel welcome you to a whole wide world of whimsy and wonder!

It’s that time of year again! Today marked the sixteenth annual Free Comic Book Day, the one official holiday in my lifelong hobby when comic book shops across America lure in fans and curious onlookers with a great big batch of free new comics from all the major publishers and a bevy of smaller competitors deserving shelf space and consideration. It’s easy to remember when to pin it on the calendar because it’s always the first Saturday of every May and virtually always coincidental with a major movie release (in 2017’s case, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). It’s also easy to notice if you live near a comic shop and the parking spaces are much scarcer than normal.

I’m too late for this entry to be immediately useful, but for future generations who might be considering participating in the joy of reading and/or the rush for freebies, we offer the following ideas for maximizing your graphic storytelling holiday to the fullest extent, whether you’re brand new to comics collecting or a savvy peer who likes nodding along with solid reminders.

1. Find a local comic shop! Most large cities and many medium cities have comic shops available. If you haven’t noticed one in plain sight, the Comic Shop Locator will help sort you out with pointers to viable options in your area.

If you’re among the far too many Americans who live in a comics desert, where no shop is within a fair radius of your home because of the economy or rampant illiteracy or local Footloose-esque laws that oppress comics instead of dancing, I strongly recommend checking with the online comics purveyors who sometimes find ways to deliver the fun directly to you through internet magic. Alternatively: zillions of webcomics are free everyday, so it’s great motivation to go digging. I wish I could better assist with this contingency, but I’m old and addicted to my paper comics. I’m not even crazy about digital music, so I’m the wrong guy to ask for comiXology browsing hints.

2. Plan ahead! The official Free Comic Book Day site posts a list in advance of all FCBD offerings that retailers could choose to carry for the occasion. Not every shop will carry every title, but it’s safe to assume all the major publishers will be represented. At the very least, seeing the potential options should give you hope and stoke your excitement level.

3. Arrive early! Comics are free while they last, but sometimes they don’t last. Sixteen years into this tradition, FCBD has built up decent attendance in most areas, and some titles run out more quickly than others. For the widest selection available, you’ll want to get there while the getting’s good or else there’ll be no more getting to be gotten. What constitutes “early” is up to you — my wife and I usually plan to show up at least 60-90 minutes before the doors are unlocked for the morning. In some states and weather conditions, check the weather forecast and gear up as needed. If the thought of standing in a long line for an hour or more is a turn-off, I do understand. Long lines aren’t for everyone. To us geeks it’s all part of the game.

4. Keep your camera handy! Some shops stage special events the day of. We’ve seen FCBD welcomes and sideshows provided by cosplayers, local fan clubs, actual comics creators, local musicians, charity drives, random Samaritans bearing donuts, face painters, and roller derby teams. One of the many fantastic things about comics is the broad intersection they provide for entertainment lovers from across all media and spheres. You never know what kind of talents will be in the house or interacting with the crowd. If what they do looks cool, you’ll naturally want to commemorate that in picture form for all your friends and followers.

Classic Ms. Marvel and the unbeatable Squirrel Girl are kinda like LeVar Burton hosting Reading Rainbow but times 100.

5. Choose carefully! Once you’re inside the door, walk (don’t run because there’s no space for that) calmly to the assigned tables or racks bearing the specific Free Comic Book Day issues designated for the occasion. If the shop posts rules limiting how many you can take, play nice. If they’re cool with you nabbing whatever, that’s fine, but you don’t have to be greedy. You don’t need one of everything, especially not the kiddie-only fare if you’re over 12. Each comic you leave behind means one more fan at the end of the day won’t leave empty-handed and depressed and ranting through tears about how Free Comic Book Day is just a sham holiday that Hallmark made up to sell more Peanuts greeting cards.

6. There is no number 6. Look, there just isn’t, okay?

7. Shop around! Fun trivia most comics fans already know because we remind each other constantly every year: those free comics aren’t free to the retailers. They’re purchasing them from the distributor same as any other comics on sale. FCBD is entirely a voluntary promotion meant as community outreach, which means they’re bankrolling this splendid event from their own coffers, while the publishers still get paid. Comic shop ownership generally sees razor-thin profit margins and moves less than .01% of its careerists into upper tax brackets. So while you’re there…see all those hundreds of thousands of other objects lying around the store? Maybe look through the other comics, graphic novels, toys, T-shirts, and ephemera and buy a thing or two or ten. Not only do you end up with more new things, it’s a nice way of thanking them for their part in this special day and supporting businesses, in that order.

8. Road trip for more! If you’re extraordinarily blessed to live in a city or town that supports more than one comic shop (Indianapolis has at least six or seven), and if you have the time and funds and gas, why not go drop by other shops and see what they’ve made of it. Say hi to more cosplayers, grab another freebie you didn’t see at the first shop, buy even more stuff, keep FCBD alive, repeat until you’re out of either shops, time, money, or space in your trunk.

9. Make time for reading! Congratulations! You now have a reading pile, if you didn’t when you woke up that morning. At some point you’ll need to dive right in and live vicariously through those varied imaginations and universes and licensed merchandise all-stars. Peruse the pictures, absorb the written word, watch those two sides work together in a loving harmony that encourages art appreciation, vocabulary building, and narrative thrills all at once.

For the record, #9 is the step where I failed this year. We’ve been so nonstop busy today that…well, there’s a reason why I’m writing this entry at 11 p.m. about what fun we had at 11 a.m. As of this moment I’ve read 4½ of the 15 comics my wife and I selected, and will likely be scrounging for quality reading time tomorrow. Don’t be me: read now, read often, read faster, glare menacingly at anyone who tries to stop you mid-page.

10. Spread the love! Once you’ve finished, what do you do next? Tell other readers which ones were amazing. Write reviews, as I’ll be doing here in the next day or two because it’s what I do. Return to the shop in the weeks ahead to spend more money on those publishers or creators who brightened your life. For extra credit, once you’re done with your FCBD stash, consider pass on a few books to other folks that you think might get a kick out of them. If you’re hoarding them only because you dream of selling them on eBay someday, you’re like the Grinch of Free Comic Book Day yanking stories and inspiration out of the little hands of all the Whos down in Whoville.

Free Comic Book Day isn’t about fiduciary investment. It’s about the comics. Honestly: duh. Don’t make us have to send Squirrel Girl to your house to beat some super-hero altruism into your head.

Our Free Comic Book Day 2017 reading pile, less than half the total titles that were in stock. ‘Twas a good year.

Full disclosure: beyond this haul, I also spent money on an issue of Astro City I was missing; the most recent issues of Hawkeye, Angel, and R. L. Stine’s Man-Thing; and Jeff Lemire’s Essex County. Yay comics!

Spidey and the Vulture, both older than they’ll appear in the next film. Art by Paolo Siqueira, Frank D’Armata, and one of the four credited inkers.

On May 6th 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 a metric ton of all-ages comics far outnumbering the adults-only options, served up by a plethora of publishers great and small, hopefully many of whom will still be around a year from now.

I never grab copies of everything, and this year I restrained myself a bit more than usual. Sometimes reviewing comics can be fun, but I wasn’t in the mood to read that many kids’ comics in a row. Also left behind were a few books based on cartoons and movies, reminders that some publishers see comics more as a second-tier merchandising stream than as a literary medium unto itself.

The fifteen comics in my FCBD 2017 reading pile came out as follows, ranked from Totally Not For Me to I Would Pay Monies For More, complicated by the fact that several of these contain two or more stories. I considered concocting some sort of system involving grade-weighting and averages that would even up the scores, but ultimately I’ve decided to base everything on subjective non-math and internal whims instead. As most listicles are.

15. Keyser Söze: Scorched Earth (Red 5 Comics) — Story #1: the walking plot twist from The Usual Suspects is back! And this time, he’s a mysterious crime lord lurking around alleys, spooking other bad guys who are too stupid to notice or smell the gigantic gasoline spill they’re all standing in, and then using still more gasoline to paint his name on a brick wall. Yep, that’s our cagey Keyser, master schemer and preposterous poser in a world of one-note slack-jawed tackle dummies. Story #2: chapter one of “The Rift”, in which a 2017 mom and son in Kansas happen across the crash landing of a time-tossed WWII flying ace. It’s labeled “Presented by Jeremy Renner”, a phrase which here means “blatant movie pitch on paper”. It’s kind of an intriguing start, even though it irks me when big Hollywood names try cashing in on comics cachet like that, especially considering how rarely it’s worked.

14. I Hate Image (Image Comics) — I don’t read Skottie Young’s I Hate Fairyland, but it seems to be about a little girl who butchers and slaughters her way through a cutesy sparkly happy dimension and…that’s it? The whole joke? Here she traipses and terrorizes through sundry Image books like Walking Dead, Saga, Trees, Chew, Paper Girls, and more. A few riffs were funny; mostly it’s just meet-maim-move-on, over and over and over again.

Buffy helps a young reader get started. Art by Yishan Li, Rod Espinosa, and Tony Galvan.

13. Buffy: The High School Years (Dark Horse Comics) — I collect Dark Horse’s regular Buffy series, but I haven’t been following the graphic novels aimed at younger readers. This is firmly of the latter, introducing all the basic Buffy elements of vampires, stakes, strong female role-modeling, and Xander on standby, plus the added bonus of a comic shop setting for the occasion. It’s not aimed for my age group, but that’s perfectly as it should be. Behind it is another annual installment of Plants vs. Zombies, which has been stumping me for I don’t even remember how many Free Comic Book Days in a row now. I still have no idea why they’re fighting, or whether the plant characters have backstories, or whether this is a video game or expanded webcomic or what. I assume somewhere out there is a fan base who loves these whatevers to pieces.

12. Bongo Free-for-All 2017! (Bongo Comics) — We stopped watching new episodes of The Simpsons years ago, but I keep picking up their annual FCBD compilation out of habit. Two nonstarters about wheelie backpacks and snot are followed with an amusing tale of Homer and Bart pulling an all-nighter before church and, of all things, a Rod and Todd Flanders underground mini-adventure from classic Batman writer Mike W. Barr, with clever gags and a heartwarming ending of the kind that the show used to do in those distant early seasons of yore. Man, those were the days.

11. Star Trek: the Next Generation: Mirror Broken (IDW Publishing) — Sooner or later every version of Trek must visit the Mirror Universe (can’t wait to see Evil Chris Pine someday), and now it’s time for Picard’s crew to flip their scripts. This prelude stars Lieutenant Barclay (played in several episodes by Dwight Schultz from The A-Team), still an engineer, but less anxiety-prone and more conniving, working his way up the ranks of the Evil Enterprise while Evil Picard strokes his white goatee and Evil Deanna Troi lounges around in a Greek goddess robe. Everything’s grim and gritty, and Barclay fans may squirm in their seats, but presumably that’ll course-correct once the main storyline begins and Our Heroes put them to shame. Presumably.

10. Captain Canuck: Year One (Chapterhouse) — He’s bigger up north than here in the U.S., but Cap is one of those FCBD stalwarts who visits us once a year on the holiday like a Santa who just brings the one present and has much rockier muscles. In addition to returning writer Kalman Andrasofsky, Cap’s creative cred is bolstered with a name you wouldn’t expect: Canada’s own Jay Baruchel, costar of many an R-rated sex comedy and the voice of Hiccup from the How to Train Your Dragon films, credited as co-writer rather than “presenter” (he also pens a lengthy, affectionate intro). Part one of three delves into new hero backstory involving the Afghanistan battlefront, some sharp twists ‘n’ turns, reams of research into wartime jargon, and solid art from New 52 survivor Marcus To. I’m no Canuckophile or whatever his fans might be called, but this is several cuts above the usual Hollywood vanity-project level, setting aside the major drawback that Cap’s costume is absent everywhere except on the cover.

Filling out the back pages is the wildly incongruous Die Kitty Die, from the minds of Archie Comics veterans Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz, in which Josie the Teenage Witch deals with a bunch of Harvey Comics pastiches mixing it up at her beach house party. A few jabs at the comics industry are right on target, but I’d think the subsection of comics fans who want adult imitation Archie products isn’t terribly large. And why this is paired with all that Afghanistan war zone seriousness in the front half, I have no idea.

9. Secret Empire #1 (Marvel) — Story #1 to me was disposable on arrival, the kickoff to the summer blockbuster crossover event that should wrap up the much-reviled Hydra Steve saga once and for all so we as a fandom can move past this fiasco. I don’t like crossovers anymore and nothing about this muddy excerpt convinced me I’m missing out on essential happenings. Story #2, on the other hand, is a treasure: a sneak preview of the forthcoming Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man relaunch written by Chip Zdarsky, whose off-kilter wits are the perfect fuel for sassy Spidey sarcasm. Along for the ride are the old Vulture with a refreshed arsenal and an all-new, younger Trapster who makes them both feel like geezers. I’d love to see tons more of this if every issue came with a zero-crossover guarantee. In all, this FCBD one-shot would’ve ranked nearer the top of the list if it had just been the Spec Spidey tale, no Captain Nazi, and lots of screen shots of Zdarsky’s Twitter feed.

8. Underdog (American Mythology) — The mighty mutt is back with perfect timing! He’s flying, punching, winning, and rhyming! There’s something old, something new, both aimed at kids of differing ages. Here in the now, Shoeshine Boy finds he can’t change to Underdog because some fiend has sabotaged all the phone booths in town, which means kiddie readers will have to ask Mom or Dad what a phone booth is. As intermission, Commander McBragg tests their vocabulary and ends with a suitably groan-worthy pun. For a coda, a 1970 Gold Key Comics reprint shows off the comedy stylings of underrated writer Steve Skeates (Aquaman; Crazy Magazine; Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham), who could pun with the best of ’em, though I’m not sure it was necessary or desirable to preserve the original comic’s flat, primitive coloring. In general, everything about this seems tailored more to nostalgic adults than to today’s kids, most of whom probably haven’t even seen the Jason Lee live-action flop that’s about to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Then again, maybe one shouldn’t underestimate the timeless appeal of a flying, talking dog.

7. BOOM! Studios Summer Blast (BOOM! Studios) — Three comics in one, leading off with a new David Petersen Mouse Guard tale, which is always a good bet. Closing out the issue is “Coady and the Creepies”, sort of a next-gen Josie and the Pussycats but snarkier. A header proclaiming “Lumberjanes Proudly Presents” had me raising my bat a bit unfairly high from the start. Most oddly appealing to me was Sam Sykes and Selina Espiritu’s “Brave Chef Brianna”, about a young human lady opening her own restaurant for humans in a city full of monsters and apparently only one other human, who may not be enough of a clientele by himself to meet her profit projections. I’m guessing every issue won’t be just twenty pages of her weeping at empty tables and filling out loan applications to keep her poorly researched dream alive.

Of course Star-Lord brought his tunes. Art by Aaron Kuder and Ive Svorcina.

6. All New Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel) — The #1 movie in America thinks you should also buy comics with the Guardians in them. In the hands of Deadpool writer Gerry Duggan and ex-DC Comics artist Aaron Kuder, our antiheroes are as rascally as ever, pulling off a heist with equal parts klutziness and panache, while a new Big Bad waits in the wings. Drax has an odd personality crisis that’s not explained for new readers, but anyone who liked the movie should be disappointed here only in the lack of Gamora beyond a few talking heads.

But wait! There’s more! If you really really like transmedia tie-ins, also enclosed is a preview of Marvel’s next Defenders do-over, which naturally stars the Netflix quartet and not any previous actual versions of the Defenders. Since this is Marvel’s comic universe and not TV, both Iron Fist and a returning Diamondback are 300% more tolerable here, so for that alone it wins.

5. The Tick (New England Comics) — I never see that thick-skulled avenger of wrongdoings on store shelves except on FCBD, though it’d be cool if that upcoming Amazon series were to change that. Lead story: Our Hero, who knows nothing about himself, throws his first birthday party and of course decides the main event should be a super-villain battle because that’s exactly what he does for fun. Backup story: a super-powered Election Day send-up whose goofy spoofery of all sides is closer to fair-and-balanced than most comedians and news channels. He may be over thirty years old, but that big brave bug still has some life in him.

4. Doctor Who: Four Doctors (Titan Comic) — Twelve and Bill, our current Doctor and companion, host a framing sequence that retrofits a new/old friend into stories starring Nine, Ten, and Eleven, all of which add up to a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting an entire civilization forget its history, even if they thought it was too terrible to preserve. Writer Alex Paknadel nails both Capaldi and Mackie’s voices exactly right, down to the part where I keep chuckling a lot at their zingers and near-instant chemistry.

3. Guy Delisle: Hostage (Drawn + Quarterly) — I had high hopes for the talent behind the 2014 book A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting and wasn’t let down. DeLisle shifts from everyday humor to real-life drama in this excerpt from the recently released hardcover graphic novel, based on the true story of a Doctors Without Borders admin who spent three months as a captive in isolation. The FCBD sample lists none of those details that I found by cheating (i.e., reading the Amazon blurb), instead giving us a portion of the story when it’s just him, his oppressive handcuffs, and fleeting glimpses of his graceless hosts. As an added bonus, there’s an excerpt from Poppies of Iraq, Brigitte Findakly’s forthcoming memoir about her childhood in Iraq and subsequent move to France, brought to life by French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim as what could be the next Persepolis. Both these books are going on the want list.

2. Catalyst Prime: The Event (Lion Forge) — Christoper Priest, one of my all-time favorite writers, who’s so awesome that he’s even got me collecting a DC Rebirth title, helps jump-start a new super-hero world with a one-shot involving a team of astronauts, a catastrophic meteor storm that strikes Earth, and a conspiracy beneath it all orchestrated by one of the least guilty-looking characters. Priest’s writing (abetted here by co-writer/editor Joseph P. Illidge) demands a reader pay attention, assemble their own clues, leap from points A to B with no hand-holding, and watch in shock as complicated ulterior motives are revealed, extracted slowly and judiciously like blocks from a Jenga tower. The first four pages are a jumble of super-team flash-forwards that will surely make more sense one year and fifteen comics from now, but everything else points straightforwardly to a new universe worth watching if any of our local comic shops order Lion Forge’s future titles. Fingers crossed really hard on this.

Not all ’90s comics fans followed the beat of the same drum, but a lot of them started with it. From Ed Piskor’s autobiographical Mudfish.

1. World’s Greatest Cartoonists (Fantagraphics) — The great-granddaddy of the indie scene commissioned all-new shorts from a killer lineup of longtime idiosyncratic cartoonists. Personal favorites here include Dash Shaw (about a pair watching one of The Hobbit chapters at the theater in HFR 3-D and suffering the consequences), Noah Van Sciver (about a bar debate between a Bukowski fan and a Bukowski superfan), Jason (I’m a big fan of his Hey Wait…), Hip-Hop Family Tree‘s Ed Piskor, and a wacky short from Anya Davidson that’s about Free Comic Book Day and about the obviousness of making her story about Free Comic Book Day. Some vignettes are in black-and-white; some are purely figurative; one is inspired by Muhammad’s first revelation; and one features the death of Pepe the Frog. Proof positive there’s so, so much more to comics than super-heroes, horror, R-rated sci-fi, and toy licenses.

…and that’s the free reading pile that was. See you next year, economy and hobby livelihood willing!

My wife with Barbara Eden, star of TV’s I Dream of Jeannie. This con was my birthday trip, but Anne was pretty elated with her end of the deal.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

This weekend Anne and I had the pleasure of attending the 28th annual Motor City Comic Con in the city of Novi, a safe suburb northwest of Detroit, some 300 miles from home. Well established and catering to fans of comics and media guests alike, MCCC is a shade smaller than our two regular Chicago shows, but proved an excellent reason to return to Michigan for our first time in fifteen years.

Whenever we attend a new con, the same set of fears nips at us every time. How crowded will it be? Do the showrunners know what they’re doing? Is the layout simple or complicated? Are their attendees nice people? Is the parking convenient and/or affordable? How horrible is the convention center food? We were relieved to confirm by the end of the day that MCCC by and large has nearly all its gears locked properly in place, and plans afoot to solve the one issue that complicated matters for a bit of the afternoon. Every show has its issues, but the best ones are already working on solutions before you can tell them about their problems.

We planned the entire outing less than two weeks before it arrived, not enough notice to use vacation days for an expanded weekend. The best we could do was negotiate leaving work early Friday and spending the afternoon and early evening on the road. Thanks to atrocious construction gridlock on I-69 in Indiana, our four-hour drive stretched past the five-hour mark. We didn’t arrive at our Toledo hotel till after 8 p.m., leaving us no time to explore our surroundings. So that part’s boring, especially the long haul up US 24 from Fort Wayne to Toledo, one of the most featureless freeways I’ve ever driven.

MCCC is held each year at Novi’s Suburban Collection Showplace, an hour north of our Toledo hotel. It’s smaller than our own Indiana Convention Center, with a single exhibit hall the size of our Halls F through K put together (what Indiana Comic Con and Indy Pop Con typically use), plus five speaker/panel/conference rooms and an attached Hyatt. Signs announced an expansion forthcoming on its west end circa spring 2018. Surrounding it on all sides are a few thousand parking spaces; the website provides added directions to grass lots across the street, a local high school offering more spaces, and other lots around town with shuttle service to and from the con. It’s technically part of the kingdom of Detroit, land of car lovers. If you brought a car, someone will take care of your parking needs.

Saturday morning we arrived shortly after 8 a.m. to find several dozen fans in line ahead of us, already filing inside the doors. After picking up our wristbands we were treated to MCCC’s most magical touch. Many cons let early arrivals wait standing up in a long line or narrow crowd, sometimes outdoors regardless of temperature. Sometimes we’re ready for naptime by the time the exhibit hall opens. Not so with MCCC: once registered, everyone was directed to go have seats in the speaker rooms in order of arrival. Thus we waited in comfy chairs, not standing on cruel concrete, till the exhibit hall would open at 10:30.

Why is this woman smiling? Because she’s sitting.

Then we read the fine print in the program and realized anyone who ordered advance tickets online would be allowed to start conning at 10 sharp — no VIP badge required, just a reward for the faith you showed by putting up money up front. That included us, even though we cut the deadline a bit close.

At 9:45 someone in charge said “What the heck” and began ushering us in even earlier. We refused to complain. We were off and running, heading toward the media guests’ autograph aisles to take care of what we assumed would be the most draining part of our day.

My first stop: the booth of Marky Ramone, drummer for the Ramones.

That’s right: as seen on The Simpsons! Even if you know zilch about punk rock, you’ve probably seen an episode of theirs.

I can count the number of accomplished musicians I’ve met on one hand, and very nearly never at a “comic con”. When I discovered at age 16 that there was more to music than what commercial radio is paid to share with the masses, the Ramones were among the first wave of bands to latch on to the part of my brain that craved something thoroughly different. The Ramones’ songs were ridiculously short, blunt, repetitive, deceptively simple, pure, undiluted, no-frills, breakneck-speed capital-R Rock with a solid backbone and an authenticity borne of their NYC upbringing that spoke to outcast li’l me hundreds of miles away in my lower-class neighborhood. No pageantry, no pretension, no trendy dance beats, no backup singers, no drumless acoustic ballads pandering for airplay — just simple chords, basic declarations, and fearless martial rhythms that were like my mental jet fuel.

Of the seven men who ever recorded officially as a Ramone, Marky is among the last three still alive. Frankly, he’s the #1 reason we chose MCCC as my birthday outing. So yeah, you bet I was first in his autograph line.

Meanwhile, Anne was first in line at the booth right next door. Its proprietor: Barbara Eden, iconic star of TV’s I Dream of Jeannie.

Hers was among the most lavishly decorated booths, covered in Official Jeannie Bottles she’d be happy to sign.

Classic TV from the ’50s to the ’80s was the hardest drug Anne ever mainlined in her youth. Naturally I Dream of Jeannie was on her watchlist, bedazzling her with the silly special effects and witty repartee between costars Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. So yeah, you can bet Anne was first in Eden’s line. Well, not counting the fans with VIP badges who would be allowed ahead of her. That’s part of the game, which we recognize and accept.

But sometimes even VIP badgeholders have to step back when an actual VIP wants a place in line. Anne and several others got the most delightful surprise to find themselves joined by John Barrowman. You might remember him from such TV shows as Doctor Who, Torchwood, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow. He bought himself a bottle but departed for his own booth since she wasn’t there yet.

“If you have any bottles left over at the end of Sunday, call me. I’ll have my people come take ALL of them.”

Time flew while we waited for the stars to arrive around 11. On the other side of Ramone’s booth, Gotham costar Robin Lord Taylor arrived at 10:20 and slowly built up a line as passersby realized he was an early bird.

Ramone arrived at 11:08 to Anne’s applause from the next booth over. He turned to her, smiled, and said, “Hey ho, let’s go!” She took this a a cue that meant something and applauded some more. I explained “Blitzkrieg Bop” to her later. Once he was settled in, I approached and prattled on while he signed my copy of his autobiography. I must’ve rambled more than I thought because not only did he sign it and add a message, he was also starting to draw stick figures in it till I shut up and made way for the next fans behind me. I was a little annoyed that his serpentine line wasn’t packed, but I figured more aficionados would show up later.

The divine Ms. Eden hadn’t yet shown up, so I left Anne with the other giddy Jeannie fans, traveled a few aisles down, and joined another line in progress for Scott Wilson. You might know him best as the late, kindly Herschel from The Walking Dead. I also know him from the classic film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Anne thinks we look like father and son, and found our similar expressions priceless. Unintentional, honestly.

In the film as a younger man, Wilson played the complete opposite of Herschel, a cold-blooded killer who charms the ladies and swindles the salesmen while he and Robert Blake enjoy life on the lam after brutally murdering an innocent Kansas family. Wilson’s chilling performance was more disturbing to me than most of the “walker” kills on his last TV gig. I was a little shocked that there were only four other people in line ahead of me when I joined them, but a quick check of the internets told me he’s been to this con before. Between that and possibly the mere passage of time since he left the show, I supposed that made a sort of sense. Less waiting for me, I guess.

By the time I returned to Anne’s side, Eden was there and working her way through the eight or ten VIPs first. Also returning shortly after me: the talented Mr. Barrowman for his meet-‘n’-greet and photo op. Because everyone you’re a fan of is also someone else’s fan.

At far left with Merlyn and Jeannie is Mario Della Casa, the artist who designed the Official Jeannie Bottles. Lovely handiwork.

Eventually Anne got her turn and her moment of giddiness. And with that, we’d wrapped up the highest-priority names on our autograph wish list. It wasn’t even noon. For the sake of prudence, we got lunch out of the way and resigned ourselves to sampling the convention center food. Final verdict: much better than Wizard World Chicago’s, maybe tied with the Indiana Convention Center’s, nowhere near C2E2 levels, and a far cry from the greatest convention center culinary delights we’ve ever had at Cincinnati Comic Expo. But it didn’t kill us, which of course meant we were stronger now.

We’d need our strength as we prepared to dive into their Artists Alley, which was on the opposite end of the show floor from the actors’ booths. But I made a point of meeting two creators whose works had left large impressions on me as a teen and young adult.

First up: the idiosyncratic Ted McKeever, who made me a fan with his earliest black-‘n’-white works Transit and Eddy Current, the latter of which took me years to track down all twelve issues of its story. He later brought creator-owned works to Marvel’s Epic line and DC’s Vertigo imprint, none of them like any comics next to them on the stand and hard to describe within the space of this single paragraph. I bought a sketch of DC’s Robotman, which you can see in the final photo in this entry. You’ll note it’s exceedingly rare for me to buy sketches at cons.

We arrived just as he was telling the story of the one time a major DC writer demanded McKeever be fired from his project while McKeever was sitting right there. He also told the tale of a peculiar night he hung out with other comics creators that I will never, ever repeat for the rest of my life.

Right next door to McKeever: Kyle Baker! He entered the field as an inker in the ’80s, but quickly graduated to doing his own thing, starting with the original graphic novel The Cowboy Wally Show, a kiddie-host satire (beating Krusty to the punch by a few years) that was one of the most hilarious things I ever read in high school. I read it and read it again until it was dog-eared, and then I was sad because it was a library book. I bought his next graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn the week of release and laughed just about as much. Truly funny funnybooks are sadly not as common as you’d expect in the world of comics. For my money, Baker made at least two of the best of them.

He still dabbles in occasional work for Marvel. Among other less amusing fare, he illustrated the controversial The Truth: Red, White and Black, about the government’s secret precursors to Captain America’s super-soldier program, so there’s that.

Shortly before 1:30 we slowly, ever so slowly, made our way out of the increasingly dense exhibit hall to head toward the speaker room at the farthest end of the entire building, well past the autograph area. We got sidetracked for a minute by an extra-length line on the way that turned out to be for John Barrowman’s 2 p.m. panel. Shortly beyond them, we passed a long curtained hallway at just the right time to watch a running volunteer plow at top speed right into Barrowman himself speeding from the other direction. Thankfully no one seemed damaged.

Our next event: a 1:30 Q&A with the legendary Dave Gibbons, co-creator of Watchmen. It’s now thirty years old and remains one of the most groundbreaking stories in the history of comics. It’s disappointing on one level that very few works have even tried approaching that level ever since, but still.

He looks rather different from the photo I recall seeing in Amazing Heroes circa 1985.

Among the more benign topics covered:

* Gibbons was first inspired to take up pen and pencil for a living when as a brash young man he decide he could draw better than Barry Windsor-Smith. Eventually he worked up the talent to enter the British comics industry on titles like 2000 AD and Marvel’s UK line, including Doctor Who.

* He loved working with Mark Millar on The Secret Service, which was recently adapted into the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service. Since the movie diverged so wildly from the comic, they’ve decided against any comic sequel so the movie series can continue forging its own path.

* The moderator brought up the only subject that had occurred to me: asking about his graphic novel The Originals, one of the very few projects Gibbons wrote and illustrated himself. When the time came to do his own thing, Gibbons was inspired by the idea of someone his own age getting angry at young whippersnappers co-opting the styles of his youth, and decided to expand on that in a modified alt-future setting so he wouldn’t have to spend months on painstaking historical research.

* He deems Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore “one of the most rational men I’ve ever met”, though admits they haven’t talked in years.

* During the filming of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, he was on set the day they shot the scene with the “Crimebusters” meeting flashback. He gave that scene two enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Among the less benign topics: one brave soul poked at the elephant in the room and asked what Gibbons thought about DC’s efforts to drag the Watchmen cast kicking and screaming into the DC Universe with Rebirth, “The Button”, and the forthcoming Doomsday Clock. Gibbons’s diplomatic response: “I could choose to say nothing or I could choose to say everything. I choose to say nothing.” He added only that all parties have been in talks, and each is aware of the others’ feelings on the subject. Gibbons left it at that.

Momentary digression: in his 2008 coffee-table book Watching the Watchmen, Gibbons concludes with much reminiscence about his ongoing relationship to DC and the characters in years since publication. On the subject of further adventures, he writes on page 261:

“Far more upsetting to Alan and I was a suggestion that we produce spin-off series from Watchmen or, failing that, that DC would produce them without us. Proposed titles were Rorschach’s Journals and The Comedian’s Vietnam War Diary. DC wisely shelved the proposals and, to their credit, have managed to resist the temptation ever since.”

After the retirement of DC President Paul Levitz in 2009, DC waited about twelve minutes before moving forward with the initiative that would ultimately spawn “Before Watchmen”, a 2012 batch of spinoff books written and drawn by anyone but Moore and Gibbons. Gibbons remained diplomatic at the time; Moore, not remotely so much.

Food for thought, commerce-wise.

…

Then we made the long walk back to the exhibit hall for our next photo op at 3 p.m.: Billie Piper! You might remember her from such series as Doctor Who and Penny Dreadful.

That’s right, readers. It’s time once again for jazz hands.

Judging by the crowd size, our immobility for long periods, the complaints around us, and the fact that the last several dozen fans in Piper’s line had to be shunted to a designated overflow area until the main photo op area could be cleared, we reckon someone on the MCCC staff had decided there would be no such thing as a sold-out photo op at this show. The volunteers seemed to know what they were doing, though the creative rearranging of lines resulted in intersections, 4-way stops, and mass confusion among those waiting for other photo-ops and those who made the mistake of walking in the vicinity of this happy madhouse. That spring 2018 expansion can’t come soon enough for this convention center.

Likewise, the photo pickup line was long and moved slowly, snaking behind the booths and through a curtained area filled with merchandise, boxes, random equipment, and an empty space where stars could sneak a moment of quiet time. Through a separation in the curtains, we and two young ladies peeked discreetly and saw TV’s John Barrowman grabbing a snack before launching once more into the fray.

Eventually we got our photo and…turned around and got right back in line for our 4 p.m. photo op: Robin Lord Taylor! You might remember him from The Penguin Show, a one-season wonder on Fox about a fascinating young crime lord in the making, the unseemly underworld that rejected his greatness, the crooked cops who stayed out of his way, and the one super-crooked cop named Jim who kept ruining things and stealing his screen time. Anne and I thought well of that show, which no longer exists and is dearly missed. The End.

Gotham? What’s a Gotham?

We had a little free time before our next appointment. We recounted our funds and realized that by eating cheaply, and by spending next to nothing on back issues and clearance books, we had enough resources to toss in a bonus autograph and photo op.

Conveniently next to the photo-op-drome was our next great actor: Sean Gunn! You might remember him as Yondu’s wingman from the Guardians of the Galaxy duology, or as one of the many nifty reasons to watch Gilmore Girls. Any long, longtime readers with elephantine memories may be slightly less befuddled at how one of my favorite things he’s ever done was a small but hilarious part as a perfectionist barista in two episodes of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s late, lamented ABC Family series Bunheads, which I used to recap here on MCC because that’s how much it wowed me even though I know next to nothing about ballet.

If anyone else in the world has said the name “Bunheads” to him in the past year, I’d be very surprised. I hope I didn’t frighten him.

That left us time to finish our mandatory trek around the entirety of the exhibit hall, which didn’t yield much else to our pocketbooks. We wandered through other parts of the autograph area and noticed quite a few actors with one or two fans in line, still others with no line at all. We saw the one child star we met last November; the frequent con guest whose name is legendary among other Wizard World Chicago fans and not in the best way; we saw one who used to recur at our 1990s Trek conventions; we saw non-actors, a couple of reality-TV folks, and a duo who once costarred in a famous movie whose line lengths were as different as Daryl Hall and John Oates.

We also saw this cool balloon Groot and balloon Rocket. I’ll understand if you’d rather focus on that.

At the very end of our Saturday, we had two last photo ops on our docket. As we waited for our lines to form, one volunteer ran over to us from the photo printers, apologized profusely and sincerely, handed us a copy of our Robin Lord Taylor photo, and returned to duty. She seemed so sad about this seeming letdown in customer service, and so proud to have made up for it, that we didn’t have the heart to tell her we already had a copy. Somehow a duplicate must have been printed by mistake and been left sitting there till our return. Anne usually holds on to our con photos for safekeeping, but thanks to this glitch I now have a new decoration in my work cubicle.

Next up came Anne’s Barbara Eden photo op, our lead picture way up top, which nicely bookended Anne’s MCCC experience.

Then I bookended mine with one last hangout with rock legend Marky Ramone.

That’s us, remembering rock-‘n’-roll radio.

I was disappointed there were only nine of us in line for him, including the Jeannie cosplayer from Part 1. Compared to the hundreds-plus who’d waited for Billie Piper, or the hundreds after us waiting on Wil Wheaton’s turn, it seemed unfair to me. But Ramone at least got a brief pick-me-up. As he assumed his position before the camera, Barbara Eden was still sitting in a chair in one corner gathering herself. They saw each other and smiled, and she waved back at him with adorable gusto.

As I tried to exit the booth, the volunteer in charge of handling bags became the second person that day to ask me if they could take a photo of my shirt. It’s definitely not a question I’m used to getting. It’s a very good shirt. I’ll never be a true fashion blogger, but if you’d care to indulge this rare moment of MCC’s Outfit of the Day, curious parties should check out That’s Terri-Ific, the seamstress’ official Facebook page, where she offers photos and samples of the variety of her custom geek-wear. She also had a booth at MCC and was a sincere pleasure to meet in person.

And that was a wrap on our first Motor City Comic Con experience. Before our Saturday night hotel coma and our long drive home Sunday, we capped off our four-star day with dinner at a gyro place across the street called Ahmo’s, which whips up a fine, filling kefta plate if you don’t mind the wait.

MCCC is a long drive for us, but it’s entirely possible we’ll be there again someday, if only to play another fun game of “Where’s John Barrowman?” I did make sure he wasn’t in our back seat before we took off, though neither of us would’ve kicked him out.

The End. Thanks for reading!

The old books they signed and the new stuff I bought. At lower right, MCCC also put together a nice program — original front cover art by Dave Gibbons; back cover Doom painting by Simon Bisley. A quality program is generally a sign of a quality convention.