Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

…

…okay, everyone, they’re gone now!

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

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

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

How we conventioned:

Friday, August 21st:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, August 22nd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, August 23rd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I felt free to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s just me.

That brings me to another universe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Brooke Allen and Maarta Laiho.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

* * * * *

That reading list, then:

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

Here’s what they look like shelved together:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other random trivia and comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite comics from 2015, in random order:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abandon funds, ye who enter here.

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

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

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

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

That super-sized Lego Sentinel, though.

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

BUY COMICS OR HULK SMASH!

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

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

To be continued!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Ameripool: the Winner Soldier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun trivia and moments from throughout the talk:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order

Can this be? Rey and Kylo Ren working together? Say it ain’t so!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture.

We expected new costume ideas to abound thanks to the interstellar success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the whole new cast of iconic characters for us to watch, study, follow, debate, and impersonate. We saw veritable armies of Rey and Kylo Ren parading around the show floor and claiming it as their own. We caught a mere fraction of a fraction of the Star Wars fans on site.

Rey and Mini-BB-8 steal the scene from Vader, Leia, and Actual-Size Yoda.

The only Finn we saw all weekend. With Eastet-egg cameo by Ramona Flowers.

The only Poe Dameron we saw all weekend wants YOU to join the Resistance!

Another Kylo Ren takes on a traditional Jedi who escaped Order 66. But not for long.

* * * * *

STAR WARS MERCHANDISE INTERMISSION!

Prepping your own all-Lego The Force Awakens fan-film for YouTube? Two different vendors are ready to hook you up with all the background extras you need.

Lego Kylo Ren: soon to be a costume variant, probably.

Lego Rey and Lego BB-8: both built to survive.

The folks at Funko brought Mega-BB-8, grand emperor of the kingdom of Funko Pop. Or Funko Pop! Or Funko POP! Look, I don’t buy the things, so I’m old and I have no idea which parts are or aren’t capitalized or punctuated.

* * * * *

And now, back to Star Wars costumes:

Stepping into the path of this much taller, briskly walking Wookiee was one of my more foolhardy acts in the name of cosplay photos.

Somewhere in the galaxy, Emo Kylo Ren is wailing and rending his garments at the sight of this version of his idol.

Strong will, tremendous leaping skills, Spider-Sense warning him of danger, dead parents, lousy at long-term romantic attachments because of the meddling of others…Jedi Spider-Man makes perfect sense.

Ahsoka Tano lives! And takes questions along with the Fairy Godmother from Shrek 2.

AN AT-ST lumbers onto the show floor. Right after Anne snapped this pic, a leg fell off. “IT WAS EWOKS!” she shouted.

This very special MCC series is far from over, but this was the very last photo we took on our very last day before we headed home — one last Rey hanging out with her new comrade Artoo, beeping merrily and welcoming her to the Star Wars Universe and the wild, wild world of convention cosplay legends.

To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!

The family that cosplays together: straight out of Final Fantasy VII, it’s Barrett, Vincent Valentine, and li’l Cait Sith peering into your SOUL. My favorite photo of the weekend.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture.

In tonight’s photo parade, we focus on artforms made of moving art, interactive or otherwise. I’m not the best guy to ask about anime or XBox games, but I’ve played my share of video games and seen more than a few animated features. The younger cosplayers are great at stumping me, but I love seeing other fans celebrate some familiar faces out there. And as longtime MCC readers may recall, Final Fantasy characters get preferential treatment here, but there’s more where they came from.

Fran from Final Fantasy XII. I didn’t ask her to replicate that otherworldly accent.

Pretty sure this is a a Black Mage form one of the FF games I haven’t played, or from a remastered version of one of the oldies. I beat the original FF on my old NES back in high school…

I’m currently playing through (and gnashing my teeth at) the DLC for the original Borderlands, but I was excited to meet Krieg and Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2.

Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw. (It’s a game.)

Mega Man and fellow hero Zero.

Bowser! For my fellow oldsters out there.

Pac-Man! For the even older-than-oldsters out there.

Fred Flintstone! Even the most ancient of Ancient Ones know that guy. Bonus points for that regal Water Buffalo hat!

Ursula representing for Disney in our animation cosplay lineup.

I remember when the first extra-large Jetfire figure hit the U.S. market when I was a kid. Transformers his size were too pricey for my lower-class paws. And if you thought last night’s entry needed more Star Wars in it, then the bonus Mini-Kylo Ren is here just for you.

Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Better than M. Night Shyamalan’s version? YOU make the call!

Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama. WOOOOB WOOBWOOB WOOB WOOB!

Nitpickers might point out Sailor Moon was a manga before it was adapted to anime and therefore oughta be moved to our next entry with the other comic-book cosplayers. If that’s your take, then in the name of the Moon, I will ignore you.

To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order

New Marvel meets modern manga: Silk and One Piece star Monkey D. Luffy.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture.

In tonight’s photo gallery: costumes from your favorite comic books! Or someone else’s favorite comics, whichever. You’d think these would out number the other categories, but C2E2 attracts a diverse following of myriad tastes in reading material. Regrettably, it wasn’t till after we got home and I took inventory, when I realized Marvel and DC Comics were very nearly the only publishers represented in the “comics-based costumes” section. I have no idea how that happened, but it’s too late for retakes.

Regardless: onward!

Spider-Family deluxe: another Silk teamed up with Spider-Gwen, Iron Spider, Pokemon trainer Misty, and the only Harley Quinn you’ll see in this week-long MCC miniseries, though there were several hundred patrolling the show.

Spider-Man India, one of the undervalued members of the extended Spider-Family. (For those new to the idea: yes, Spider-Man India is a thing.)

War Machine and Black Widow, charter members of the No White Chrises Squad.

Erstwhile HYDRA leader Baron Strucker, armed with his deadly Satan Claw. You may remember him as one of the 461 characters vacuum-packed inside Avengers: Age of Ultron. He was played by Thomas Kretschmann, but sadly de-Satan-Clawed.

DOOM is less than pleased with his movie-universe surrogates and thinks Baron Strucker should count his blessings.

The Reverse-Flash, complete with his own Flash costume-ring.

Arrow and Speedy from TV’s Arrow. I want to say their companion is…a Joker/Harley mash-up? variant Sailor Mercury? an anime superstar popular with everyone younger than me?

The real Lex Luthor, who’d love to have a few words with Jesse Eisenberg about some…creative differences.

Bane hanging out with off-topic guest Gandalf the Grey. As allies with powerful facial hair go, he’s less of a backstabber than that Ra’s al Ghul.

Once upon a time, Donna Troy was Wonder Girl, charter member of the original Teen Titans. Then she was just Donna Troy. Then she was Troia, pictured above. Everything after that is a convoluted blur, but suffice it to say hanging with Jareth the Goblin King is a far better fate than being torn apart every six months by DC reboots.

Static Shock! Or just Static, if you’re an old Milestone Media fan like me. Either way, I’d pay good money to have the complete animated series on DVD, and even better money for a regular comic series that reverses everything I loathed about his New 52 reboot.

Ms. Marvel, another rising star in the Marvel universe, who recently made her video game debut in LEGO Marvel’s Avengers.

The Taskmaster, a classic villain who copied all the weapons and physical talents of all the Avengers. If he appears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’ll just be a guy who has the proportionate strength and speed of five guys named Chris.

Jessica Jones costar Luke Cage, soon to headline his own Netflix series.

Another Luke Cage, this one in his classic ’70s super-costume as part of the mismatched buddy-hero duo we called Power Man and Iron Fist. Soon to be Netflix acquaintances.

That time Marvel and DC used to do crossovers, but the comics executives decided Iron Fist just wasn’t white enough and replaced him with Captain Cold.

To be continued! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order
* Part 5: Gaming and Animation Costumes

Puppymonkeybaby! Puppymonkeybaby! Puppymonkeybaby! Puppymonkeybaby! Puppymonkeybaby! Puppymonkeybaby!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture.

This isn’t the final chapter in this very special week-long MCC miniseries, but it is all the costume photos we have left. Most of these would fit into a “Movie and TV Costumes!” chapter of their own, but that would leave a few stragglers out in the cold. As always, our goal here is to see No Cosplayer Left Behind if we have any say in their fates. So everyone unites in one last big potpourri hurrah for the sake of inclusion.

What we’ve presented in our five C2E2 2016 costume entries is a fraction of a fraction of all the hundreds of cosplayers we saw swirling around us all weekend. No two C2E2 attendees will have the same costume photo collections, so I’d strongly recommend seeking out others online if you want an even broader picture of the complete Chicago convention experience. C2E2 is large and it contains multitudes.

Also from the world of advertising, Quiky the Nesquik Bunny, reminding consumers of a time when shilling was more of an artform than a traumatic horror show.

At first I thought SuperPizza might be a webcomic star, but this is a for-real Papa John’s shill trying to drum up business by offering free pizza through social media. Marketing nostalgia can be fun, but actual marketing is the WORST.

A more tasteful marketing avatar: Giant Baby Groot at the Funko Pop booth, hanging out here with Ms. Sta-Puft.

Also from the world of effects-heavy action comedy: The Mask!

OH, WHAT A CON! WHAT A LOVELY CON!

Daft Punk, keeping it shiny without chrome spray.

Also bringing the funk: Duke Silver from Parks & Rec. My wife ran up to him and yelled, “I HAVE ALL YOUR ALBUMS!”

Also missing from our airwaves: Chuck Bartowski from Chuck, starring TV’s Chuck.

Also handy with gadgets and gizmos, preferably from a distance: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker from The Muppet Show.

Also deadly if you don’t watch yourself around her: Madame Vastra from Doctor Who.

Also not to be underestimated: an Andorian Starfleet officer from classic Trek.

Gomez Addams and Uncle Fester, waiting for The CW to call them back on their reboot pitch called Altogether Ooky.

From that Game of Thrones series that I’m told is all the rage with the grown-ups these days: Daenerys Targaryen, Khal Drogo, Jaime Lannister, Mayor Tommy Carcetti from The Wire, and know-nothing Jon Snow.

Fran from Final Fantasy XII returns from Part 5, this time with Black Canary (sorry I didn’t do her justice) and, uh, a tall spooky guy. Little help?

A Chinese dragon winds its way through the main hall and toward a bonus Red Power Ranger.

A rare sighting of reality TV infiltrating the show floor: my wife hanging out with Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife Beth.

That’s it for costumes, but we’re not done with C2E2 yet. To be continued! Pleae enjoy these other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order
* Part 5: Gaming and Animation Costumes!
* Part 6: Comics Costumes!

“Did you know the Visigoths actually invented comic book conventions back in the fourth century as an excuse to get together with family and draw unflattering caricatures of the Romans? True story…”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture.

Last year Anne and I discussed the notion of no longer considering any conventions an automatic buy-in until and unless the guest list gave us a solid reason to commit. They’re expensive and the guest lists aren’t always tailored to our specific areas of fandom or nostalgia. When C2E2 added TV’s John Ratzenberger to their 2016 roster, he was the first sign that I knew we’d be there. From TV’s Cheers to every Pixar movie ever, ol’ Cliff Clavin has been a part of our lives from childhood to adulthood. We met him twice at C2E2 — once at his autograph booth, where he confirmed he’ll indeed return for Finding Dory, and once at his photo op, where we sensed he was not a jazz-hands kind of guy. ‘sokay, no harm done.

We spent most of our C2E2 time wandering the show floor, perusing the wares and works, buying stuff from writers and artists, and noticing there were dealers but not really doing much for them. The usual boxes and shelves full of $5 trade paperbacks were in shorter supply than usual. With the destruction of my old comics want list in the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 2015, my interest in ’80s back issues has taken a nosedive now that I no longer know or remember what specific singles I’m missing. We stocked up on T-shirts from StylinOnline, SuperHeroStuff, and even the official C2E2 merchandise store, because I’ve never owned a piece of their con merchandise and they finally came up with a shirt design that caught my eye.

Fun true story after our shopping experience: when a charge showed up on my wife’s account under the thoroughly generic name “Super Hero Stuff” outside our home state, her credit card company pegged it as possible fraudulent activity and immediately froze her card. This well-intentioned yet uninformed monitoring made for a moment of awkwardness when she tried and failed to buy us lunch Saturday, and had to call them Sunday morning to clear up the matter.

We appreciated seeing big-name companies like Marvel, Valiant, and WETA Workshop among the other booths. DC Comics sent creators to represent for them in spirit but once again had no booth. Dark Horse Comics sadly skipped this year, a shame considering they’ve released two books in the last few months that I’d very much love to buy in person from someone someday. Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint was in the house, but the rest of Image Comics bowed out after last year’s debut.

On a smaller scale, we were happy to reunite with a few folks we’d met at previous cons. Matthew Rosenberg, whose super-teen fugitives miniseries We Can Never Go Home was one of my favorite comics of 2015, is currently working his way into DC’s graces and was on hand to promote his next Black Mask Comics project, 4 Kids Walk into a Bank. Writer Russell Lissau had more indie projects on hand, including a young-readers’ sci-fi comic called Stranger that looks promising. We stopped by the booth of sci-fi author (and fellow WordPress user!) Luther M. Siler, trying out C2E2 for his first time. He’s posted dozens of cosplay pics on his own site along with a candid write-up of his three-day bookselling experience.

I’ve already posted about our second time meeting the great Gene Ha and the wondrous sketch he did for us. Here’s him in action sketching my wife inside the copy of Mae I’d just bought…

I’m my head I’m making happy dancing Homer Simpson noises and trying not to geek out too visibly.

…and here’s Anne in her first non-paying gig as a geek model, holding very still for several minutes while Mr. Ha captured her likeness.

In her head is some line of thought not unlike, “YOU OWE ME BIG FOR THIS.”

Other upstanding folks we met in that large, jam-packed Artists Alley:

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez is a huge name to collectors my age, a longtime dependable DC artist with strong, bold linework who’s never been “hot” but always been awesome. I brought my copy of Deadman #1 (early-’80s miniseries) for him to sign.

I liked Ming Doyle’s art on the future-soccer superpower miniseries Mara. Currently she’s co-writing Constantine the Hellblazer for DC and just finished a Vertigo project about Mob wives called The Kitchen that was among many comics that went largely unordered by our local comic shops last year.

David F. Walker, now writing Cyborg for DC and Power Man & Iron Fist for Marvel. Pictured at left: some really white guy.

Illustrator Gary Gianni has done a variety of projects for Dark Horse and other publishers over the years. I’ve always been fond of his adaptation of A Christmas Carol he painted long ago for First Comics’ short-lived Classics Illustrated line.

Colorist Nick Filardi, whose past credits include Powers, Batman ’66, and Atomic Robo, among dozens of others. His table caught my eye when I noticed he was selling an awesome print of that fiendish halfwit Dr. Dinosaur.

Among the creators we didn’t meet: the legendary Chris Claremont, whose decades at the helm of Uncanny X-Men sparked many a reader’s imagination and provided a solid foundation for today’s steadily improving movie franchise.

Met but not pictured:

* Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, local creators of the webcomic Little Guardians (appreciated the sketch!)
* Kel McDonald, creator of the webcomic Misfits of Avalon (currently being collected in trades by Dark Horse), who’s working on a Buffy young-adult graphic novel
* Artist Mark Dos Santos, whose resumé includes the Image title Superior (with Steven T. Seagle)

I wish I could follow up with a long list of panels we attended, but the truth is, of the five Friday comics-related panels I was interested in checking out, four of them conflicted with our two timed-ticket photo-op appointments. I’ll admit I was bummed, but this is what happens when one set of schedules is released farther in advance than the others, and it’s what happens when a con dumps all the most interesting programming into a single, narrow, compacted afternoon. After all appointments were met and I’d finished my first Artists Alley run-through, I insisted on attending one panel late in the day: the annual Silver Age Trivia Challenge!

Pictured left to right: moderator Craig Shutt, Mike Chary, Jason Fliegel, Tom Brevoort, Todd Allen, and Mark Waid.

I’ve been reading about this event for literally decades, on the rec.arts.comics.* Usenet groups and in Comics Buyer’s Guide back when it was held at the erstwhile “Chicago Comic Con” (now Wizard World Chicago), but never saw one in person till now. Once upon a time, fans and pros formed two teams and faced off in a trivia contest made entirely of questions about Silver Age comics, spanning from the mid-’50s to the early ’70s. After a while it was noticed that comics writer Mark Waid was basically carrying his team, so the event was restructured and now every year it’s a group of longtime fans vs. just Mark Waid.

Half the fun was in watching Waid’s incredulous scoffing whenever the other team got an easy question, and the anguish whenever he missed a question he knew he should know.

Our moderator, Craig Shutt, a.k.a. Mr. Silver Age, was once a columnist for CBG and currently has his own forum over at Captain Comics. As he used to do in CBG, he’s posted a thorough rundown of the entire event, including all the questions he posed to each team if you want to test your own knowledge of obscure comics or just get a better idea of how truly goofy comics used to be.

Mr. Silver Age knows way more about Jimmy Olsen than is healthy for any normal human. Same goes double for Mark Waid, for that matter.

Even with the addition to the fans’ team of the skillful Tom Brevoort, Senior VP of Publishing at Marvel Comics, Waid still won for, like, the eighty-seventh consecutive year. The other team tried. They really did. And everyone contributed, not just Brevoort, though Waid had to confess that a few of his zillions of comic-book memories are slowly beginning to fade. It’s conceivable there may come a day when Waid loses the Silver Age Trivia Challenge without dying first. I wouldn’t call it probable, though.

Tom Brevoort knows far more about old DC Comics than you’d expect a Marvel editor to know.

Likewise, I wish I could say our Saturday was made of comics panels, but the Supergirl experience took up over half our day, and the remaining options for which we did have plenty of time were a lot of not-my-thing, mostly divided as they were into three popular categories: How to Make Some Comics; Hurray for Event Comics I Won’t Be Buying; and Diverse Diversity in Diverse Comics Diversities. It’s extremely cool and encouraging that those platforms and networking opportunities are in there and in greater force than ever before, but I’m not sure the presence of a superfluous straight white prudish Christian guy would add much to the ambiance. I have this mental image of entering a room only to have one or more fans turn with a burning gaze to yell at me, “YOUR KIND HAS MUCH TO ANSWER FOR!” so I tend to buy their comics but sidestep their panels.

Otherwise, a lot of our weekend was browsing, shopping, hanging out, and crowd-watching among those with whom we share a lot of touchpoints. Fun times, all told.

The view on the escalator ride from the fourth floor to the third. Such loud, very crowd, much color.

Oh, and about the other photo op we did on Friday: movie star John Cusack, another name dating back to childhood, from the constant cable reruns of One Crazy Summer to the many romantic comedies to the latter-day explosions of Con Air and 2012, with a heartfelt stop in between for High Fidelity, one of the few movies from the last twenty years that I personally, genuinely consider influential.

As I understand it, he’s a big fan of Chicago sports teams. Any excuse to travel and come see them in person, I imagine.

When we ran into the photo-op booth and asked if we could do jazz hands, he quickly replied, “Uh, you guys can!” And so it goes.

To be concluded! Other entries in the series so far:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order
* Part 5: Gaming and Animation Costumes!
* Part 6: Comics Costumes!
* Part 7: Last Call for Costumes!

The total addition to my reading pile from our two days at C2E2. On a related note, I’ve been suffering back pain flare-ups all week long. I normally don’t buy sketches or prints, but I bet fans who buy only sketches or prints didn’t share my problem.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I spent two days at the seventh annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Exposition, where Midwest comics fans in particular and geeks in general gather together in the name of imaginary worlds from print and screen to revel in fiction and touch bases on what’s hot or cool at this moment in pop culture.

So it all comes down to this, as every convention ultimately does: stuff and things! Items for sales, displays around the show floor, the neat collectibles everyone wanted to get their paws on, and the big corporate advertisements that surrounded us and insisted we need more stuff. Thus we conclude with one last look at the inanimate objects that entertained, tantalized, or just plain baffled us.

The big C2E2 sign is a staple of the main hall, no matter which McCormick Place building houses the show each year. This was a rare moment of the sign having zero cosplayers in front of it.

WETA Workshop, the visual effects studio responsible for everything spectacular about the Lord of the Rings movies, is now in the high-end merchandising game.

As their movies look cool, so do their convention booths. They were right inside the show floor entrance for very good reason.

Marvel Comics naturally had the largest space of all, featuring autograph desks and oversize posters for their current and upcoming projects. I’m only two episodes into Daredevil season 2, but so far I approve of Jon Bernthal as the Punisher and am severely annoyed with everything else about it. And not just because they got Grotto wrong.

Flag-Man vs. Iron Man: Dawn of Actual Justice.

Mega GEICO Gecko loomed above its company truck and tried to lure young adults away from blowing all their money on books and toys, and maybe put some thought into insurance and other forms of financial planning. Theirs was surely an uphill battle.

My grandma was heavily into sewing when I was a kid, and Simplicity patterns frequently littered our home, covering end tables and filling up the storage space inside her flip-top piano bench. And now Simplicity would like to help a new generation make costumes the old-fashioned way: sewing!

McCormick Place bathrooms stick to the same old male/female binary paradigm, but social awareness spurred the showrunners to designate one high-traffic set as Gender Neutral Bathrooms. While I’m sure there are those who appreciated the gesture, most of the people we saw approaching stopped in confusion and waited for other fans to tell them which one had the urinals and which one had the feminine hygiene boxes. Superficial cosmetic changes will only get you so far.

Also trying to change all of society: an insensitive egotist with a heart ten sizes too small, morally compromised supporters, and hair issues. That’s right: Lex Luthor, asking YOU to help him Make America Great, possibly for the first time ever.

Anne had never heard of Barney Hiller and was convinced this was a cheap overseas knockoff toy. But no, Barney Hiller was apparently the second Six Million Dollar Man as played by special guest Monte Markham. And once upon a time, he was an action figure, commemorated as a toy for all eternity.

Basketball action figures just in time for March Madness. They asked us to fill out brackets at work for fun, which was interesting since I know zero about college basketball except that Duke wins everything. Hopefully that’s true, anyway. I don’t even know where Duke is.

Steampunk Lincoln was brought courtesy of the city of Lockport, IL, who’ll be holding a big Steampunk Weekend festival in September, and a modest comic show at their town library. We honestly thought we smiled better than this, but we must’ve been distracted. Timing is everything, I guess.

The path leading out of the McCormick Place South Building, where we ultimately had no choice but to exit and rejoin the ordinary world. We dragged along as many reminders and keepsakes with us as we could.

The End. Thanks for Reading. See you next year, quite possibly!

Other entries in the series:

* Part 1: C2E2 Kicks Off Our 2016 Convention Season in Style
* Part 2: Dance of the Mad Deadpools
* Part 3: We Are Here For Supergirl!
* Part 4: Star Wars: The New Cosplay Order
* Part 5: Gaming and Animation Costumes!
* Part 6: Comics Costumes!
* Part 7: Last Call for Costumes!
* Part 8: Who We Met and What We Did

An outtake from our Indiana Comic Con 2015 cosplay photos, starring three Deadpools and a pair of kids who are each probably a foot taller by now.

Large-scale geek conventions weren’t a thing in Indianapolis when I was a kid. We had tiny comic shows in hotel ballrooms, but nothing requiring the spacious accommodations of the Indiana Convention Center. My young-adult years saw the advent of an annual Star Trek convention that brought great joy on several occasions and would become beloved by many, though their fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the past two decades. In 2003 Gen Con became the first super-sized company to believe in the considerable forces of local geek dollars, and they’ve been rewarded handsomely ever since for their benevolence by tens of thousands of Midwest gamers as well as folks like me who weren’t strictly gamers but were content to enjoy any sort of hobbyist gathering validation. We took what we could get, and we liked it.

Another full decade passed before other convention companies and wannabe startups noticed we’re here and began bringing their medicine wagons to town in hopes of finagling our approval and our wads of cash, and not necessarily in that order. Over the past four years we here at Midlife Crisis Crossover have shared our photos and our experiences — the good, the bad, the distressingly inept — as we’ve explored these new contenders in hopes that sooner or later, someone would establish the Greatest Indianapolis Comic Convention of All Time. My wife and I still find ourselves driving to Chicago twice per year for geek satisfaction, but it’s nice to know folks are trying to save us some gas money. And they’re welcome to keep trying.

Anne and I are now preparing for our next con this coming weekend, for which we’re mostly excited but reserving the right to retain our qualms after the rockiness of the showrunners’ last two events, each of which ran more like dry-run learning experiences than like professional expositions. While we’re selecting our personal artifacts for autographing and deciding what camping gear is most suitable for an unsupervised photo-op line, let’s take stock of the cons that have been courting us Hoosiers, praise those who did right by us, bury those who aren’t coming back, and look ahead to what’s on the Circle City calendar so far for 2016.

* Wizard World Indianapolis: WWIndy was one of many beachheads that Wizard World set up in new markets with an eye on nationwide geek domination. For their first and only try here, they debuted on Valentine’s Day weekend 2015 during an icy winter, had to share the Convention Center with other events, and reserved a limited amount of rooms and just one exhibit hall. Anne and I had fun for most of a single day, but not enough of us showed up for Wizard World’s liking. I guess no one warned them about winters or holidays. After a year that saw cumulative losses here and elsewhere, Wizard World recently saw their CEO resign, appointed a longtime entertainment lawyer from their board of directors as his replacement, and currently have no sequels on their schedule for WWIndy and several other erstwhile WW shows in other states.

* Awesome Con: Normally based in Washington, DC, where they’re successful enough that they’ve snagged the Peter Capaldi and a few high-end Doctor Who costars as headliners for their next show in June. Back in October 2014 they took a stab at duplicating their success here, albeit with a guest list that was interesting to us but fatally short on the kind of “hot” names needed to sell multiple thousands of tickets. They later pulled the plug on a follow-up show in Milwaukee and have retreated to home base for the foreseeable future.

* Starbase Indy: What was once our biggest game in town and a must-do con spent a few years in post-scandal limbo until a group of dedicated fans took it over, recalibrated its sights, and ushered in a new era with bigger hearts and more modest guest lists. We’ve attended more Starbase Indy shows than we have any other con, but 2015 was not their best year. They assembled a riskier guest list and relocated to the other side of the city, parting ways with the hotel that SBI called home for ages. I don’t know if fans didn’t get the news and all showed up at the wrong hotel, or if the actors on hand weren’t enticing enough, or if everyone was busy on Thanksgiving weekend for a change. All we know is we were only there for about an hour (partly due to our own scheduling issues) and never saw more than a handful of fans in the same place at the same time. Maybe everyone had flocked to panels to the point of violating fire codes and we totally missed them, but this was the sparsest SBI we’ve ever seen. They announced their 2016 dates at the end of March, but location still appears to be pending. We hope they’re well and we look forward to future news.

* Gen Con: Still going on, still the largest geek rendezvous in all of Indiana, still expanding their territory to its farthest reaches yet for their 2016 shindig. We skipped Gen Con in 2015 for reasons that mean more to me than they might to you. We’re not saying “never again”, but an awful lot of stars would have to align for it to happen. Nothing against them, mind you — the TL;DR version is “It’s not them, it’s me.” If you’re a fan of TCGs or tabletop gaming, you really ought to try Gen Con in as many Augusts as possible.

* Horror Hound Indy: Horror isn’t really my thing nowadays, but twice in the last three years their impressive guest list has intersected with our interests. Their 2015 gala was pretty great for what it was. They’re returning in September but their guest list is still in its early stages. We’re keeping an eye on this one just in case.

* Indy Toy and Comic Expo, and other smaller shows: A variety of cons in varying sizes and mission statements dot the Indianapolis landscape and other cities statewide, but we’ve missed out on most of those. Anne and I are social wallflowers, fairly disconnected from most local fan bases, and tend to get fidgety at cons where the primary objectives are old-inventory sales, best toys ever, and/or networking. For better reference from a higher authority, I direct you to the detailed calendar of Indiana Geeking, a local blog whose head honcho is top-notch at keeping track of all the opportunities out there that we misfits too often miss.

* Indy Pop Con: Their inaugural multifaceted 2014 show was one of our favorite convention experiences of all time and I can’t gush nearly enough about it, except that I wish attendance had been hundredfold what it was. As a means of course correction, their 2015 follow-up rebalanced the guest list heavily in favor of YouTube all-stars. Attendance skyrocketed exponentially and the poor, unsuspecting volunteers found themselves overwhelmed to the breaking point. Those young, hip, beloved whippersnappers with millions of online groupies didn’t mean quite so much to us old folks, so the lines we chose could be measured in mere minutes rather than in stressful hours or days. Lucky us. Their 2016 guest list is bigger than ever, once again heavy on the YouTubers and accentuating monetized cosplayers. As of this writing I see one (1) comics writer I absolutely have to meet because he’s on my bucket list, so I’ll be there on Saturday for at least a short while. Hopefully we can find other fun things to do and people to meet.

* Indiana Comic Con: This weekend! Despite their inaugural 2014 amateur hour (see here and here for the full disgruntlement) and their 2015 improved performance with unresolved management issues, they’re trying again. In the past week we’ve seen billboards around town and commercials during our morning news shows, so they’ve obviously got a budget to work with this time. We’ll be there once again because guest list and stubbornness. We know folks who refuse to give them another dime ever again, so for us one of the perks and responsibilities of attending the show is to watch it happen firsthand and invoke our storytelling privileges to report whatever we witness to You, the Viewers at Home. If we can tell they’ve learned a lesson, we’ll let you know. If not, don’t expect silence here. And hey, if you’re in the area, feel free to say hi and try drawing us out of our shells! If you could also bring some extra supplies to our base camp inside one of Emperor Palpatine’s multiple lines, we’ll probably need them to survive the day.

Gimli. Sallah. Treebeard. Professor Arturo. da Vinci. Kingpin. All those names and personalities don’t prepare you for the fact that John Rhys-Davies will tickle you in the middle of your photo op.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Friday and Saturday, my wife and I attended the third annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. Previous chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

* Part One: Costumes!
* Part Two: Cosplay!
* Part Three: Cosplayers!

The TL;DR rundown of our weekend experience: this was the best-run Indiana Comic Con to date. The showrunners evidently took notes last time, focused on their weaknesses, streamlined their processes, and exceeded our apprehensive expectations. We came away with a new set of happy memories, several cool books, another gallery of photos, a few minor suggestions for future years, and no sour complaints this time. A fine convention at last, would run through again, 10/10.

Early arrival times are a standard practice for us at most conventions, but given the troubling crowd-control issues we witnessed at the last two ICCs, we remained fully committed to this principle and mentally prepared for the worst. This year the con opened for business Friday at noon. We arrived around 9:30 and waited to see what would happen next…

Registration at Hall F opened at 11. Line #1 filed inside, we traded in our pre-order printouts for official lanyards, we exited the hall, then we had to go join line #2 on the opposite end at Hall I, the exhibit hall whose entrance would give us nearest, fastest access to the celebrity autograph area. Emmy Award Nominee John Rhys-Davies was scheduled to begin signing at noon sharp, and we were determined to avoid a repeat of the Carrie Fisher event. We bided more time and made small talk with a group of younger fans who were anxious to meet the various voice actors.

We walked briskly inside once the doors opened promptly at noon and found every autograph line had a dedicated transaction system — their own separate table with two volunteers to sell you tickets and provide your complimentary 8-x10 glossy for signing before you could get in the actual autograph line; one volunteer actually at the actor’s table as their assistant; and maybe an extra volunteer as standby security/gofer. Most other cons provide one handler per actor having to manage all necessary tasks at once from money to glossies. If your con can draw enough volunteers to provide a separate team for every actor, it’s a handy system.

Through some combination of effort and miracle, we found ourselves second and third in line for Mr. Rhys-Davies. He arrived a few minutes after 12 and we were done, out and giddy by 12:08. Frankly we were stunned by the speed of service, and by the hours of bonus convention time we thought would be wasted standing in lines instead of spending money at booths.

We had time to wander the exhibit hall at a leisurely pace, to buy stuff from folks (see below), to grab lunch from one of the food trucks outside (saving those pics for a separate entry), and to return in plenty of time for the Rhys-Davies Q&A at 2:00.

Our seats weren’t the best, but we didn’t mind. This was our least worst photo from where we sat.

The Q&A started with an unexpected ten-minute extemporaneous speech about UK economics, free trade, fossil fuels, the butterfly effect on a worldwide sociopolitical scale, probably world peace and Real Change and so forth. I lost the narrative thread several minutes into it, and I imagine the younger apolitical American fans retreating into their mind palaces and waiting till it was safe to ask questions about Lord of the Rings or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Random tidbits you may or may not have heard before:

* He sums up Gimli as the series’ “grumpy old fart” and played his attitude as “Glasgow paranoia and aggression”.
* His face became so destructively aggravated by the makeup that he’d have to wait days between filming for his skin to heal just enough for them to have clean places to reapply it, rather than gluing things onto open sores.
* I, Claudius was more fun in hindsight because he got to murder a young Patrick Stewart.
* He imagines Gimli after Return of the King building “an elaborate cabinet” as a shrine to hold the three hairs Galadriel gave him.
* As a noted conservative who’s made no secret of his anti-Islamic views, he nonetheless laments Sallah as “the last popular Arab in popular culture.” (Contrary examples do leap to mind, but are they as Popular-with-a-capital-P as Raiders?)
* As someone who grew up in Tanzania and witnessed aspects of the slavery market firsthand as a kid, he wondered aloud why African-Americans aren’t more vocally activist about opposing slavery in other parts of the world.
* The last fan to step to the mic was a well-educated nonwhite woman who politely asked if he as an actor was choosing parts that would afford him opportunities to speak out or confront serious issues that meant most to him, including but not limited to what he’d just finished pontificating about at length. He conceded he takes the parts offered to him, offered a bit of Latin, and — holding up his old-school feature phone as evidence — concluded with an admission that in his advancing age, “My opinions may have the same relevance as my technology has.”

We wandered a bit more, I flipped through a back-issue bin or two, and we moved on to our next actor: the great Maurice LaMarche. With over three hundred credits to his name, he’s appeared in something you’ve seen and enjoyed.

Anne adored him most as The Brain. His co-conspirator Rob Paulsen (Pinky!) had to cancel his scheduled ICC appearance, but LaMarche brought along a small stack of Pinky & the Brain 8x10s pre-autographed by Paulsen as a consolation option. She was on cloud nine.

Whatever character a fan gushed about, he responded in kind in the corresponding voice. I remembered The Brain, Dr. Zoidberg, and various Orson Welles spoofs off the top of my head, but I last saw him in Disney’s Zootopia, in which he plays a shrew(d) send-up of Don Corleone. I complimented this, and in his Mr. Big voice he let me know he wouldn’t have me iced. And then I died content. The End.

From there we headed over to the photo op area, where fans arriving early for Line A had to march back and forth through sixteen rows’ worth of serpentine line to join others in wait. If you were 400th or 500th in line it was no big deal, but if you were among the first thirty in line as we were, it was a short bit of calisthenics to add to your already impressive Fitbit total for the day.

That’s one of Anne’s old friends taking her turn going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and so on. Anne greeted some arrivals like a marathon volunteer with words of encouragement and accomplishment. If only we’d had Participant ribbons to hand out.

And then we got the goofy-looking results shown at the top. At the photo pickup tables we compared notes with other fans, who each testified he tickled everyone. We discussed whether it was okay for us all to laugh or if we should all file an offended class-action lawsuit in the name of Problematics. Anne and I took a while to stop laughing and carry on.

* * * * *

On Saturday ICC opened at 8 a.m. — not just for waiting, but for activities — shopping, panels, and even one major actor Q&A at 8:30 a.m., a start time unprecedented in the history of Midwest comics conventions. Our #1 reason for attending was a chance to meet Emperor Palpatine himself, Ian McDiarmid, whose first autograph session was scheduled at 9:20. That meant we had to adjust our own parameters and arrive shortly after 6:30 a.m. Anne is an early bird, but that’s hard for a night-owl like me. I can only imagine how hard that probably was on anyone who spent Friday night carousing and binge-drinking in accordance with comic convention customs.

Shortly after 7:30 a.m. Some roosters were probably still in bed.

Our line-buddies were a gregarious, shockingly wide-awake bunch, including one cosplayer who let Anne try on his Red Hood helmet. She’s not exactly a big Jason Todd fan, but cosplay opportunities are exceedingly rare for her. It’s been ages since she used to attend Trek cons in her old Starfleet medical officer’s uniform.

If she’d been Robin during “A Death in the Family”, I like to think thousands of DC fans would’ve called in to save her life and there’d be no Red Hood in the first place.

At one point we were joined by special guest George Perez, whom we’d previously met at Wizard World Chicago 1999 and at the 2012 Superman Celebration. A legendary artist and a very nice man, he posed for pics with the Batman of Mishawaka before heading off to find the pros’ designated entrance.

Today’s “Brave and the Bold” team-up: Batman and George Perez!

Security let us into Hall I at 8:00 on the nose. We sped toward McDiarmid’s spot and waited for another eighty minutes.

We got to say hi to old friend Richard, a fellow Carrie Fisher line survivor. And Anne the history buff had the pleasure of chatting at length with fellow fan Dave, a history teacher who came out all the way from Long Island for this chance to meet the Emperor himself. I played fly-on-the-wall for a while and watched them speaking in each other’s language.

Like a true professional, McDiarmid arrived at his table at precisely 9:20. Despite one dealer bringing several posters for autographing, each of which required veeeeeeeeryyyyyyyy slooooooooowlyyyyyyy uuuunrooooooolliiiiiiiiing so every one of them could be individually signed and turned into eBay gold. Once he was out of the way, then the line proceeded normally and we had our chance to say hi and bask in his majesty.

That moment took an unexpected turn when his handlers recognized us. One recalled our Jenna Coleman photo from last year; the other recognized me from this very site. Wonders really never ceased this weekend.

We were done, out and giddy yet again by 9:35. We’d honestly expected a minimum three-hour ordeal. Once again we had hours of surprise free time on our hands. I can’t say the same for other McDiarmid fans who arrived much later and were part of the system organized behind us, divided into managed sections for a much more orderly process than we’d endured in 2015. Many Star Wars actors are regulars on the convention circuit and have shorter lines as a result, but Palpatine isn’t among them. His line remained larger than any other guests’ pretty much all day long. Points to us early birds, then.

That gave us more time for light shopping, cosplayer-watching, and temporarily escaping the Convention Center to grab lunch at Circle Centre Mall rather than overpay for underwhelming convention food. We saw several other fans over at the food court with the same life-saving idea. We returned in plenty of time for our 12:30 photo op, for which the con kept advising ticket-holders should begin lining up fifteen minutes early. By the 35-minute-till mark, we were fifty strong, with hundreds more filing behind us over the next hour. The start time was delayed till after 1:00 so they could whittle down more of that overwhelming autograph line. All things considered, we understood, though a few kids in line with us were grumpy for a bit.

Eventually it happened, and we got our photo with the Sith Lords themselves, Emperor Palpatine and Ray Park, a.k.a. Darth Maul.

To his credit, Park was caught mid-jazz-hand when the shutter clicked. And all Star Wars Prequels fans know Palpatine prefers opera over jazz.

The delay caused us to miss a 1 p.m. comics panel we’d been considering, but there was nothing to be done. Next event: the 2:30 Q&A with those same Sith Lords. Thousands of fans filed through the serpentine in Hall J for the main event in Hall K.

— back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and —

Our moderator, writer/professor Christy Blanch, whom we’d previously seen moderating at last year’s ICC, then met in person at C2E2 2015.

“I have the coolest job in America,” says starstruck Star Wars fan

Both stars were in great spirits. McDiarmid switched his Palpatine voice on-and-off as needed, and described his disappointing lunch as “Ewok hash”.

I didn’t take too many more notes because I doubt much of the chat was stop-the-presses news. Ray Park talked about his early martial-arts inspirations like the old anime Monkey Magic, and thought it was funny that he had to record ADR for Snake-Eyes in both GI Joe films because they wanted this very mute character to still grunt and groan and go OOF whenever he was hit. Otherwise we relaxed and listened and tried not to bristle too loudly when younger fans asked 100% inappropriate Q&A questions like “Will you sign this for me?” or “Can I have a hug?”

Ray Park, photographing the photographers.

At panel’s end, the room was cleared per con procedure and thousands of us flooded into the halls all at the same time. Weaving through and around so much writ-large Brownian motion made me a minute late to our final panel of the day, a writers’ confab called “Writing a Shared Universe”.

Pictured left to right:

* John Jackson Miller, former Comics Buyer’s Guide editor turned comics writer (Iron Man, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) and Star Wars novelist (A New Dawn, which kicked off the controversial New Canon), who’s now got a Star Trek novel in stores and a Trek trilogy called Prey set to begin in September.
* Eric Flint, mastermind behind the 1632 shared-world series.
* An author who wasn’t listed in the panel’s program description, whose intro I missed due to late arrival.
* Jody Lynn Nye, whom I recall from the Thieves’ World shared-world series back in the ’80s, who also co-authored the later volumes in Robert Asprin’s MythAdventures series.

Most of their useful tips for co-writing in other people’s universes boil down to “Don’t be a jerk to the other writers by writing things that screw up everyone else’s possibilities.” But as we’ve seen in comics, some people do still need practical advice. I was worried that this panel might be the perfect opportunity for any haters of the New Canon to establish a beachhead at ICC, but Miller asked the audience to hold any Star Wars-specific questions until the end of the panel. At the end, they’d spoken so long that we only had time for questions from two fans — one asking about the value and drawbacks of fanfic, one broadly wanting general writing tips, neither of them coming within 500 yards of any elephants in any rooms. Bullets = dodged.

(I took more notes than that if anyone’s interested, but I realize I’ve lost most readers a couple thousand words ago. Just let me know if you’re interested in a follow-up sidebar.)

We made a few last stops in the exhibit hall to pick up heavy or unwieldy items, then bade Indiana Comic Con farewell for the year. (Saturday nights at any given con are rarely programmed for square old-timers like us, and we almost never do Sundays.) Before we close here, special shout-outs to the comics creators I had the pleasure of meeting throughout the weekend:

Nacogdoches’ own Joe R. Lansdale, who started in the ’80s as a horror author (The Drive-In once blew my teenage mind) and has done a number of comics projects since the ’90s, including a pair of Jonah Hex miniseries for DC’s Vertigo line. His “Hap & Leonard” novels were recently lined up for adaptation into a Sundance Channel series costarring Omar from The Wire. Really friendly guy. Photo was taken by his son Keith, who’s done some co-writing with him.

Tim Truman, creator of Scout (new project forthcoming!), co-creator of the great Grimjack, contributor to DC’s post-Crisis Hawkman mythos, and writer of several Conan arcs for Dark Horse Comics.

Tomas Giorello, whose past Dark Horse credits include Star Wars: Republic and Truman’s great-looking Conan books.

A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran, who’s done various projects for Marvel and DC since I was a kid (e.g., Neil Gaiman’s Sandman!). Her most recent project: illustrating the graphic-novel autobiography of Stan Lee, Amazing Fantastic Incredible, which I’ve been dying to read since I first heard about it.

Unparalleled horror illustrator Bernie Wrightson, co-creator of Swamp Thing and other spooky books. Stephen King fans have seen his illustrations gracing the cover of the old Creepshow graphic novel, the early trade editions of Cycle of the Werewolf, and if you’re into really deep cuts, King’s contribution to Marvel’s hunger-relief benefit book Heroes for Hope.

John Jackson Miller, whose work in comic stats I knew long before he began writing fiction…

Full disclosure on that last one: as CBG editor, Miller was instrumental co-writer of their Standard Catalog of Comic Books, which compiled comic-book sales figures from past decades using the “Statement of Ownership” forms that publishers were once required to release once per year inside any and all comics that were available by subscription. I submitted a few forms I’d found in my own collection, so the Standard Catalog‘s “Special Thanks” section was the first appearance of my name in print in a nationally distributed book. Miller’s sales-stat work continues over at Comichron as time permits between fiction-writing opportunities.

Unfortunately not pictured above: Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, local co-creators of the webcomic Little Guardians that we met at C2E2 back in March. I thought well enough of their first collection that I wanted to say hi and pick up Volume 2. I’d meant to ask if we could take a photo, but then another potential paying customer approached their table, so we stepped back and let them have the chance to make more money. Next time, then.

…

…and that was our successful thumbs-up experience at Indiana Comic Con 2016. If I had to submit a few nitpicky ideas to their suggestion box:

* I live-tweeted occasionally using the #indianacomiccon hashtag even though ICC’s official Twitter account kept recommending #ICC2016, which is already in use by other groups sharing that really common acronym, some of them overseas and none of them relevant. By contrast I counted only one (1) company likely to have use for #indianacomiccon. A hashtag shared by multiple groups for multiple purposes is a useless hashtag. (Value-added personal-preference note: I’m also staunchly opposed to hashtags that add pointless suffixes and devour those precious 140 characters for no good reason, like #indianacomiccon2016 instead of #indianacomiccon, or #thewalkingdeadfinale instead of #thewalkingdead. Maybe that’s just me.)

* As a fan of straight lines in general and grids in particular, the layout for Artists Alley, and various publishers’ and dealers’ booths was frustratingly non-linear and virtually freeform in parts, making it hard to ensure that we actually saw every exhibitor in the house. I missed at least one webcomic artist and one local comic shop that I’m pretty sure were supposed to be there but never appeared in our paths.

* Sincere kudos for printing an actual convention program this year, but I’d add at least a few more sections to it, including but not limited to: (a) short bios of all the main guests, as a means of upselling them to attendees who might be interested in spending more money on them if they had a better idea of who they were; and (b) a print version of the con’s official harassment guidelines, which were posted nowhere and only available online, buried in the About page.

So far the only other complaints I’ve run across were from a couple of comic fans on Twitter who thought George Perez’ line moved too slowly. As a two-time Perez line veteran, I can say that’s not unusual. He’s extremely cordial and will sketch for you then and there while you watch and marvel, instead of taking a commission list and getting back to you three weeks from the October after next, like other artists might do. I can sympathize, but to me he was worth both long waits. And trust me, however long you waited, he’s no Carrie Fisher.

Otherwise: great year. Special thanks to my local shop Downtown Comics for helping me complete my collection of Christopher Priest’s The Ray, and to Gem City Books, who always bring a fine selection of discount trades to our favorite cons, and who struck gold in my heart with a new idea: a rack for damaged books at rock-bottom clearance prices.

Remember, kids: reading is a magical world of whimsy and wonder that never gets old, even when you do.

The End. Thanks for reading. Lord willing, see you next year. Cheerily so.

Our annual Free Comic Book Day tradition saw us once again at Indianapolis’ own Downtown Comics North, where cosplayers are always on hand to greet kids, accompanying adults, and regulars alike. Naturally for pop culture’s Year of Deadpool there was Deadpool, so please enjoy Deadpool because Deadpool.

On May 7th my wife and I had the pleasure of once again observing Free Comic Book Day, the least fake holiday of them all. Readers of multiple demographics, thankfully including lots of youngsters, flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and dozens of indie publishers. This year’s assortment saw more all-ages comics than ever, so this wasn’t just an outreach to longtime fortysomething collectors who need no further enticement.

I never grab copies of everything, but this year I got a little more grabby than I thought. This entry was procrastinated days past its relevance expiration date because it took me that much longer to find the free time to read them all, even those I could speed through in three minutes flat. In my mind, regardless of total consumption minutes, each issue ought to be a satisfying experience for any new reader who opens the cover without any foreknowledge. Historically, each publisher’s offerings tend to fall into one of six story levels, ranked here in order from “Best Possible Display of Generosity and Salesmanship” to “Had to Slap SOMETHING Together, So Whatever”:

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

Surprisingly, none of this year’s samples settled for option 5 or 6. Good show, publishers.

The comics in my FCBD 2016 reading pile came out as follows, from least favorite to definite favorite:

19. Spectrum #0 (Automatic Publishing) — I usually avoid comics co-created by actors as illustrated TV/movie pitches, but the name of Firefly‘s Alan Tudyk on the cover caught my eye. After a sluggish, uninviting, 370-word all-text prologue (for a Star Wars film it’d make a ten-minute opening crawl), the comic proper is divided in two halves, one about Our Hero and his current role in an anti-alien rebellion, the other about an ethereal lady taking over a spaceship from her alien captors through indecipherable powers, decorated throughout with still more sci-fi names that the overlong intro didn’t mention, all accompanied by frequently inscrutable illustrations failing to convey what’s actually happening. I should’ve stuck to my guidelines.

18. Avatarex: Destroyer of Darkness (Graphic India) — Inimitable comics legend Grant Morrison and a not-bad artist introduce a new Indian superhero who awakens aboard a spaceship, acquires his weapons, and goes on and on and on about how awesome he is. That’s twelve pages spent on the print equivalent of an I-am-the-greatest old-school rap single. Also included is an excerpt from Morrison’s ongoing 18 Days, in which other Indian superhumans or possibly deities are at war with each other and prepare for the oncoming battles by debating their conflicting philosophies. The Hindu discussions are weighty but the excerpt ends before they take on enough context. I’m taking it on faith that’s Morrison literati superfans have already annotated every sentence of this at extreme length.

17. Mixtape 2016 (Devil’s Due/1First Comics) — Three excerpts: li’l Mercy Sparx, one of the few Devil’s Due characters still around in any fashion, which means more to her current readers (not my thing); Squarriors, which are like Mouse Guard with angry squirrels and unhelpful flashbacks; and an excerpt from Badger #4, the recent revival of the classic Mike Baron/Jeff Butler character that was one of my early faves when my teen self first discovered comic shops. Val Mayerik’s art captures all of Badger’s strengths — martial arts and unfettered loopiness — but anyone who doesn’t recognize him, or his old pals Yak and Yeti, will probably be lost and wondering why he’s facing Vladimir Putin in an MMA match. That’s, uh, typically how things go for him.

Downtown Comics North opened at 11 a.m. This was the line when we arrived around 9:30…

16. Civil War II (Marvel Comics) — Story #1 is an excerpt from the upcoming annual very special Marvel company-wide summer blockbuster mega-crossover event spectacular that will shake up the Marvel Universe irrevocably forever or whatever. It’s just the heroes gathering so Thanos can appear from nowhere and beat on them for a while, two of them not looking so good by the end. Jim Cheung’s art looks pretty as always, but so far I don’t care. Story #2 introduces the all-new Wasp, Henry Pym’s #1 fan who hopes the late doctor doesn’t mind her stealing his shtick. I’d forgotten the pleasures inherent in the art of Alan Davis, but I tend to avoid superteam books noawadays and will therefore be disconnected from whatever happens to her next in All-New All-Different Avengers.

15. DC SuperHero Girls (DC Comics) — It’s DC’s all-women answer to Muppet Babies but instead of a nursery they’re in high school. Intended for younger audience who like short, sparse sentences but are prepared for new vocab words like “wormhole”, “evaluation”, “carelessness”, “trendsetter”, and “cliffhanger”, a word here which means “an unsatisfying ending like this comic’s that means you’ll have to beg your parents to buy you more comics if you want to find out what happens to Supergirl next”. To be fair, this non-canon side trip treats some of the characters with more respect than their New 52 counterparts have received. And girls will love the all-new all-dreamy Comet the Super-Horse!

14. We Can Never Go Home/Young Terrorists (Black Mask) — Story #1 is an interlude that takes place amidst one of my favorite comics of 2015, bridging the gap toward the second WCNGH arc coming later this year. It fits well within the first arc and is every bit as shocking, though I’m too biased to tell if it does much for newcomers. Story #2 is my first glimpse of Young Terrorists, a less subtle and much more sadistic, nihilistic tribulation of the sort that stopped entertaining me years ago. For those who like this sort of thing professionally crafted, here some is.

13. Camp Midnight Free Comic Book Day Special (Image Comics) — Excerpt from the upcoming graphic novel written by Steven T. Seagle (House of Secrets, Ben 10), about a weird girl sent to a spooky summer camp for monster kids. I think the excerpt lopped off a few too many pages at the start, but the whole promises to be better than just the one part.

…and this was the line behind us a few minutes before 11. It wasn’t any shorter by the time we left at 11:15.

12. Bongo Free-for-All! 2016 (Bongo Comics) — The annual batch of Simpsons Comics reprints contains a few painful clunkers, including a two-pager that felt like 30-year-old MAD Magazine leftovers, but two stories both written by Ian Boothby — one a Homer/Pieman story, the other some hijinks in which Bart convinces everyone Principal Skinner is a vampire — got a few chuckles out of me, which is more than I can say for the average new Simpsons episode these days.

11. Lady Mechanika FCBD (Benitez Productions) — Joe Benitez is a fully accredited, upper-tier member of the Marc Silvestri/Top Cow comics design school, which can be a nifty art style to behold if you can overlook the heroine’s curiously modest boob window. I’m not familiar with Lady Mechanika beyond the one time I saw a Lady Mechanika cosplayer win a Gen Con costume contest, but the done-in-one new tale moves briskly, introduces other cyborgs like her as well as a set of nemeses, and threw in a few surprises I didn’t see coming. Two excerpts from other LM works show off even better art by Benitez and other collaborators. It’s not for kids, but this was a more interesting read than I expected.

10. Oddly Normal #1 (Image Comics) — Reprint of the first issue of the creator-owned all-ages series by Otis Frampton, one of the artists behind the YouTube series How It Should Have Ended (one among my very few YouTube subscriptions). The titular young girl is a green-haired, pointy-eared, half-witch outcast mocked at school, saddled with parents who don’t get her, and confused by powers that may have just kicked in. A fast read aimed squarely at all the other young oddballs out there. I can relate.

9. Steve Rogers: Captain America (Marvel Comics) — Story #1: after being dead for a few years, then resurrected and elderly for several more, Steve Rogers was recently rejuvenated and returned to his Star-Spangled Avenger role thanks to some contrivances set up in the recent Avengers Standoff: Welcome to Pleasant Hill very special Marvel mini-crossover event, of which I read exactly one issue. Cap’s comeback looks great thanks to artist/colorist Jesus Saiz, and ends with a declaration of an official War on Hydra, which is tempting to follow but probably leads into twelve more crossovers, so I’m reluctant to commit. Story #2 stars the amazing Spider-Man, whose version of Peter Parker is barely recognizable to me. He’s undergone so many changes ever since “One Moment in Time” severed my last remaining childhood emotional ties to him years ago. Dan Slott’s writing style never disappoints me, and “One Moment in Time” wasn’t his fault, so I can acknowledge this as a pretty fun prologue to yet another upcoming very special Spider-Man major crossover event that will pass me right by.

The all-ages books had one table; this was the other. Plenty of supplies on hand for would-be readers.

8. Rom #0 (IDW Publishing) — ROM, Spaceknight, one of my beloved childhood toys, is back from a long, long stint in licensing limbo! And now IDW’s got him instead of Marvel! But for some reason at the end of this intro, probably for legal reasons, he calls himself “Rom the Space Knight”, which is wrong wrong WRONG. And the revamped Dire Wraiths are pale anime impersonations of Sal Buscema’s classic creepy designs. But Rom still has his trusty Analyzer and Neutralizer, and his silver armor with just some corners rounded, and his starchy Bill Mantlo speech pattern. It’s a promising start, as nostalgia reboots go. Story #2 is a revival of Britain’s own “Action Man”, about whom I know zilch beyond what writer John Barber’s afterword tells me, but his passing-of-the-mantle does a nice job of connecting the old GI Joe precursor to a young, befuddled successor left to figure out how Action Man things work. It’s got a breezy Young James Bond vibe and deserves a second look.

7. Serenity/Hellboy/Aliens (Dark Horse Comics) — Story #1: River Tam turns the Firefly cast into a really precious bedtime story that’ll warm the hearts of fans like me who still miss Wash. Story #2: Richard Corben draws Hellboy and mostly leaves me cold. Story #3 is connected to Brian Wood’s Aliens: Defiance, which I’ve been on the fence about trying or skipping, so I’m at a disadvantage. The art of Tristan Jones and colorist Dan Jackson is a strong selling point, I’ll give it that.

6. The Tick Free Comic Book Day 2016 (New England Press) — Our annual Free Comic Book Day reminder that New England Comics is still in business even though Tick creator Ben Edlund hasn’t been an active contributor in a long, long time. The lead story, in which the Tick meets dozens of other alt-universe Ticks, reminds me of Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, except this was funnier — the funniest Tick story I’ve read in a long time, truth be known. If regular Tick comics ever appeared at my local shop in any of the other 51 weeks every year, I might have to revisit these old, silly friends more often.

5. Doctor Who: Four Doctors (Titan Comics) — Four new shorts with each of the modern-era Doctors! The Tenth is bogged in the current comics’ status quo, Eleven and Twelve face revamps of classic-Who adversaries I don’t know, but the Ninth — my “first Doctor”, for the record — wins with Rose Tyler and Captain Jack at his side against a “geohacker” who reshapes planetary surfaces like a bored intergalactic Banksy. All four stories get each Doctor right and are worthy additions to any Whovian’s comics library. A trade collecting Titan’s first Twelve arc was one of my non-free FCBD purchases to support our local shops, so hopefully it’s more of the same niftiness.

Harley Quinn and the Red Power Ranger doing their exercises before assuming crowd-control and party-hearty duties.

4. Mooncop: A Tom Gauld Sampler (Drawn & Quarterly) — Reprints of the British cartoonist’s single-panel gags from The Guardian are great on their own, but the lead story, taken from the forthcoming graphic novel, is good quirky sci-fi about life on the still-desolate Moon in a time when the novelty of living on the Moon never quite took off. Gauld’s website contains more samples and pointers in case this wasn’t nearly enough, which it wasn’t. More, please.

3. Legend of Korra/How to Train Your Dragon/Plants vs. Zombies (Dark Horse Comics) — The Airbender/Korra universe always wins at FCBD, and the streak continues here with the origin of how Korra met her dog. I think. I’ve never seen an episode of either show, but in print they always impress me. Likewise the Dragon short gives cast members a chance to tell their favorite dragon tales with varying degrees of unaware humor, but all tie together at the end with a heartfelt nod to Hiccup’s dearly departed father, of which I approve. I’ve still never played Plants vs. Zombies, but this year’s story (versus a mad scientist zombie) is more coherent and funnier than last year’s. Well met.

2. Science Comics (First Second) — The title says it all: comics about science, and not necessarily just for the kiddos. In story #2, Jon Chad delivers a handy precis on the wide world of volcanology and answers the important issue of “why volcanoes”, but I’m even more enamored of story #1, in which Maris Wicks tells the inspiring true story of how her double-proficiency in comics and oceanography led her to taking scuba lessons for art’s sake. Many folks are lucky if they can do one thing they really love; Wicks is the rare victor to realize you don’t have to settle for just one.

1. Spongebob Freestyle Funnies (United Plankton Pictures) — Maris Wicks completists can then move on to this one, in which she has a two-pager about underwater mountains. There’s also a mostly okay opener by Israel Sanchez (I haven’t watched enough Spongebob to know that his arms can regenerate, but okay, sure) and a one-pager by James Kochalka called “Patrick’s Guide to Getting Stuff for Free” that had me in stitches (“#4: draw a picture of it and pretend that it’s real”), but the winner and champion of Free Comic Book Day 2016 stars Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, in a super-hero throwback tale written by old favorite Evan Dorkin (Beasts of Burden, Eltingville) and illustrated by Ramona Fradon, a longtime DC Comics artist who graced the ’60s through the early ’80s with work on the original Aquaman and the long-running Super-Friends comic based on ye olde cartoon. To have her drawing a spiffy Aquaman parody in the classic action-adventure mold after so many years in retirement is one of the most brilliant ideas any publisher will have this year.

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

Our Free Comic Book Day 2016 Cosplayer of the Year: the unbeatable Squirrel Girl! Buy her amazing comic now or you hate reading, fun, literacy, women, and cute furry animals.