Mr. King and Mr. McDonald are pleased to make your acquaintance.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 my wife Anne and I have taken a trip to a different part of the United States and visited attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. For 2017 our ultimate destination of choice was the city of Baltimore, Maryland. You might remember it from such TV shows as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, not exactly the most enticing showcases to lure in prospective tourists. Though folks who know me best know I’m one of those guys who won’t shut up about The Wire, a Baltimore walkabout was Anne’s idea. Setting aside my fandom, as a major history buff she was first to remind skeptics who made worried faces at us for this plan that Maryland was one of the original thirteen American colonies and, urban decay notwithstanding, remains packed with notable history and architecture from ye olde Founding Father times. In the course of our research we were surprised to discover Baltimore also has an entire designated tourist-trap section covered with things to do. And if we just so happened to run across former filming locations without getting shot, happy bonus…

Oriole Park was a nice place to visit, but catercorner to it was the part of Camden Yards I wanted to see most. As a fan of comic books for nearly four decades and counting, I wish I could say we find comic-related tourist attractions everywhere we go, but that’s nearly never the case. Leave it to one of the most powerful men in the comics industry ever so kindly to place one in our Baltimore path. And not just comics — Geppi’s Entertainment Museum is a haven for collectible 20th-century pop culture in general.

Its founder and namesake is Steve Geppi, also the founder and owner of Diamond Comics Distributors, the near-monopolistic juggernaut through which the vast majority of American comic shops are required to receive their weekly comics and ancillary products. Geppi has been a leading figure in the industry since the 1970s, with Diamond rising to indispensable prominence when the tumultuous 1990s market saw the company either outliving or outright buying its competitors. In 2006 Geppi — himself a big fan of all those worlds — decided to try something different and opened his Entertainment Museum on the second floor of the former B&O Railroad Station, with its exhibits curated out of his own enormous personal collections.

The first-floor tenant was the unrelated Sports Legends Museum, which closed in October 2015.

Visitors can take the stairs up to level 2 or ride the elevator. Most of its fancy fake control panels didn’t work.

The museum divides the collections into a series of themed exhibits — most permanent, a few temporary — connected by hallways covered in an endless array of art objects. Surrounding you on all sides are hundreds upon hundreds of original paintings, movie posters, comic art, artists’ sketches, and other artifacts from across the various, wondrous media.

It’s a bit busy and cluttered in spots. If you need a moment of stillness, you can just stare down at those beautiful hardwood floors.

As expected, the comics quotient is extremely high here. Most items are for display only, but their version of a gift shop is filled with thousands of graphic novels to buy and bring home as souvenirs after you’re done perusing the covers of the classics.

Comics from my childhood and teenage years. I have (or had) most of these.

Comics from well before my time. Ask your ancestors about some of these.

Anti-Nazi comics were of course some of the best comics ever.

Superman was one of many DC and Marvel heroes who starred in the famous Hostess snack ads that taught multiple generations the power of sugar.

A coveted Marvel No-Prize and other ephemera from comics’ Silver Age.

Comics painter Alex Ross has a few pieces on hand alongside other illustrators.

The permanent Batman section naturally includes props from the 1960s TV series.

An additional, temporary Batman exhibit featured pieces that wereGeppi’s
own purchases or gifts.
Surrounding the large painting by Jae Lee are additional works by Matt Wagner, Dick Sprang, Graham Nolan, and Kelley Jones.

If you’re a modern fan who doesn’t get the ‘Adam West 60s version, try 1940s serials starring Lewis Wilson as a barely recognizable Caped Crusader.

Comic books and comic book accessories naturally comprise the bulk of the museum, but they’re not the sole inhabitants. Toys and other forms of ancient licensed merchandise occupy dedicated areas as a reminder that pop culture is more than just comics.

The Beatles were my mom’s thing back in her day.

A Baltimore section celebrates such local legends as Billie Holiday and Frank Zappa.

Little Orphan Annie’s Secret Society was a trendy code-breaking club for fans of old-time radio, comic strips, and/or Ovaltine.

Classic TV section is very classic.

Annie Oakley, Dennis the Menace, and the Peanuts gang vie for display space.

This wasn’t the first time we encountered PEZ Dispensers on this vacation. It also wasn’t the last.

What Is It Like Being a Woman in Pop Culture: The Museum Section.

Obscure poster subjects included this forgotten 1917 silent film with Constance Talmadge, who previously costarred in D.W. Griffith’s infamous Intolerance.

The Care Bears and Rainbow Brite refuse to be forgotten, no matter how hard I try.

All told, Geppi’s museum was a fun place to immerse in the grand comic-book hobby, in the amazing worlds of super-heroes, and in other eminently merchandisable fictional universes. Of course I had to buy two more books to go, on top of the sizable hardcover we were still lugging around from the American Visionary Art Museum. My souvenir needs are usually few and not too heavy, but I figured I could indulge for just this one vacation. If pop culture museums become a more commonplace fixture on the American travel landscape, then it’ll be time to exercise shopping self-control.

Joker statues line a special case filled with autographed photos of numerous guest stars from TV’s Batman. It’s hard to look at such stockpiles without wondering how much all of this cost.

A nearly life-size Superman statue inspires at the end of one hallway.

The Bat-Signal! Quickly, Robin, to the Bat-Exit before I spend again!

To be continued!

[Link enclosed here to handy checklist for other 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!]

An optimistic Wonder Woman is already scouting locations for the Hall of Justice.

Midlife Crisis Crossover calls Justice League “Not Remotely the Worst Film of the Year!” I mean, y’all do remember 2017 spawned another Transformers sequel, right?

As a comics fan for nearly forty years, I’m not among those with unconditional love for every project with the DC Comics imprimatur on it, but their creators have made cool things over the decades. I found Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice the Worst Film of 2016, but The CW’s The Flash is my favorite current TV show, and I thought more highly of the first half of Suicide Squad than many people did. In comics I found the New 52 reboots largely dreadful, but love that “Rebirth” brought Christopher Priest’s Deathstroke and Gene Luen Yang’s New Super-Man into the world. The Flash was among the first super-heroes I ever followed monthly beginning at age 6. When I started making up my own super-heroes circa age 9, Cyborg was among the first ones I ripped off. But I pledge unquestioning allegiance to no fictional characters.

I fully expected Justice League to be an enormous waste of time that would have me nitpicking and raging for hours, given: (a) the departure of director Zack Snyder under tragic circumstances; (b) that former Marvel movie overseer Joss Whedon, the opposite of Snyder on every conceivable level, had been tasked with stitching together the pieces; (c) that Warner Brothers executives had demanded nearly a third of the movie be chopped out to enforce a shorter running time for reasons of greed; (d) they were trying to foist a redundant Flash on us despite the ongoing awesomeness of Grant Gustin; and (e) it’s mostly from the makers of Batman v. Superman. That’s a lot of strikes even before getting to the plate.

Honestly? It wasn’t that bad. In fact, I’ll go on record here and confess I wouldn’t call it “bad”.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot return as aging angry Batman and the wonderful Wonder Woman! The world is worse than ever because their 2017 looks like ours and because Superman’s still dead for now. The Caped Crusader still fights the good fight in Gotham, but Princess Diana of Themiscyra has been a bitter recluse ever since Steve Trevor’s fate in World War I, which was such a tremendous bummer that composer Danny Elfman’s orchestra becomes suicidally depressed whenever she mentions him or even daydreams wistfully about him in silence. But the two have a much bigger problem in the form of a giant-sized conqueror named Steppenwolf (Munich‘s Ciaran Hinds, embalmed in CG), who’s arrived on Earth to track down three MacGuffins that would give him the power to destroy everything. That’s the entirety of his characterization, but super-heroes need something to punch, so here he is in simplistic, punchable glory.

Our Heroes realize they need more than a mere duo for a super-team film and go line up recruits. Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones) IS Aquaman, lost son of Atlantis, hunky commander of water and spouter of happy-jock exclamations. Ezra Miller (Fantastic Beasts) IS not Grant Gustin, but his alternate-earth Flash is a homeless Jewish science prodigy whose dad is in jail and who could really use a strong supporting cast that would be willing to overlook his fidgety impatience. Ray Fisher IS The Black Guy From Justice League — a.k.a. Cyborg, last seen in several seasons of Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans and a few episodes of Smallville, who’s now graduated to the big leagues because someone behind the scenes decided that Green Lantern John Stewart for some reason was unworthy to bear the mantle of The Black Guy From Justice League. Now he’s the team’s resident human robot super-hacker and weapons specialist rolled into one.

And Henry Cavill IS a Superman who’s only mostly dead, which may mean slightly alive if Our Heroes can make time for a side quest to reverse the terrible ending of Batman v. Superman before they have to go save the day. Cavill has been headline fodder all throughout production, up to and including the recent mustache controversy, so if you think his resurrection is a spoiler, you really haven’t been paying attention and/or you don’t know how super-heroes work.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Supporting cast members returning from past DCU movies include Amy Adams (Lois Lane, still in mourning), Diane Lane (Ma Kent, still bitter), Jeremy Irons (Alfred, a little less curmudgeonly), Connie Nielsen (Queen Hippolyta, still fighty), and Lisa Loven Kongsli (Menalippe, the nonwhite Amazon with lines). Newcomers who’ll surely have larger roles in future films include Academy Award Winner JK Simmons as an aging Commissioner Gordon who’s known the Batman for years; Joe Morton (Terminator 2) as Cyborg’s dad and key player in his so-far-offscreen origin; Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan from Snyder’s Watchmen) as convicted murderer Henry Allen; and as Mera, future wife of Aquaman, Amber Heard has one minute of murky fight scene and one minute of unwieldy, unintelligible infodump for which her homework was to summarize all the deleted Atlantis scenes.

Holt McCallany, star of Netflix’s Mindhunter, kicks off the film as an ordinary burglar with the honor of being Batman’s opening opponent. Blink and you’ll miss Marc McClure, a.k.a. Jimmy Olsen from the Christopher Reeve era, as a Metropolis beat cop in a significant scene.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? It’s a Zack Snyder film, a super-hero film, and a DC Comics film. Today’s secret word is obviously EXPLOSIONS. Between credited writers Joss Whedon and Chris Terrio (Argo), a few morals do make it into the mix:

* Evil is bad
* Hope is cool
* Some loners would rather be part of a team
* If grief persists for more than five decades, consult a specialist or get more encouraging friends
* Superman can too smile (no, really!)
* Zillionaires can totally solve your foreclosure problem if you can get their attention for two minutes

Nitpicking? No two ways about it: Snyder and Whedon do not have interchangeable styles. It’s easy to tell when this patchwork quilt of a production switches from Snyder’s slo-mo explodo visuals to Whedon’s character-driven chitchat and back again. Some dialogue exchanges come off as clunky, some transitions are hasty, and the tone keeps swinging like someone’s slapping a disco ball really hard. In fealty to the Powers That Be who declared the running time shall number no more than 120 minutes, most of the deletions appear to have come from what would’ve been the first hour, the one presumably containing much useful exposition. Once you’ve removed the parts I might’ve liked for the sake of short attention spans, what’s left yadda-yaddas too much backstory. As a result, we learn next to zilch about the trio of heroes still waiting on their solo films, all three of them forced to keep their personal info vague and noncommittal, faint sketches that barely move them to a two-dimensional existence, let alone three.

The lost city of Atantis in particular seems to have taken a deep slashing in the editing room. That one-line description of Amber Heard’s part above? That’s the entirety of Atlantis here. Period. We’re in and out in two minutes like it’s a Star Wars planet about to be nuked away. I have no idea if any of Steppenwolf’s material was excised or not. Comics fans will recognize him as a high-ranking minion of Darkseid and therefore a potential herald of films in our future. Mainstream audience without that preexisting background will see him only as a wannabe alien dictator who must be stopped, with all the depth of an ’80s cartoon villain.

What’s left of his origin is a single extended flashback that’s a straight-up Lord of the Rings pastiche, where hordes of Amazons and Atlanteans replace the elves and dwarves in the grayish, chaotic scenes of vast armies murdering each other over mesmerizing MacGuffins. When the narrator gravely described how the MacGuffins were split up and taken custody by different factions precisely in “One Ring to rule them all” fashion, my wife and I looked at each other and laughed. It’s always awesome when we realize we’re both thinking the same thing.

Anyone really hoping this would be Wonder Woman II will have to be tolerant for a good while. After one heck of an opening set piece, Gal Gadot is relegated to the Debbie Downer of the group, wallowing in pessimism after the events of her own grade-A film and pooh-poohing everyone’s plans so hard that Batman, of all people, has to be the one to lecture her on her negative attitude. Add to this a few moments of objectification (one scene of a guy clumsily falling on her, at least one camera shot that begins on her butt) and this is clearly not Patty Jenkins’ turf. They’re a split-second each, but they’re low notes to anyone who thought Wonder Woman was one of the year’s best films.

And then there’s the matter of Henry Cavill’s mustache hijinks. For those who missed out and/or who never click on any links I share: by the time Joss Whedon’s rewrites hinged on inserting more Superman into the film, this was July 2017 and Cavill was already deep into filming Mission Impossible 6 in the critical role of Dude With Mustache. It was nowhere near as majestic as Hercule Poirot’s, but he was contractually forbidden from shaving it. Therefore he performed his additional Superman scenes with mustache, which was then deleted from Justice League using virtual Nair tech. Consequently, in more than one scene, Cavill’s digitally reconstructed hairless upper lip is seriously distracting.

Less annoying and more, well, in line with how things tend to go on DC’s TV shows: the aforementioned Marc McClure and at least one other policeman are privileged to be given a massive clue to Superman’s secret identity by at least one emotional bigmouth. Consider it their reward for trying to be helpful, I guess.

Smiles, everyone! SMILES!

So what’s to like? The studio executives got their way: so much of the original screenplay was tossed out that what’s left is Basic Super-Heroism 101. There’s a bad guy. The heroes punch him. Good triumphs over evil. At times it’s stylish, thrilling, and eminently entertaining on an above-average whiz-bang kiddie-cartoon level but cranked up to maximum volume so you can feel like it’s macho adult fare though it’s fundamentally not. If you hate super-heroes from the get-go, there’s nothing for you to see here. If you’re a casual popcorn-flick fan who’s only added the super-hero genre to your viewing repertoire in recent years, Justice League will be much easier for you to follow than Marvel’s later films, which have become increasingly mired in continuity and tougher for non-fans to climb aboard the bandwagon without spending 30+ hours catching up on Netflix first. The DC Cinematic Universe isn’t too far from ground level yet, and Justice League doesn’t aspire to take it much higher than that.

Those who hated previous DC offerings may be surprised to witness occasional glimmers of fun, optimism, and levity in the mix, many of them thanks to Whedon, who doubtlessly needed something to take his mind off his own recent, shameful controversies. Not all the jokes land, but they’re a needed break from the grim-‘n’-gritty atmosphere. It’s no Thor: Ragnarok by any means, but frankly, now we know Taika Waititi is an impossible opening act to follow. On the other hand, the Venn diagram of Snyder and Whedon finally got us the visibly heroic, morally inspiring Henry Cavill Man of Steel that my wife, a longtime Superman fan, had been utterly denied in his last two attempts.

My own personal favorite part: Ezra Miller’s performance overcoming his thin material. His Flash is a wildly different rendition from Grant Gustin’s, but stands on its own. He’s a Barry in a completely different place — inexperienced, completely new to the concept of super-hero fight scenes, left alone on his own for too long, still trying to figure out frightening and confusing concepts such as group dynamics and polite human interaction. His expressions are often funnier than his lines, particularly in one of the film’s most inspired little moments — the first time he meets someone at least as fast as himself. His combination of immaturity and incredulity makes him the perfect viewpoint character for an audience trying to find an inroad, any inroad, into this supposedly amazing world of DC Comics that they keep hearing about but still don’t get.

How about those end credits? to answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there are indeed scenes during and after the Justice League end credits. For those who fled the theater prematurely and really want to know without seeing it a second time…

…

[insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship]

…

…

…shortly after the first wave of names in print: Superman and the Flash meet on an open field and agree to an old-fashioned super-speed race like they used to do back in the Silver Age of comics. They place their bets, they take their positions, and they’re off and running. And the winner is…whoever you want it to be when you write your own fanfic conclusion.

Meanwhile at the very, very end after the end credits: Jesse Eisenberg returns as the loathsome Lex Luthor, easily escaped from prison and garbed in a Hackman-esque suit, cruising in a yacht with a pair of babes when a visitor hops aboard. Special guest Joseph Manganiello (Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday) makes his DC Cinematic Universe debut as longtime Teen Titans villain Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke, complete with eyepatch, white hair and goatee. Eisenberg muses on “the return of God” (i.e., that meddling Superman) and poses a question to his new colleague: “Shouldn’t we have our own League?”

To be Continued!

Oh, and after that came the saddest part of my day. For some reason my wife got really excited at this endd scene. Then I realized that she doesn’t know Joseph Manganiello from Adam, with or without hair coloring, and I had to break it to her that Deathstroke was not, in fact, being played by the great Clancy Brown. To be fair, his resemblance was uncanny.

39 of this year’s 51 books read. My MIA selections were borrowed. As a getaway from online political wartime, Anne and I found ourselves looking to the library for leisure a bit more often this year.

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

Presented over this entry and the next is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2017, 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.

As with last year’s experiment, every book gets a full capsule summary apiece, because 28 years of reading Entertainment Weekly have gotten me addicted to the capsule format. The list is divided into a two-part miniseries to post on back-to-back evenings in order to ease up on the word count for busier readers. Triple bonus points to any longtime MCC readers who can tell which items I bought at which comic/entertainment conventions we attended over the past few years. Onward!

1. Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts: Comics and Stories 1950-2000. The grand finale to the 13-year, 26-volume reprint series from Fantagraphics Books is all outtakes and DVD extras that Schulz drew apart from the 50-year daily strip — comic books, early Saturday Evening Post one-panel gags, tiny Hallmark keepsake books, and corporate shilling gigs for car companies. I learned Schulz himself sold out the Peanuts gang to the Ford Motor Company decades before his family would sell them out for new licensing bucks. Still funny to varying degrees. But at long last…it. Is. Finished.

2. Richard Price, The Whites. The celebrated author of Clockers and premium-cable writer (The Wire, The Night Of) employs the pseudonym Harry Brandt to tell a tale of third-shift Manhattan police, focusing on one middle-age cop whose old specialized crime unit disbanded years ago, but who find that their old unsolved cases — suspects who beat the system and got away with their crimes — are beginning to turn up dead. Price excels at seedy urban settings, moral ambiguity, and messy choices in lieu of gunfight climaxes. Although there’s one of those, too. He’s one of those writers who makes me want to cut back on other hobbies just to make more time for novels like his.

3. Luther M. Siler, The Sanctum of the Sphere. Self-published sci-fi that’s like Firefly but the characters are Dungeons & Dragons nonhuman races like gnomes, trolls, and half-ogres. It makes sense for a D&D universe to last for centuries and not have the humans as the sole survivors into the future, but I’m not sure I’ve seen it done. Light, fluffy adventure yarn with extra F-words.

4/5. Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, Little Guardians, v. 2: The Anger Demon; v. 3: Tane and the Spirit Dragon. Collections of the ongoing webcomic by a pair of local creators we keep running into at conventions. Cartoony fantasy about monsters terrorizing villages, the teenagers meant to rise up against them, and the adults who keep failing at taking care of things themselves. Harmless fun, though in black-and-white some characters look too much alike and flashbacks can be tricky to discern from present-day scenes if you’re not intensely invested in distinguishing the characters from each other.

6. Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunleavy, Action Philosophers! Part straightforward education, part gratuitous explosions, totally about the world of philosophy. Mini-biographies of thinkers, ponderers, preachers, and heretics across the millennia from ancient Greece to wizened Asia to Reformation holiness to gloomy existentialism to that horrid Ayn Rand and beyond. You could waste a semester in a college class arguing The Meaning of Life with spooky loners and drunk frat boys, or you could settle for this far more entertaining and comprehensive primer in the comfort of your home.

7. Charles Soule and Alberto Jimenez Alburquerque, Letter 44, v. 1: Escape Velocity. A new President of the United States of America assumes control of the Oval Office only to find a note from his controversial predecessor outlining how he bulked up the country’s vast military budget for the sake of a special secret operation: a space mission to make contact with a mysterious construct floating millions of miles away. While the Prez negotiates with his aides and tries to figure who knows what and who’s on his side, the team of astronauts sent on a one-way quest try to make sense of the weirdness they find out in the great beyond. Interesting start, not sure exactly where its mysteries will lead yet.

8. George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Suicide Kings. Soon to be a TV series someday maybe if I’m lucky! I’ve been following the long-running shared-world super-hero prose-novel series since ninth-grade, but I’m running a few years behind. The 20th novel in the series follows different groups of superhumans as they’re drawn into their alt-universe war-torn Africa, ruled jointly by horrid dictators trying to create an army of deformed kiddie super-villains and an evil Superman type with quite a body count to his credit from past books. R-rated and hyper-violent, but a vastly different take on the genre than any comics have ever attempted.

9. George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Fort Freak. Book 21 shifted gears to the Manhattan district of Jokertown, home of all the most mutated, misshapen humans around. Crime drama and murder mystery mix with a host of old and new characters and authors alike. Best of Show goes to Paul Cornell’s “More!” about a weird detente between an aging fugitive who can duplicate objects and an off-Broadway actress who can duplicate superpowers.

10. David Rodriguez and Sarah Ellerton, Finding Gossamyr, v. 1. All-ages fantasy about a teen girl with an autistic brother, Mom ‘n’ Dad out of the picture, who get shanghaied into an alt-fantasy universe where math is magic and vice versa…which makes her li’l savant brother one of the most powerful people in town. Two parts Disney to one part real-world relationship struggle as Our Heroine finds herself crushed by the burden of trying and failing at surrogate parenting, not to mention keeping them from getting killed by the swordsmen and monsters in their path. Fun adventure and weighty emotion in equal measure, this deserves an actual audience.

11. Michael West, The Wide Game. Horror novel set in an Indiana small town about adults having a book-length flashback to that time in high school when all the kids were in on a secret game that turned out unexpectedly fatal for some of their classmates at the hands of a creepy Native American cornfield god. I know the author offline, so this is me recusing myself from review mode for the rest of this paragraph.

12/13. Trevor Mueller & Gabo, Albert the Alien v. 1: New in School; v. 2: The Substitute Teacher from Planet X. All-ages science action fun about an exchange student who comes to Earth from beyond and tries to learn our strange ways through everyday classroom life. Hilarity ensues, packed with pop-culture in-jokes, cute running gags, and a decent number of laughs. It’s like a Nickelodeon series but for the above-average kids.

14. Derf Backderf, My Friend Dahmer. Soon to be an indie film, though I had no idea till after I’d finished it and then saw a photo in Entertainment Weekly a couple weeks later. A graphic novel based on the cartoonist’s true story about how he knew Jeffrey Dahmer in high school and was among the few kids who hung out with him despite his off-putting social skills, whacked-out sense of humor, alcoholism, dead animal collection, and increasing air of creepiness about him that didn’t fully take form until after graduation. Backderf unknowingly had a front-row seat to the making of a serial killer, but could only add up the signs in hindsight. The story ends when their interactions do, before the deaths began, but their increasingly disjointed exchanges brings a dread that looms more intensely with each passing page. Disturbing, insightful, and a very rare instance of me finding a book impossible to put down.

15. Frank Conniff, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever. Essays by TV’s Frank himself about the gig that made his TV writing career possible. Some are behind-the-scenes tales about how he was in charge of screening and picking the movies from seasons 2 to 6. Some are random stand-up comedy tangents. One has him apologizing profusely to us all for Manos: The Hands of Fate. A couple of brief political diatribes didn’t do much for me, but since he didn’t actually contribute to The MST3K Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, this is fans’ first chance to get his take in writing on some of the show’s most well-known episodes.

16. Warren Ellis, Normal. A bizarre sort-of mystery set at a special mental health facility exclusively for futurists and other theorists who went mad when they tried too hard to imagine humanity’s ultimate destiny and/or doom. It’s like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest except all the patients are geniuses and none of them is there by mistake. It’s borderline sci-fi, but rooted in pessimistic humanism and grim sarcasm that make it all the more disturbing.

17. Zack Kaplan and Giovanni Timpano, Eclipse, v. 1. In a world where Earth’s atmosphere is so far gone that exposure to sunlight instantly disintegrates flesh, humanity has gone underground and somehow excavated entire new living spaces under previously existing infrastructure without buildings collapsing and without explaining how they got cranes underground to finish their upper levels and roofs. One cop must solve the killings perpetrated by a dude armed with either superpowers or extra protective clothing, all while being surrounded by a bunch of inconsistencies as to what’s flammable and what’s not, to say nothing of the part where apparently moonlight is not lethal even though it’s just reflected sunlight. My head hurts.

18. Matt Hawkins, Bryan Hill and Isaac Goodhart, Postal, v. 1. In a small town whose deep dark secret is that they’re all convicted criminals living there as part of their weird sentence, the town mailman — a young guy with Asperger’s syndrome who was born there — tries to solve a horrible murder while negotiating life with his oppressive mom and doing what he can from within the boundaries of his condition. Based on my own anecdotal experience from knowing someone with Asperger’s, the protagonist here resembles him in so many ways that…well, I gather the creators know exactly what they’re doing. The crime-drama stuff was kind of secondary to that.

19. Marky Ramone with Rich Herschlag, Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone. The autobiography of one of the few living members of the quintessential American punk rock band. From the streets of Brooklyn to the wild world tours and back again, Marky the drummer expounds candidly about what it was like working, playing, and putting up with Joey the severe OCD sufferer, Dee-Dee the unrepentant junkie, and Johnny the money-minded Republican. (Tommy gets occasional friendly mentions early on and then left behind; CJ doesn’t show up till fifty pages from the end; Richie’s two paragraphs are so scant that the words “Richie” and “Ramone” never appear side-by-side, and he’s not even listed in the index.) Sex, drugs, and rock-‘n’-roll go hand-in-hand, including his own bout with alcoholism that took him to darkest places and got him kicked out of the Ramones for several years until fate reunited them when he and they were both ready. Now a couple decades into sobriety, Marky and his co-writer serve up a detailed retrospective of life in the Manhattan club scene, as well as frank insight into what it was like negotiating with record labels and producers in the ’70s and ’80s. But the overall portrait of the band’s 30-year career is so dark and littered with unhappy endings that now I’m kind of afraid to read the other Ramones’ autobiographies.

20. Brian Azzarello, JG Jones, and Lee Bermejo, Before Watchmen: Comedian/Rorschach. A double-shot of cash-grab prequel stories by one of my two least favorite writers in the biz, but it was a library find, so I figured why not since my money wasn’t involved. Both were as nihilistic and unnecessary as expected for prequels starring the two least sane, most brutal characters of the bunch. Rorschach at least has the benefit of fantastic art by Bermejo, but the Comedian’s ugliness has him gallivanting through 20th-century American history, playing football with JFK on the White House lawn, turning down Jackie’s flirting but then murdering Marilyn Monroe because she asked nicely, helping start the Watts Riots, single-handedly making Vietnam worse, and then personally assassinating his other BFF RFK. It’s Forrest Gump meets No Country for Old Men. Least favorite book of my year.

21. Michael West, Poseidon’s Children. First in a novel series about mutated descendants of the Greek gods finally being fed up with hiding from humanity for so long that they’ve decided a violent uprising is in order in their idyllic New England resort town. It’s like what if Percy Jackson reached a George R. R. Martin level of violence. I know the author offline, so I should recuse myself from review mode as I did above, but I question the wisdom of waiting till page 194 for the one black character to reveal he’s black by saying exactly one black thing and then going back to being any-race for the rest of the book, or of waiting till page 283 for the one Japanese character to reveal she knows a martial art. Also, when font sizes change from one paragraph to the next, that’s super annoying and makes me wonder if my eyesight has gotten even worse than I thought.

One of my favorite covers of the bunch, a wondrous tome in general merely from a design standpoint, with “ME ME ME ME ME” written in red letters all around the outside edges. And it was a vacation souvenir!

22. Terry Gilliam, Gilliamesque. The heavily illustrated autobiography of the one American member of Monty Python, who later went on to direct such films as Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, Brazil, and more more more. Gilliam is candid about his former collaborators as well as his own flaws, and reveals a lot of behind-the-scenes trivia, drama, and pleasant successes. The book gives short shrift to any films for which he’s already done extended commentaries or summations elsewhere, which is frustrating if you haven’t already consumed those materials first, but he’s not one to repeat himself. His entire career is a must-hear for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to brave the grinding gears of the Hollywood movie machines with any of your ideals intact, if not necessarily your career.

23. Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Stones. Collecting the first several chapters of a longform graphic novel about life in Germany beginning in 1928 and leading up to the eventual Nazi regime. The narrative skips around from one character to the next, weaving in and out of each other’s lives — sometimes shifting viewpoints within the same page and back again — at a time when Germany struggled after the Great War with its identity as a nation. Lutes averages roughly one completed chapter per year, so this one is still in progress and a bit far from closure.

24. Gwenda Bond, Lois Lane: Double Down. YA novel about the intrepid Daily Planet reporter as a nosy, diligent, 21st-century teenager working for the school paper but making real headlines anyway. The second book in the series has Our Heroine contending with a shady experiment involving two sets of twins — one natural, one not so much — while juggling her schoolwork, her suspicious principal, and her online best friend she knows only as “SmallvilleGuy”, with whom she holds clandestine chats in a hidden space inside their favorite MMORPG. If you have to update 80-year-old characters for a new millennium, this isn’t a bad way to do it.

25. Ransom Riggs, Tales of the Peculiar. If you found Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine adaptation as annoying as I did, you can take comfort that the books themselves remain unharmed. Riggs follows the first trilogy with a short-story collection that boasts so few firm connections to the “Peculiar” universe that this could basically be a set of Twilight Zone pitches. They’re largely fun reading, but only two of them offer any official backstory to existing characters. Most memorable to me was “The Girl Who Befriended Ghosts”, in which a young lady with ties to the undead decides she really, really wants to have ghosts for friends and so sets about trying to move to different houses and asking them, but they keep running away. In essence, a reverse-Casper. I may have been more amused than I was meant to be.

26. Kate Leth and Brittney Williams, Patsy Walker a.k.a. Hellcat, Vol. 1: Hooked on a Feline. One of the sixty-seven different series that Marvel canceled in 2017, the heroic Patsy (who technically appeared in Netflix’s Jessica Jones) and a nearly all-female supporting cast come to life in the current internet art and humor styles, bring back a few faces from her original 1950s heyday, and make me LOL several times in good ways. The series failed to participate in any major Avengers of X-Men crosssovers and therefore was doomed from the start, like a lot of other dead Marvel books that have freed up space in my budget this past year. Pity.

To be continued!

Library trip, 9/2/2017. Also, two of my favorite books of the year.

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

Presented over this entry and the next is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2017, 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.

As with last year’s experiment, every book gets a full capsule summary apiece, because 28 years of reading Entertainment Weekly have gotten me addicted to the capsule format. The list is divided into a two-part miniseries to post on back-to-back evenings in order to ease up on the word count for busier readers. Triple bonus points to any longtime MCC readers who can tell which items I bought at which comic/entertainment conventions we attended over the past few years.

Once more: onward!

27. John Leguizamo, Christa Cassano & Shamus Beyale, Ghetto Klown. You might remember him from such films as Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet, Super Mario Bros., one scene in John Wick, and the Ice Age series. His candid, often self-immolating autobiography pulls no punches in recounting his early days as a class clown in Queens, his one-in-a-million route to Hollywood via Manhattan acting coaches, the pros and cons of playing endless stereotypes on demand, his more creatively fulfilling one-man off-Broadway shows, his rise to supporting actor stardom, and his recurring issues with relationships, ego, drugs, self-sabotage, and A-list male divas. Come for the behind-the-scenes cautionary tales; stay for the lessons he learned the hard way; and in between you can recoil at his retelling of the time an overnight bender turned a morning on the set of To Wong Foo into a debacle of rage and vomit.

28. Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band. The autobiography of Sonic Youth’s bassist/singer/co-founder, alt-rock queen and one-time co-founder of her own fashion line. Written shortly after her acrimonious divorce from adulterous frontman Thurston Moore after 27 years of marriage, her memoir is a candid deep dive into her early family life marred by a toxic relative, the NYC post-punk rock and art scenes, and the frequent question of What’s It Like Being a Woman in Rock, which later morphed into What’s It Like Being a Mom in Rock. Her insights and confessions are surprising even before you realize Gordon isn’t exactly the ultra-feminist you’d expect.

29. Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen, Superman: Secret Identity. In a world where Superman is a fictional comic character, one seemingly normal youngster cruelly named Clark Kent by his parents, who has a closet filled with years’ worth of unwanted Superman gifts from relatives who think they’re clever, one day finds himself suddenly possessing Superman’s powers. With no clues to his own origin, no super-villains to fight, and an American government far more intrusive than the one depicted in DC Comics at the time, the “real world” Man of Steel must figure out what to do with his new talents and how to fit into an otherwise ordinary world. Busiek admits this project was basically his take on the ’80s “Superboy of Earth-Prime” character, but the emotional heft and contemplative assessment of what else comes With Great Power make for one of the more offbeat and fascinating post-Crisis/pre-New 52 Superman projects around.

30. Dean Haspiel, Beef With Tomato. Collection of semi-autobiographical shorts about life as an artist in Brooklyn, down amongst the sinners and weirdos and far, far away from the tourists. Anyone who enjoyed the quotidian anecdotes and curmudgeonly observational style of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (on which Haspiel worked as one of Pekar’s many artists) will dig this in equal measure, particularly his memories of 9/11 as witnessed from his apartment window in Carroll Gardens.

31. Joe Harris and Brett Weldele, Spontaneous. In a town where random residents keep catching fire and disintegrating from causes unknown, one young man with a tragic past has a theory: spontaneous human combustion. But is the cause truly random, or are there connections at play? This creepy story unearthed an old childhood memory for me — an old episode of That’s Incredible! that was my first exposure to the bizarre phenomenon, which I don’t recall seeing used as a plot device anywhere else before unless you count Firestarter, which wasn’t the same thing.

Library stop, 6/17/2017. Two hits and a miss, but not in this order.

32. Derf Backderf, Trashed. The most recent book from the creator of the autobiographical My Friend Dahmer delivers another project that’s one part research, one part personal experience as Derf explores the less-than-wonderful world of garbagemen, which was his actual job from ’79 to ’80. Learn the workaday awfulness, the smells, the dumb bosses, the dumber coworkers, the objects that are the worst to pick up, the dangers of wintertime routes, the mechanics and schematics of landfills and garbage trucks (the latter have basically been the same design since the ’30s), what happens when you toss an upright piano into the truck, the twin scourges of disposable diapers and doggo leavings, the sorrow of abandoned foreclosure piles, and the amusing ineffectiveness of families that routinely throw out three dozen trash bags a week, then toss three (3) milk jugs into their recycling bin and consider themselves “going green”. Also included are tons of stats and trivia about American residential waste in general that are at least as frightening as you’d expect. Another solid dose of behind-the-scenes education and nightmarish reality, not unlike the Dahmer book.

33. Marv Wolfman and George Perez, New Teen Titans: Games. This 2011 hardcover graphic novel, a story 22 years in the making, was the last original tale by the writer/artist duo who relaunched the team when I was 8 and made it one of the cornerstones of my comics-collecting childhood. Set in late-’80s continuity, it has everything an old-school fan could want: a complicated plot that drags Our Heroes all over Manhattan, a new super-villain team, supporting characters from way back when, Perez’ dynamic yet ornate art, upsetting casualties, and a firm classic-comics reminder that Super-Heroes Don’t Kill. Except for the part where they let Danny Chase live, it’s like Wolfman and Perez peeked inside my brain decades ago and kept the notes around ever since.

One of my favorite pages of comic art this year, from New Teen Titans: Games. Jericho faces bad guys at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, whose unique architecture Perez incorporated into the page design.

34. Various, Wildstorm: A Celebration of 25 Years. A hardcover salute to Jim Lee’s former Image Comics imprint that was later subsumed into the DC Universe, but not before a lot of top talents made their mark in style. It’s partly a clipfest, with lots of pin-ups and black-and-white reprints of previously published comics (e.g., the original WildCATs #1, the first two issues of Mark Millar and Frank Quitely’s The Authority run but with the original dialogue restored), but a few new gems are included. Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch reunite for a Jenny Sparks story; Jim Lee himself draws a few new Deathblow pages; for some reason Backlash takes up a lot of real estate; and we’re treated to the complete script for the never-drawn second issue of Grant Morrison’s 2006 WildCATs relaunch. I wouldn’t recommend paying full price for this hardcover, and I’m glad I didn’t have to, but longtime fans might appreciate the diamonds in the rough.

35. Melinda M. Snodgrass and George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Lowball. The 22nd and next-to-most-recent book in the long-running shared-world superpower anthology series spends about 150 pages reconnecting with characters from previous recent books before finally revealing that its central plot is Superhuman Fight Club. The violent consequences, standard both for this plot and for this series, venture into the realm of whacked-out body horror before dropping a big fat To Be Continued on us. I have the finale on deck for a 2018 read.

36. Joe Harris and Martin Morazzo, Snowfall. In a world where water is nearly extinct and mere moisture is a rarity, one man fights back against The System by making it snow a lot through magical science. Extreme climate transmogrification is a stretch of a premise far beyond the usual post-apocalyptic fare in this vein, but it suffers even more from a blatantly rushed ending, taking a hard turn toward fantasy instead of science, made necessary when the comics series needed to be truncated for presumably low sales.

37. Various, The Best of Omega Comics Presents Vol. 2. Anthology reprinting several short stories from a publisher whose works are rarely seen beyond comiXology or conventions, where at least one of their creators has become a recurring friend at the conventions we attend. Interesting just to note that there can be life in print comics beyond what Diamond Distribution allows through its kept gates.

38. Dan Gearino, Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture. An illuminating history of your local comic book shops, one of the least profitable and often least professional industries in America. Comic book fan and accredited journalist Gearino charts the early beginnings of geeks selling comics out of backrooms and basements in the ’70s (e.g. future Mile High founder Chuck Rozanski) to the ’80s when shops began to proliferate and some of then began to buy actual cash registers; from the expansion of the direct-sales distribution system to the ’90s implosion caused chiefly by Marvel that led to today’s Diamond Distribution monopoly; with stops along the way for success stories from the owners of some of those very shops, including an extended appendix profiling some of the better survivors still around today despite the obstacles. Parts of the book focus intently on Gearino’s current stomping grounds of Columbus, OH, which is why Laughing Ogre Comics is offered up as a curiously extensive example of a shop that’s lasted, but anyone who’s interested in the retailer side of things — and of the younger days of a lot of its more famous participating superfans — will find this a must-read.

39. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. Award-winning longform epistle by the celebrated intellectual, comics geek, and beloved Twitter user (well, till he deactivated his account literally the day after I started reading this), whose primary purpose is to tell his son that America was built on a foundation of white evil, there is no God, everything is horrible, there’s basically no hope, and he should get woke so he can feel hopeless and miserable too, unless he doesn’t, in which case, that’s cool. And, side note, Howard University is awesome and here’s a list of the best black intellectuals to follow. Interesting at some turns, distressingly nihilist at others. In the book’s concluding anecdote, he details his meeting with Dr. Mavis Jones, an accomplished black woman whose son was murdered by a black police officer, but who today remains a pillar of strength imbued by her faith in God. Coates respects her but doesn’t get her. Frankly, I’d rather hear more from her.

Library trip, 8/5/2017. Our local library’s graphic novel section has exploded since my childhood.

40. Alex DeCampi, Fernando Ruiz, and Rich Koslowski, Archie vs. Predator. Not a hoax! Not an underground comix parody! Wanna see America’s goofiest teenager and his old buddies shot, stabbed, decapitated, vaporized, skinned and deboned? Have we got a twisted travesty for you! When a teen Predator comes to Riverdale on the trail of a MacGuffin weapon, Our Heroes have to save each other from R-rated fates with more than just creaky punchlines and hamburgers. Predator fans can count the movie references (only to the first one, of course) while all the other ex-kids watch the bodies piling up. Despite the bloodletting, it’s still not as weird as the idea of rebooting Miss Grundy as a young-adult hot babe for Archie to sleep with, though.

41. Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville. Peculiar tale about an American comics journalist who visits a comics-happy New Zealand town to research their most famous former resident — a corporate comics juggernaut who’s like a cross between Stan Lee and Walt Disney with an extra dash of conniving greed. He hates the town, the town hates him, and everyone hates the journalist for asking. What ensues is a curious reflection on how far some guys will go to succeed at comics, what others will do to stay true to themselves, and the value in creating stories for reasons other than luring in a wide audience.

42. Jonathan Case, The New Deal. In 1930s Manhattan, the famous Waldorf Astoria is the setting for a wacky caper involving a young bellhop in deep debt, a black maid/Shakespearean actress, an outgoing socialite with a mysterious birdcage, and a series of jewelry thefts for which someone is about to be framed. A fun period piece with unexpected twists that would make a nifty 90-minute Wes Anderson project.

43. Mimi Pond, The Customer is Always Wrong. 450-page hardcover original graphic novel inspired by the creator’s own young-adult years as a California waitress in the post-Summer of Love days trying to figure out her life after the happy hippie times have faded but the heavy-duty drug culture never went away. Pond eventually broke out and went on to become an accomplished cartoonist for various magazines (National Lampoon, et al.) as well as a onetime TV writer with credits including the first full-length episode of The Simpsons, but she watched the rise and fall of a lot of friends along the way. Imagine Alice meets Trainspotting done as a sequel to Mad Men‘s California episodes. Though the initial focus is on our main character and her thwarted attempts to rise above, the best parts come later in examining her friendship with the restaurant’s manager, the guy everyone in her circle respects most but who continually has the worst luck, sometimes but not always by his own doing. A prime example of why there should be more actual novel-length graphic novels, if it were economically feasible.

44. Kyle Baker, Nat Turner. Before 2016’s The Birth of a Nation was exiled from Hollywood for its director’s past sins, this graphic-novel biography depicted the life and times of the leader of one of the most infamous, bloodiest slave rebellions in American history. It’s mostly silent at first, then complemented with passages of Turner’s own words taken from the 1831 tract “The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection in Southampton, Va., as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray”. Racism is terrible, slavery is worse, and the horrifying violence it enabled was the worst of the worst, and Baker pushes the damage even harder than 12 Years a Slave did. But he also doesn’t shy away from Turner’s response as a self-professed man of God who’s not a saint by any definition — like, at all, judging by the level of sanguinary atrocity he and his followers committed in response to centuries of cruel oppression. Much of our history is violence in response to more violence, shocking and messy and regrettable, but for better or worse, this is how things went down in America. Anyone who thinks “slave” was just another word for “employee” back in those times is a liar or a fool, and needs to have works like this shatter their unintelligent hermetic bubble so they can be brought to repentance and maybe America can just…I don’t know, start over, maybe.

45. Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, and Erin Humiston, Calla Cthulhu. All-ages action adventure that’s what if Buffy were the daughter of Cthulhu but she fought monsters anyway and had green tentacle hair. Highly recommended for girls who dig monsters and/or monster-fighting.

Library trip, 11/4/2017. Two radically different adventures.

46. Noelle Stevenson, Nimona. In a vaguely steampunk-ish fantasy world, a shape-changing teen girl with a very tiny moral compass wheedles her way into an apprenticeship with the local villain. Eventually a relationship develops despite the clash of styles — he prefers old-fashioned complicated sinister plots, while she wonders why they can’t just go murder all the good guys. They’re like Dr. Evil and Scott Evil but differently funny. Over time we learn not everyone is the stock cliché they appear to be, and what starts as peppy buddy comedy soon escalates into far darker, more explosive consequences. All-ages fun that turns grim yet epic.

38. John Arcudi and Peter Snejbjerg, A God Somewhere. Quite a few super-hero creators have contemplated the question of what might happen if someone got superpowers in the real world. Nine times out of ten the answer is a corrupted conscience followed by nasty hyper-violence. Here, a simpleminded happy dude gets turned into Superman and takes about 15-20 pages before he begins to view us normals as ants. Bleeding ensues, along with ambiguous thoughts on humanist godhood and the friendships it leaves behind as the body count rises.

48. Dustin Harbin, Diary Comics. Thick collection of several years’ worth of autobio comic strips that are seemingly about nothing at first until enough time passes that the author begins to accumulate experience and light wisdom that inform his noodling and broaden his horizons. Memoirs by young-adult artists used to be a bread-and-butter subgenre for indie comics publishers in past eras, and often read alike, but Harbin’s condensed meanderings and anecdotes form a more fully realized portrait as the years accelerate and life changes come harder and faster.

49. Various, Spitball 2: A CCAD Comics Anthology. A brilliant idea by a professor at the Columbus College of Art & Design: commission a series of comic-book short-story scripts by some of the medium’s most renowned writers, give them to the school’s top art students to draw, sit back and enjoy the results. Greg Rucka, Jonathan Hickman, and Kelly Sue DeConnick are among the pros who contribute ideas and inspiration for the new kids to turn into panel-by-panel narrative. The results are wildly experimental, wholly unbeholden to ye olde Marvel and DC standards, and a good sign of what the future of comics — or webcomics! — might yield one day.

50. Alec Longstreith, Weezer Fan. Happy memoir chronicling the life cycle of an OG Weezer superfan, from their debut album up through 2010’s Hurley, from merely loving “My Name is Jonas” to co-running their official fan club to meeting them in person to meeting them again so he could say less stupid things to them. I’m not sure how much non-Weezer fans would get out of this, but I thought it was a blast and, as a fan but a bit short of “super-“, learned a lot. Weezer are coming to Indy this July with the Pixies, but we’ll probably be on vacation that weekend, and even if we aren’t, the seat prices are horrendous by my standards, and I learned in 2016 that I hate hate hate hate HATE cheap lawn seating, so for now I’ll have to settle for living vicariously through this book and this lucky guy.

51. Tom King, David Finch, Mikel Janin, Ivan Reis, et al., Batman, Vol. 1: I Am Gotham. One among the first wave of DC Comics’ “Rebirth” initiative, which was conceived as sorry-not-sorry atonement for the fatal flaws of its 2011 “New 52” line-wide reboot. Batman didn’t start over so much as he was given new life in the hands of Tom King, one of the best new comics writers of the century. Between The Vision, Omega Men, and The Sheriff of Babylon, King has produced basically all my favorite comics of the last two years. I figured I might as well give his Batman a shot, and largely wasn’t disappointed. I’m still irked that new readers are given next to no inkling of who new supporting player Duke Thomas is, but Batman himself is put through a number of outlandish challenges, from dealing with Silver Age losers like Kite-Man to trying (single-handedly!) to prevent an airliner from crashing into Gotham. The main story arc involves a Superman/Supergirl-analog duo who try becoming superheroes through shady internet superpower dealers, which…doesn’t go well. So now I’m more excited and have some Batman to catch up on in the year ahead.

-30-

All my 2017 singles divided and alphabetized from A to X but skipping V.

[WARNING: This entry turned out several leagues beyond epic-length and may be the wordiest entry in MCC history, but I wanted it out of my system, and all at once in a single-take infodump. And now it is. Mission accomplished.]

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 first on the chopping block. I doubt many comics readers follow MCC anyway, so it’s the perfect place to talk about comics all to myself. Whee.

2017 certainly hasn’t been a boring year for discussions. In addition to undergoing a light-handed version of the anti-sexual harassment revolution that’s sweeping Hollywood, the comics field has seen DC’s Rebirth initiative still going strong on the learning curve from the “New 52” misfire. Meanwhile, the “Marvel Legacy” campaign — their fifth line-wide restart in eight years or so — was founded on the assumption that old folks like me and the Kids These Days are dying to watch comics regress to the ’70s and ’80s. So far they’ve been wrong and sales have nosedived on a number of titles. The cancellations that made room for this ploy have been followed in short order by still more cancellations of their usurpers. I’m still finding Marvel-labeled reading to my tastes, but I’m glad they’re not the only choices at my local comic shop.

For reference and maybe unconscious oblique insight, here’s what I’m currently buying every Wednesday at my local comic shop, series and miniseries alike, budget permitting, broken down by publisher as of the very end of December 2017:

Marvel Comics:

Captain America – Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, who previously teamed up on a decent Black Widow series and a fantastic extended run on Daredevil, reunite for new adventures of Steve Rogers, the original Star-Spangled Avenger. Back in the suit after the events of Secret Empire that we as a hobby community should never speak of again, Our Hero is currently on a road trip through the heart of America to defend the weak and meet new challenges. I can relate.

Hawkeye – Canceled but not over yet. Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero are no Fraction/Aja, but the further adventures of Kate Bishop have had their entertaining moments, augmented by Kate’s Sherlock-esque surroundings-evaluation technique, her stubborn spirit, and an endless supply of frozen peas to soothe her ever-growing collection of wounds. I wish her new set of friends were more memorable (I can’t remember any of their names at the moment), but eventually I stopped missing Clint Barton and enjoyed Kate’s L.A. adventures on her own terms. I assume this won’t be the last we see of her? Hopefully?

Marvel 2 in One – Marvel still refuses to publish Fantastic Four comics while Fox insists on degrading them on the big screen, but they’ve agreed to compromise with a relaunch of the Thing’s old team-up title from my youth. The first arc is essentially a “Fantastic Two” buddy-hero duet, with Ben Grimm trying to help his annoying old pal the Human Torch take his mind off his missing family and his weakening powers, while also trying to ignore condescending assistance from former villain Victor von Doom, who’s now reformed and become an Iron Man in some other comics I didn’t read. Chip Zdarsky nails the contentious camaraderie between the FF’s brasher half with humor and pathos, while artist Jim Cheung delivers the best-looking Marvel book on my reading pile at the moment.

Moon Knight – The bizarre, hallucinatory Jeff Lemire/Greg Smallwood run ended in suitably puzzling fashion, canceled to make way for the Marvel Legacy reboot by Max Bemis (frontman for the band Say Anything) and Jacen Burrows (who cut his teeth on grimdark works at Avatar Press), whose take on the multi-personality avenger is one of the most brightly colored horror comics around, which is not exactly a compliment. For now it’s still on probation with me.

Ms. Marvel – The aftershocks of the vastly underwhelming Civil War II crossover, which I avoided everywhere but here, continue reverberating throughout Ms. Khan’s neighborhood, ruining her relationships with her best friend Bruno and her idol Captain Marvel (a CWII victim of character assassination), and forcing her to confront a takeover of Jersey City government by ripped-from-Twitter-Moments idiot forces of relevance whose momentary success in their scheme’s early stages never made sense to me…much like our actual politics of the past two years. So I withdrew my objection and hope see at least some of Kamala’s relationships restored in the months ahead, because seeing her separated from her strong supporting cast is a bummer.

Runaways – The best new series of 2017. I don’t have Hulu and can’t comment on the TV adaptation of the classic A++++ Vaughan/Alphona originals, but YA author Rainbow Rowell and artist Kris Anka have bypassed the popular tabula rasa reboot approach and taken on the mighty task of confronting the damage done to Our Heroes by other writers since their last cancellation years ago. Nico, Chase, Karolina, Molly, Victor, and even Gertie and her raptor Old Lace are all back, but most of them aren’t the same kids they were in their heyday. They’re already dealing with another evil family issue even as they’re figuring out that sometimes getting the ol’ gang back together isn’t as easy as pretending the last several years never happened.

My wife Anne only reads a handful of monthly comics, 95% of which are Marvel’s Star Wars output.

Star Wars – The flagship among the four ongoing series is also my least favorite. Someone in a marketing position has decreed its primary goal is unceasing worship of the Luke/Han/Leia holy trinity, of which I am not an unconditional acolyte. The “Screaming Citadel” crossover quickened the pulse a tad, but the past few months have brought unmemorable tales as well as the pain of someone (an editor? a Lucasfilm official? the artist himself?) thinking it was an awesome idea to replace some of Salvador Larroca’s line-drawn character faces with actual photo-heads extracted straight from original Star Wars film cells. Mixing fumetti with hand-drawn art can work for selective comedic purposes, I’ll grant, but this slavish insistence on capturing actors’ likenesses by the most awkward possible means is off-putting and not the least bit endearing.

Star Wars: Darth Vader – For some reason the end of Kieron Gillen’s run meant Charles Soule’s takeover needed its own #1. Comics math is dumb sometimes, and Soule and Giuseppe Camuncoli may have a different tone, but Vader is Vader is Vader. Regardless, the first two arcs have shared a formula of “Vader meets new person and then gets rid of them”, which I hope won’t define all future arcs. The first arc promised an intriguingly designed opponent only to cut hopes severely short, but the second bout — a showdown with Jedi librarian Jocasta Nu from the Prequels trilogy — was full of surprises and inspired moments. More arcs like that, pretty please.

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra – The Harley Quinn of Marvel’s Star Wars line was promoted to her own series along with her erstwhile subordinates, the sadistic evil droids Beetee and Triple-Zero. When the three of them engage in cutting repartee — sometimes literally, in the droids’ case — it’s Suicide Squad antihero magic. When the droids are off screen I’m less enthusiastic, though this year’s big con-game arc “Doctor Aphra and the Enormous Profit” was a breath of fresh air, forcing the morally deficient space archaeologist into a precarious situation for a potential Ocean’s-style payoff.

Star Wars: Poe Dameron – In my favorite of the four SW books, Charles Soule continues to channel Oscar Isaacs’ performance into print with delightful accuracy, and keeps me invested in the continuing subplot saga of Terex, former First Order spy demoted to lackey yet dead set on securing his role as Poe’s arch-nemesis. I don’t mind Phil Noto’s painted covers on occasion, but his interior pages tend to be stiff and I’ve much preferred the work of replacement artist Angel Unzueta, a better fit for dynamic action-adventure.

Squirrel Girl’s “Previously on” recaps come in handy fake-tweet format. Now that Silver Surfer has ended, hers is the other comics series that Anne follows.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl – Still among the best Marvel things of the millennium. Ryan North and Erica Henderson show no signs of slowing down yet and largely avoided the “Marvel Legacy” backlash. Accomplishments this year include luring Garfield creator Jim Davis into his first sequential comic-book work, albeit for two pages of Galactus dad-jokes; and giving birth to the wonder that was Dinosaur Ultron, in a manner that is now official Marvel continuity canon and makes totally perfect sense from a Marvel universe science perspective. Well, I mean, it does to to any readers who don’t have too much starch in their T-shirt collar. If there are any social circles out there bellowing at each other, “DINOSAUR ULTRON IS WHAT’S WRONG WITH COMICS!” I would contend they should buy a mirror, think harder, but keep buying Unbeatable Squirrel Girl anyway so this book can live forever.

DC Comics/Vertigo/Young Animal:

Astro City — Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, cover artist Alex Ross, and a fine roster of pinch-hitting artists keep the hits coming, 22 years and counting, almost single-handedly bearing the banner of the once-mighty, moribund Vertigo line all to themselves. The jazz-era short stories that led off the year seemed to fall short for me, but one of my favorite stories of 2017 across all media was the “Good Dog” two-parter from #47-48 (perfectly drawn by guest Mike Norton), about a young burglar, a discovered doggo, a magic amulet, an unlikely hero, and an unforgettable friendship. Honestly, I’m tearing up a little just remembering it.

Deathstroke – When Christopher Priest writes comics, I’m there. Priest gave us the definitive Black Panther, the once-great Quantum and Woody, the last days of the original Power Man and Iron Fist, and more more more. DC lured him back to the field with what remains my favorite among the “Rebirth” titles, though his typically complex story construction and fondness for waiting till the end of a given arc to do recaps and explanations required a bit more intensive attention when the book downshifted from a fortnightly to monthly schedule. I was a bit peeved that our antihero Slade Wilson experienced a crucial epiphany in a crossover I refused to buy, which altered the book’s direction ever after, but it’s nonetheless been interesting to chart the side effects of the mercenary with a massive body count supposedly turn the other cheek, walk away from murdering, and form his own super-hero team full of youngsters who hope and pray he’s not playing five-dimensional chess with their heads. If he isn’t, we can bet Priest is.

Doom Patrol – Grant Morrison’s number one follower Gerard Way (he of My Chemical Romance fame) already penned his ultimate love letter years ago with his creator-owned comic Umbrella Academy (soon to be a Netflix TV series!). Now he’s nabbed the ideal gig of writing the oddball super-team on which Morrison himself once performed an eclectic overhaul. The flagship title of DC’s Young Animal line, of which Mr. Way is also the guiding light, is basically Morrison redux — many of the same characters returned, some in altered states, plus a handful of new characters for value-added verve and/or confusion. Ideas fly off the page at a furious rate if not always in straightforward, accessible fashion, possibly an ideal design for today’s reader who prizes imagery over narrative flow.

Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica – In this, the Year of the Woman, Archie and DC join forces and really hope there’s a market for that and incidentally for this six-issue miniseries. Harley’s co-creator Paul Dini is among the talents on board, which means good things and happy laughs have been the order of the day in both Riverdale and Gotham for what’s now been revealed as…a body-swap comedy! I can confirm hilarity has indeed ensued. I’m grateful because I have zero interest in Serious Archie. Like, absolute zero.

Justice League – The last time I followed DC’s legendary super-team regularly was [checks notes] possibly Dwayne McDuffie’s truncated run from about a decade ago. But now Christopher Priest has been invited to write an arc, so I’m on board for a few issues. “The People vs. Justice League” wasted no time in making trouble for Our Heroes as either someone is framing them for civilian deaths or they’re all in need of time-outs. Batman has seen his fatigue possibly result in civilian death, while Wonder Woman may or may not have stabbed an innocent in her way. Can they get their act together before more deaths occur, and before DC revokes Priest’s invitation as they did with McDuffie all those years ago?

Mister Miracle – Tom King, the best new writer in comics in a long time, brings more of the magic he’s cast upon unique efforts like The Vision, Omega Men, and The Sheriff of Babylon. Jack Kirby’s classic escape-artist hero and his wife Big Barda are back in this unsettling 12-issue maxiseries, but while Darkseid lurks in the shadows, their greatest enemy appears to be Orion, current Highfather of the New Gods, who seems to have become a power-mad jerk who’s ten times worse than the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and who’s ordered Scott Free executed for the crime of Not Properly Toadying. For now not all answers have been forthcoming, as King is playing a long game and revealing his cards slowly, which is fine and I can deal even though I want to read it all now now now. Sheriff of Babylon collaborator Mitch Gerads has become one of my favorite monthly artists and is more than doing his part to produce one of the most wondrous works of art here.

Mystik U – Former DC/Vertigo editor Alisa Kwitney returns to the company as writer of this reboot, envisioning DC’s magic-based characters as older teens learning to magic-use together as classmates in a Harry Potter-ish college setting. Zatanna leads the way with a few familiar faces and a couple of new ones, in a take that could be fun but is only one issue in. On probation for now.

New Super-Man – The book’s best joke is that its unabashed derivation from the Man of Steel isn’t just typical spin-off procedure; it’s literally the whole point and the starting point for one young man’s quest for uniqueness. Gene Luen Yang’s engrossing take on a young, artificially empowered Chinese Superman proves DC’s “Rebirth” has made room for a bit of old-fashioned heroic fun in today’s stodgy DCU. The series will soon be retitled New Super-Man and the Justice League of China, which is ridiculously overlong but pretty much what’s been happening anyway, with our hero-in-training Kenan Kong teaming up with an assortment of JLA analogs who’ve helped him deal with China’s old-guard heroes and uncover secrets both about his unusual parents and the uniquely non-Kryptonian facets of his power set.

Ragman – If you’ve only seen him on TV’s Arrow, you haven’t seen Ragman. Then again, if you’re buying this miniseries reboot, you still haven’t seen Ragman. His intrinsic Jewish roots have been all but burned away, and he has no creepy cape, the best part of his original design — just lots of unraveling, animated Mummy gauze. I’m sticking around for the fine art of Inaki Miranda, but not finding a lot of Joe Kubert’s DNA remaining and already bored with the faceless supernatural baddies muddying up things.

The Wild Storm – Warren Ellis’s reboot of Jim Lee’s Wildstorm Universe has begun here. Some of the original WildCATs are back in varying degrees, as are select veterans from Stormwatch and the Authority, pawns in a conflict between warring American spy agencies with aliens biding their time in the background. The razor-sharp bickering between characters is an Ellis trademark that’s always a draw for me, and the action scenes choreographed by Jon Davis-Hunt have a pleasing John Woo slo-mo aura about them. On the downside, the covers in general (by more than one artist) have been so astoundingly unmemorable that there were two issues I bought twice (two of them, mind you) because I didn’t recognize them from my reading pile the week before.

Wildstorm: Michael Cray – The first of a few planned Wild Storm spin-offs stars the mercenary formerly known as Deathblow. He’s still a killer on the government’s behalf, but his mission on this new, separate Earth is wholly unexpected: each two-parter has pitted him against this Earth’s twisted counterparts to the JLA. #1-2 saw a bitter Oliver Queen who oversees “The Most Dangerous Game” on his very own island; #3-4 gave us Dark Barry Allen, a paranoid-schizophrenic scientist who’s murdering with technologically simulated super-speed. Ellis is more or less an executive producer working with writer Bryan Hill (Postal) for this not-bad side quest, but the art seems to be losing details with each passing issue.

Image Comics:

Copperhead – Back on schedule with new artist Drew Moss and still full of surprises in this sci-fi Western about a space sheriff and her son trying to start a new life in a faraway Godforsaken town despite the corrupt mayor, the former alien partner who’s now her angry boss, the indigenous alien robot hiding out in the shadows, the occasional murder mysteries, and the vengeful ex-husband who’s hot on their trail. The artist-hunt hiatus nearly made me forget this was around, but I’m hanging on the best I can even though my shop is only ordering one copy per issue, and another shopper has beaten me to it at least twice now.

Descender – Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s watercolored sci-fi epic continues with a lot of the game-board setup from Year 1 coming to bear in the “Rise of the Robots” arc, where unpleasant results have befallen more than one cast member. Pretty to look at, alarming to read at times.

The Dying and the Dead – #1 was published in January 2015. #4 through #6 were finally published in 2017, when it was also decided this Jonathan Hickman joint would max out at ten issues, which might see print before my 50th birthday and hopefully form at least one complete story. Considering all three of these latest issues were flashbacks, this cross between The Dirty Dozen and Red with a dash of Prometheus overlord aliens is pointless to recommend midstream.

Injection – Warren Ellis is at his best when state-of-the-art unbelievable real-world science is involved. Add in a dose of otherworldly magic opponents and an angry A.I. as the Big Bad, and you’ve got this fantasy/SF ensemble, which saw two arcs in 2017 — one about Stonehenge as a doorway to horrors and the other as a showcase for teammate Vivek Headland who will find new ways to harm you for describing him as an Indian Sherlock, which is unfairly reductive on so many levels that I should just stop typing now except to note ongoing fascination both with him and with the amazing colossal art team of Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire.

Lazarus – Currently on hiatus so artist Michael Lark can catch his breath. In the meantime, the bridging miniseries Lazarus X+66 has taken us into the minds of the supporting cast at various points of this post-apocalyptic world where Earth’s remaining livable continents have been divvied up between the few richest families who essentially keep societies running on a de facto feudal system. The regular series paused on a heck of a season finale, but the interstitial vignettes are worth the time for regular readers.

Manifest Destiny – Lewis and Clark and Monsters soldiers onward through the American frontier against the onslaught of hallucinations that nearly had our party killing each other off before they thankfully thought through the mess and lived to see the birth of Sacajawea’s baby. And then the early American grotesquerie continued, and something’s still not right with Sacajawea herself, but we’ll see what 2018 brings. Probably more madness, I imagine.

Paper Girls – Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang gave us a few solid clues as to what’s really going on behind the scenes with our time-displaced news-carrying young ladies, the broken-English future-dwelling soldiers who menace them on and off, the future versions of themselves who have surprise issues, and the giant mech battles not everyone can see. I was worried Vaughan might be turning this into his very own Lost with millions of questions and zero answers, but we saw slight hope that my fears were unfounded. Maybe.

Royal City – The prolific, previously mentioned Jeff Lemire finds even more spare minutes in the day to write and draw this labor of love about a broken family in a disintegrating blue-collar town who each see different ghostly versions of the one brother whose mysterious death tore them all apart. Spooky yet grounded in the reality of today’s not-so-idyllic countryside life.

Rumble – Restarted from #1 with a new artist, John Arcudi’s wacked-out sword-and-sorcery shenanigans continue destabilizing an average city neighborhood and the lives of the two barflies who fought the good fight against them along with their weird friend, an other-dimensional swordsman trapped in a scarecrow’s body but armed with a giant sword that would make Conan jealous.

Snotgirl – I never imagined myself buying comics about skin-deep fashion bloggers, but it’s co-created by Bryan Lee O’Malley, the genius behind Scott Pilgrim. I’m not sure I’m the book’s target audience, but I keep tagging along anyway just in case.

Other publishers:

Atomic Robo and the Spectre of Tomorrow – More fun science adventures with Atomic Robo, whom I’ve finally forgiven for that immensely frustrating animated Kickstarter project. Anyone who likes the fun of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl would do well to give this a shot, though I’m at a loss as to what order to read the timeline-hopping trade collections in.

Monstro Mechanica – New series from local up-‘n’-coming writer Paul Allor about an alt-history Renaissance in which Leonardo da Vinci has invented the world’s first working robot prototype, though that word doesn’t exist yet, and entrusted its daily oversight to his female assistant, with adventurous results and Medicis abounding.

…

…um, funny thing: until I began compiling this overlong entry, I didn’t realize that a lot of indie series I followed into 2017 either ended, got canceled, or lost my interest. This section wound up embarrassingly shorter than I imagined. Rats.

Quick related subject change:

Series that were canceled or ended as planned:

Archangel – In which celebrated sci-fi author William Gibson admits the ending was changed at the last minute for political relevance, and it shows — not only in me slapping my forehead at the ending that feels clichéd to anyone who’s on Twitter too much, but in the slapdash artwork that was obviously rushed to finish the project.

Atomic Robo and the Temple of Od – More same Atomic Robo. Yay!

Black Widow – Reminded me of high-adventure comic strips that previous generations dug, but canceled to make way for “Marvel Legacy”.

Crosswind – More body-swapping like the aforementioned DC/Archie crossover, except this one’s R-rated crime drama in a Tarantino vein, in a good way.

Great Lakes Avengers – Fun times, but canceled to make way for “Marvel Legacy”.

Jughead – Canceled to make way for Serious Archie, I guess.

Karnak – One of Marvel’s most nihilistic products of all time, but canceled after months-long delays between issues due to artist problems.

Mosaic – A promising new hero from one of the writers behind Leverage (which my wife and I finally finished watching this month), but canceled to make way for “Marvel Legacy”.

Power Man & Iron Fist – Brought back Alex Wilder from Runaways right before being canceled to split them into separate solo books with rigid skin-color boundaries, which seemed all kinds of incorrect.

Shade the Changing Girl – My favorite of the four Young Animals launch titles ended with #12 and nobody told me till I just now looked it up.

Silver Surfer – Ended as planned, bowing out with one of comics’ most emotional moments this year as our hero bade farewell to his companion Dawn Greenwood in the most Doctor Who-iffic way possible. The commendable saga from Dan Slott and the Allreds will be quite missed in this household.

Unstoppable Wasp – A lot like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl with a different yet no less viable sense of humor, but firmly entrenched in recent, obscure-to-me Marvel continuity. Canceled to make way for “Marvel Legacy”.

Kamandi Challenge #10 gave us sharks with machine guns versus robots. Dare we ask more than this of our comics? (Art by Shane Davis, Michelle Delecki and Hi-Fi Color.)

Miniseries completed in 2017:

Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 – A massively awesome escapade for anyone over 30 who watched as much super-hero TV as Anne and I did. Among other details, at long last we know what Batman ’77 might have looked like in this vein.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 11 – A short 12-issue season ended its magic-concentration-camp storyline with a political Moral of the Story and a bonus kaiju. Not my favorite comics season, but not bad.

Bug! The Adventures of Forager – Those wild ‘n’ wacky Allreds, at it again.

4 Kids Walk Into a Bank – This talky yet worthy crime drama needs a reread, because the months-long wait between issues (for which co-creator Matthew Rosenberg profusely apologized months ago) murdered its momentum.

Groo: Fray of the Gods – Fans of Sergio Aragones’ and Mark Evanier’s four or five jokes will still find them here in abundance. Longtime fans will recognize that’s a compliment.

Inhumans: Once & Future Kings – In which Christopher Priest proves he’s the G.O.A.T. by bringing eminent readability to the stars of the worst superhero show since The Cape.

Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Captain Phasma – Fabulous armor notwithstanding, I still really don’t care about Ms. Boba Fett.

Kamandi Challenge – A bevy of DC creators pays tribute to Jack Kirby’s post-apocalyptic Kid Tarzan with a 12-issue round-robin challenge. None of the teams failed to entertain, but the best match-up by far was Tom King, Freddie Williams III, and, in his DC Comics debut, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman.

Man-Thing – RL Stine, creator of Goosebumps, made his comics debut with a Marvel miniseries jam-packed with the cheesiest, most painful one-liners since ABC’s TGIF line-up went off the air. And yet I bought the whole thing because I couldn’t look away.

Star Wars: Darth Maul – Mostly harmless.

Star Wars: Mace Windu – An okay attempt to capture Samuel L. Jackson not acting like himsself, but Denys Cowan, one of my favorite pencillers since childhood, needed a stronger inker.

Wonder Woman ’77 Meets the Bionic Woman – Another retro-TV throwback to times of yore, but somehow we missed #6 and didn’t realize it till I sorted twelve months of comics and finally noticed. Oops.

Titles I dropped, or tried once but failed to get hooked:

Accel / Noble / Superb – The Lion Forge Comics superhero universe started off strong with a Free Comic Book Day one-shot written by Christopher Priest, who as previously established makes any and all things better. The lineup that branched out of that was…well, just-okay superhero stuff.

Angel Season 11 – No trace of the Joss Whedon voice, or much in the way of leavening humor. Without a strong cast to bounce off, Angel alone can be kind of a dullard.

Archie – Everyone else loves Riverdale, so it made sense from a marketing perspective to switch gears for a deadly serious storyline. To me the gags and repartee were my entire reason for digging Mark Waid’s Archie.

Batman/The Shadow – Set in an era when Batman was a dumb rookie who hadn’t yet encountered magic or fantasy or superpowers — i.e., the most boring Batman imaginable.

Betty & Veronica – After walking away from Archie and waving bye-bye to Jughead, my initial enthusiasm for Adam Hughes’ lighthearted spinoff dissipated.

Black Lightning: Cold Dead Hands – Creator Tony Isabella is tickled pink to see DC’s first prominent black superhero brought to new life on TV and returned to print, but this miniseries seems to be straining for a sociopolitical relevance that the first two episodes from The CW managed without breaking a sweat.

Black Panther – 90% of what Ta-Nehisi Coates brought to the table was characters monologuing at each other. The rest was a small crop of obligatory fight scenes given short shrift in my least favorite style — pin-up montages instead of real-time, blow-by-blow narrative. I hung on for all of Year 1 but couldn’t go on. If the movie is three hours of crosstalk soliloquies, I’m in deep trouble.

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye – My local shop stopped ordering it and I didn’t feel attached enough to pursue it.

The Comic Book History of Comics – Either my shop stopped ordering the color reprints or I wasn’t paying attention. I’ll have to chase after the trade.

Eleanor & the Egret – Oddball item from John Layman, co-creator of Chew, and Sam Kieth, co-creator of The Maxx. I forgot its contents within 24 hours.

Eternal Empire – I had high hopes for this new project from the creators of the top-notch Alex + Ada, but I was left cold halfway through the first issue. For some reason non-Tolkien fantasy works haven’t succeeded well with me since high school.

The Fall and Rise of Captain Atom – Attempted reboot that gave me no reason to forget the classic Cary Bates/Pat Broderick version, despite Bates’ involvement.

Future Quest – One of the more inspired, less head-scratching titles among DC’s Hanna-Barbera reboots, but felt inessential as a monthly read.

Luke Cage – David Walker is a fine writer, but couldn’t rise above the journeyman artists Marvel kept assigning to their big Netflix hero. One of the first wave of casualties within “Marvel Legacy” itself.

…

…and that’s me and comics in 2017, mostly. If this 5000-word blog-bomb wasn’t enough for someone out there, we previously covered my 2017 in graphic novels as a two-parter right here and then over here.

See you next year, and please enjoy this parting gift of some of the best covers that got me to keep buying comics in 2017. Cheers!

Finding strong, memorable covers was kind of tough. I don’t care for pinups that have nothing to do with the interior contents, and too many covers are just Hero A punching Villain B — or worse, punching Hero C — offering nothing to lure in new readers. Y’know, like in the old days when comics used to fly off newsstands.

Kylo Ren and friends were the last cosplayers we met at the end of the day, but they’re first in line for our two cosplay galleries.

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. It was another opportunity to dive into comic boxes, meet people who make comics, boggle at toy displays, make way for the youngsters who can’t get enough of anime merchandise, and find space to breathe in those cheerfully ever-growing crowds. To be honest, we were surprised how many of the actors on hand were folks we’d met at previous cons, but Anne and I found a few new intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by once more.

While we recuperate and wait for our feet to forgive us for their punishment, please enjoy this collection of cosplayers who brightened the day around the show floor. The actors and comics creators will be shared at the end of this special miniseries because everyone loves costumes. In all we took over three dozen pics of varying degrees of tailoring talent and photo quality. We’re dividing the stack into arbitrary halves and letting Part 1 focus on the superstars of the Marvel, DC, and Star Wars universes. We regret we can only represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total cosplay wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun. Enjoy!

Darth Revan, one more Sith for good measure.

One of the tallest Wookiees ever to cross our paths.

Thor didn’t need to buy much in the exhibit hall because he already commands one of the coolest toys of all.

Black Panther, Hollywood’s newest A-lister.

Iron Man in classic armor hanging out with a heavily armed understudy.

The American Spider. Or Spider-America. Or American Arachnid. Or Patriot Parker. Whichever.

Star-Lord, Squirrel Girl, and — because J. Jonah Jameson demanded it — MORE PICTURES OF SPIDER-MAN!

Star-Lord rejoins his fellow Guardians of the Galaxy, Yondu and Gamora.

Yondu Poppins, y’all!

He is Groot, but Jack Skellington is not Groot.

Mandatory Deadpool variant department presents a little old Grannypool and her caretaker villain the Joker.

Captain America and Peggy Carter, Marvel’s ultimate star-crossed lovers.

Joker and Harley, DC’s ultimate stark raving mad lovers.

Scarecrow and the Riddler, the couple you never saw coming. Plot twist!

Black Mask. an early-80s Batman villain who later graduated to the Arkham video games.

Mr. Freeze in front of artist Terry Huddleston’s distinctive booth, which we’ve used as a landmark for mapping purposes at several other cons.

Mary Marvel, Captain Marvel (a.k.a. SHAZAM!), and Liberty Belle from the All-Star Squadron. All three are fellow veterans of the annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois.

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

Part 2: More Cosplay!
Part 3: Who We Met and What We Did

Happy Easter from MCC and the Easter Boba!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. It was another opportunity to dive into comic boxes, meet people who make comics, boggle at toy displays, make way for the youngsters who can’t get enough of anime merchandise, and find space to breathe in those cheerfully ever-growing crowds. To be honest, we were surprised how many of the actors on hand were folks we’d met at previous cons, but Anne and I found a few new intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by once more.

While we recuperate and wait for our feet to forgive us for their punishment, please enjoy this collection of cosplayers who brightened the day around the show floor. The actors and comics creators will be shared at the end of this special miniseries because everyone loves costumes. In all we took over three dozen pics of varying degrees of tailoring talent and photo quality. We regret we can only represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total cosplay wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun…

…and in Part Two, it’s time for all the remaining cosplay that’s fit to print from the worlds of TV, animation, gaming, Netflix, and more. Enjoy! Again!

Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hanging out with old pal Usagi Yojimbo, another bunny who thought to bring a basket for the holiday weekend.

Princess Fiona, who can handle herself just fine without Shrek, thank you very much.

Mario’s pal Princess Peach, and the heroic Mermaid Man from Spongebob Squarepants.

The cast of Bob’s Burgers!

Leela, Fry, Bender, and Nibbler from Futurama.

A frightening Bender/Leela mash-up.

Beast and Belle, a tale as old as time.

Maleficent and the Queen of Hearts, disappointed to be surrounded by so many smiling faces who shall RUE THE DAY.

Sirius Black and the Fat Lady, fellow veterans of Cincinnati Comic Expo and two among the thousands of Harry Potter fans in the house this weekend.

Eleven and Chief Hopper, two of the eleventy billion fellow fans of Stranger Things that convened on the scene.

Georgie’s worstest of worst nightmares: two Pennywises.

We don’t photograph a lot of anime costumes because I’m familiar with maybe 0.003% of them, but this time I gambled on the possibility that my son might recognize them, as he often does. This time, he’s stumped. Little help, anyone?

One my son did help identify this time: Star Guardian Ahru from League of Legends.

Another stumper. To me it looks like Lobo murdered a Dragon Age character and stole his armor, but I’m sure I’m wrong.

She’s David Pumpkins! ANY QUESTIONS?

Speaking of monsters: Reptar from Rugrats.

Pyramid Head from Silent Hill.

Raiden from Mortal Kombat with electrically charged accessories.

Lawn gnome wizard, possibly an addition to later editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

“HEY, I’M GUY FIERI AND I’M LOOKING FOR SOME AWESOME GRUB RIGHT HERE IN THIS CONVENTION CENTER BECAUSE I’VE LOST MY MIND! TODAY ON TRIPLE-D!”

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

Part 1: Cosplay!
Part 3: Who We Met and What We Did

David Harbour, a.k.a. Chief Hopper from Netflix’s Stranger Things, getting more than he bargained for in his big weekend.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth annual Indiana Comic Con at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. It was another opportunity to dive into comic boxes, meet people who make comics, boggle at toy displays, make way for the youngsters who can’t get enough of anime merchandise, and find space to breathe in those cheerfully ever-growing crowds. To be honest, we were surprised how many of the actors on hand were folks we’d met at previous cons, but Anne and I found a few new intriguing names on the guest list and decided to drop by once more.

The biggest name we hadn’t met was, of course, our man Chief Hopper, the hero of Hawkins, the guardian of Eleven, and one of the great cast members from Stranger Things. He was a later addition to the con’s guest list, but his recruitment sealed the deal for our participation. We were far from alone on this, accompanied as we were by thousands of other fans excited for the opportunity.

As for the rest of the celebrity guest list…honestly, we’d met a lot of them already. Longtime MCC readers realize we’ve been doing quite a few conventions over the past few years, to the point that we spent more time in 2017 attending cons than sleeping.

We pause now for a very special MCC Convention Clipfest in which we recap the Indiana Comic Con 2018 guest list using pictures from our own past experiences:

From HorrorHound Indy 2017: Sean Astin, the unsung hero of Lord of the Rings and season 2 of Stranger Things.

From Wizard World Chicago 2013: James and Oliver Phelps, a.k.a. Fred and George Weasley from the Harry Potter series.

From Cincinnati Comic Expo 2017: Wallace Shawn from The Princess Bride, the Toy Story trilogy, and My Dinner with Andre.

From Wizard World Chicago 2014: Kevin Conroy the definitive Caped Crusader voice from Batman: The Animated Series.

Also from Wizard World Chicago 2014: Jonathan Frakes, a.k.a. Commander William Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation and acclaimed director of Star Trek: First Contact and several episodes of Leverage, among other works.

From C2E2 2017: author Timothy Zahn, one of the grandmasters of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

And lest we leave out the world of comic books: from our epic-length weekend at Wizard World Chicago 2015 came a brief musical number by Ty Templeton, a celebrated writer, artist, funnyman and onetime Canadian TV actor.

We do regret missing one of Indiana Comic Con’s big guests this year — Matthew Lewis, a.k.a. Neville Longbottom from the Harry Potter series, who unfortunately changed his schedule to Friday-only after we had already decided to attend Saturday only. Perhaps we’ll meet at a future con, Lord willing. A few other actors were in the house Saturday, but we had mixed feelings and little driving compulsion to brave their lines. Those that had lines, anyway.

Without any high-pressure time-sensitive priorities or any major autograph demands on our to-do list, we meandered into the Indiana Convention Center a mere hour before showtime, picked up our Saturday wristbands from Hall F, and joined the entry line at the opposite end of the hallway. The past two years we’d made a point of arriving ridiculously early among the first ten people in line. It’s a convention. It’s what we do normally. This time we happily ceded the position to other fans in exchange for slightly sleeping in and then indulging in breakfast down the street. The only difficult part was enduring the low temperatures outside, a frequent hindrance in this year’s peculiarly harsh spring. Carrying our jackets around the convention center all day would prove not to be so fun.

The doors opened a few minutes before 10 a.m. because apparently even the volunteers were excited to get the proceedings rolling. Our first stop was a mandatory errand: buying our David Harbour photo-op ticket. Unlike most other geek cons these days, Indiana Comic Con refuses to sell autograph or photo-op tickets in advance. Most cons are more than happy to take your cash up front and save you some minutes on the show floor, because then you have more time to go forth and spend bucks and do stuff. My best guess is that Indiana Comic Con would prefer to avoid the hassle of issuing refunds en masse in the event that celebrity guests cancel on them, and simply wanted to wait till they were absolutely certain their guests would be there, and then begin taking monies on their behalf. After the Fandom Fest debacle of 2017 I don’t blame showrunners for being sensitive to the issue of guest cancellations and their effect on consumer confidence. On the other hand, long-running companies such as ReedPOP and Wizard World have mastered the fine art of refunds whenever their guests bow out. As long as such refunds and apologies are timely and efficient, we’re totally understanding when actor conflicts come up. Sometimes this stuff can’t be helped.

Rather than refine any infrastructure for that aspect of the biz, ICC chose instead to sell photo-op tickets only on the show floor, only in person. Given the high-profile guest list, they should’ve been unsurprised when several hundred of us all got in line for photo-op tickets promptly at 10 a.m., all at the same time. I have absolutely no idea why they thought four (4) cashiers would be enough to handle this incredibly lifelike simulation of a Black Friday at Best Buy. The line moved somewhat quickly, but had been joined by several thousand more fans behind us by the time we escaped it around 10:30. Thankfully they realized this logjam would create problems for anyone interested in the day’s first session, Michael Biehn at 10:40, and asked those folks to come up front and buy theirs first. Everyone else had a long wait ahead of them…for the photo-op tickets alone, to say nothing of the actual photo ops later.

Harbour’s op wasn’t till 11:20, giving us a bit of time to walk part of the exhibit hall. We didn’t have time to do much — bought another $5 graphic novel from reliable Gem City Books; said hi to the guys from my local comic shop at their booth; saw Artists Alley filled with aspiring hopefuls selling prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, and also prints; and noted another con appearance by Optimus Prime.

We’ve seen it at least twice before, but this time there wasn’t a dude running laps around, waving his arms and yelling “NO PHOTOS!”

We also made time to meet one of the more celebrated writers in attendance: Peter David, writer of stuff. Anne knows him as the writer of several Star Trek novels, while I knew his comics work literally from Day One, starting with a pair of Spider-Man fill-ins that led to a celebrated run on Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, which in turn led to Incredible Hulk (a ten-year run of which I have every issue), X-Factor, Spider-Man 2099, and onward to DC with Star Trek, Aquaman, and Young Justice. I could go on for paragraphs. I never thought he’d come out to the Midwest for a con, but here he was, courtesy of the publisher of some of his creator-owned novels.

I was also a follower of his long-running “But I Digress…” column in the back of every issue of Comics Buyer’s Guide for many years. His free-wheeling approach to choosing his subject matter was a key influence when I first started planning MCC.

We returned to the photo-op area shortly after 11 behind a couple hundred other fans who’d refused to go anywhere else that first hour. We killed the time saying hi to others around us, checking our phones, waving our ticket in the air on command every five minutes because the volunteers were oddly obsessed with verifying we’d paid our dues, and noticing the hundreds upon hundreds of ticketholders filing behind us and ensuring it would be a good, long while before Mr. Harbour would be able to break for lunch or return to his autograph table.

Several of us in the crowd also rolled our eyes in unison every time the volunteers recommended that we take off our glasses for the photo-op because we might not want glare from the camera flash obscuring our eyes. Breaking news for all those volunteers who apparently have great eyesight or contacts: anyone who’s been truly comfortable with wearing glasses for years will never, ever take them off for any photo. Ever. Over time they’ve become a natural part of ourselves, who we are and how we look. Without them we think we look weird. You suggesting I take my glasses off for a photo is like me telling you to shave your head right before a photo so you don’t have to worry about any stray hairs falling out of place. Your warning is useless against us.

The assembly line began rolling shortly before 11:30. We eventually got our turn meeting the man, the myth, and the legend. When we asked humbly if we could do our usual “jazz hands” pose, he joked in response, “Yeah, we can go back to my Broadway days!” And so it went. The first couple hundred fans may have worn him down a bit before our turn came.

Freed from our lone mandatory celebrity appointment, we had time to wander a bit more. We noticed the respective autograph lines for both Sean Astin and the Phelps twins had reached cosmic proportions and necessitated some awkward rearranging of placements. One of the lines appeared to snake backward into the curtained recesses of the farthest corner of the exhibit hall, threatening to swallow any newcomers into another dimension. We started having flashbacks to our classic debacle with ICC’s Carrie Fisher nightmare of 2015, but were grateful that such problems would not be ours this year. I noticed the same con employee who’d made the ill-advised Dragon*Con comparison at the time was still on hand in the same capacity. Later I also noticed a number of Facebook reviews from fans grumbling about the hours spent, the confusion sowed, and the chaos that ensued. I can’t comment firsthand on any of that directly except to express my condolences and my hopes that those fans found some other forms of enjoyment in their con experience.

At the same time, it wasn’t such a bad day for anyone excited to meet the non-headlining actors. While the line for Kevin Conroy looked impressively long, the other voice actors seemed to have manageable yet steady turnouts, particularly Nolan North and the aforementioned Mr. Shawn. At the far end of the autograph section, Sean Young seemed to have time for one-on-one conversations with those who approached. We took advantage of the situation to join one of the other short lines.

You may best remember William B. Davis in his role as the Cigarette Smoking Man from all the most confusing and dissatisfying episodes of The X-Files, or maybe that’s just us. But Anne, thoughtful person that she is, wanted to get his autograph as a gift for a coworker who’s a big X-Files fan who’s been going through hard times lately. Despite his significance to the show, his line took us about ten minutes. Quite a kind gentleman to meet, and accompanied by a very friendly handler who was likewise a pleasure to chat with.

One autograph for the friend, one photo for us. Seemed fair.

Because self-care is important, next on the agenda was lunchtime. Once again the showrunners negotiated with our city’s proud food truck industry and had a row of hardy entrepreneurs lined up along Georgia Street to cater to fans and passersby alike. The 40-degree temps and blustery winds made for an inhospitable dining climate, but we refused to settle for convention center grub. The wounds from previous experiences run deep. Our winning truck of choice was Talkin Turkey, specialists in Cajun turkey dishes. We grabbed our swiftly prepared meals, fled back inside the Convention Center, and miraculously found one empty table in the nearest dining area for respite.

Fried catfish for Anne, Cajun turkey chop for me.

We finished five minutes before 1 p.m., starting time for a comics panel around the corner featuring two gentlemen who made good comics during my Golden Age of reading back in the 1980s. ICC has a pretty good knack for persuading creators from that time frame to hold court and sign autographs.

Carl Potts, Peter B. Gillis. and the moderator who didn’t introduce himself.

Carl Potts entered comics in the late ’70s as an artist, then eventually became a full-time editor at Marvel. During his reign he oversaw such books as Power Pack, Alpha Flight, Moon Knight, and other books that were part of my steady comics diet. His early days at the company saw him in charge of the submissions pile that would yield future superstars like the influential Arthur Adams and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. When Archie Goodwin moved from Marvel to DC, Potts also took over Marvel’s pioneering creator-owned Epic Comics line and kept it going for as long as possible rather than let The Powers That Be scupper it and its lineup of underrated, multi-genre projects. Away from his staff desk he created Alien Legion, one of the earliest Epic titles, occasionally drew or painted covers as a fine artist in his own right, and wrote the first two dozen issues of the original Punisher War Journal, initially drawn by some youngster named Jim Lee. Potts remained with Marvel throughout much of the tumultuous ’90s till escaping into other fields.

One of the many writers Potts worked with was the panel’s other highlight, Peter B. Gillis. He wrote the last several issues of the original run of The Defenders, and worked on titles such as Captain America, Black Panther, Dr. Strange, Micronauts, his own creation Strikeforce Morituri, and the Marvel alt-history anthology What If?, concluding Volume One of that series with some of its greatest stories, including one of my favorite Captain America stories. A short stint at DC Comics yielded a series based on the TSR role-playing game Gammarauders as well as another nearly forgotten creation of his, Tailgunner Jo. First Comics likewise gave him work to do as one of the few comics writers living in their hometown of Chicago at the time. He later switched career tracks, but was recently spotted adapting Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn to comics for IDW Publishing.

These two gents, taken together, were a Big Deal to me as a comics fan of forty years. The panel was a simple Q&A with questions from the audience (myself included! This is extremely rare) that filled the entire hour. Random tidbits that came up:

* Gillis is unimpressed with the current generation’s fondness for decompressed storytelling, and dismisses deconstruction in comics as “too easy to do”.

* Potts owes his career to networking as it existed back in those days, and got his start thanks to the benevolence of west-coast artists Alan Weiss (vastly underrated in my book) and Jim Starlin (creator of Thanos and Gamora, among other cosmic characters).

* Gillis recalls pre-computer days when Fed Ex was a critical resource for meeting last-minute deadlines, and fondly recounted one crazy late night in which a friend’s daredevil driving got him and a script to the drop-off station at the same time as fellow Chicago comics writers John Ostrander and Kim Yale.

* Potts kept the Epic line going for as long as possible, despite his superiors’ refusal to allow them much of a promotional budget, and even after he was instructed not to solicit new works from any talents working on mainstream Marvel books. Eventually the line petered out, but lasted just long enough to let Sergio Aragonés’ Groo the Wanderer reach 120 issues, possibly as a final insult to upper management. (Okay, that last part didn’t come up in the Q&A, but occurred to me just now. Shout-out to my fellow Groo fans out there!)

* When commenting on advantages of the digital age, Potts confirmed Cary Bates (The Flash, Captain Atom) was the first comics writer he ever knew to own a word processor. For you kids who’ve never heard that term, word processors were the missing link between typewriters and computers with letter-writing programs. Don’t make me cry by asking me to explain other steps in the evolutionary process such as WordPerfect, dot-matrix printers (which also came up in the Q&A), or typewriter ribbons.

* When pressed for recommendations of current comics, Gillis said he couldn’t think of anything recent that he would consider “exciting”. Potts is behind on reading and confesses to having stacks at the ready, but keeps up on the field in general and recommended Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer.

* Both had fun anecdotes to share about the late Mark Gruenwald, a fantastic Marvel writer/editor who was integral to the company during my childhood and young-adult years, and loved its entire universe to pieces until his horrifically untimely passing in 1996 at age 43. Gruenwald’s sterile Wikipedia entry doesn’t begin to do his legacy justice.

…and more, more, more. After their panel, all we had left to do was finish perusing the rest of the exhibit hall. I made a point of stopping by their tables as well, which was enjoyable.

Carl Potts and a selection of works, including a reissue of his former Epic graphic novel Last of the Dragons.

Peter B. Gillis, whom I wished I’d thought to ask about Strikeforce Morituri, which was an amazing book based on a fascinating concept and deserves reprinting for new audiences.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Brent Schoonover, an artist who’s been keeping busy at Marvel with work on Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, and the short-lived yet inspired Howling Commandos of SHIELD, which imagined Marvel’s premiere spy organization drafting a new team made entirely of monsters. I couldn’t pass up that last one.

I had hoped to meet one of the show’s other well-known guests — Bill Amend, creator of FoxTrot, one of the funnier comic strips still carried by our local newspaper — and one with geek cred, at that. We walked by his table three times between 12:30 and 3:40, only to find him absent every single time. This isn’t the first occasion on which I’ve missed out on meeting someone due to bad timing and a reluctance to loiter at their table for hours in hopes of their reappearance. I followed my usual procedure for such occurrences and gave up.

Otherwise…we took several more cosplay photos. I tried to look for more comics to buy, bypassed a couple of tables that I’d bought from before. Per my personal convention guideline, I skipped every single table that was selling nothing but prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, prints, and also prints. I did make one exception to this rule, but it was for Carl Potts.

One last parting glance at the Convention Center before we had to get in the car and drive back to the ordinary world.

By 4 p.m. we were essentially finished and satisfied with our Indiana Comic Con experience for the year. Ultimately my buying pile didn’t add up to a lot, but I was content. For value-added extra credit I also came away with so many compliments for my Doctor Who shirt from other passing attendees that now I’m tempted to wear it to every single con for the rest of my life until people start getting tired of it and mocking me to my face for it. Once again credit is owed to the seamstress extraordinaire at That’s Terri-IFIC, who’s had booths at a few Midwest cons but also accepts online inquiries.

This year’s loot. Not pictured: a $5 Uncanny X-Men trade that filled a gap in my Kieron Gillen collection.

The End. Thanks for reading! See you next convention…which, as it so happens, will be next weekend, much sooner than we’d prefer. We blame the Midwest convention boom and the shortage of viable weekends in any given year.

And if you’re among those still in line to get an autograph from the Phelps twins: hang in there, kid. I bet you’re almost there! You can do this! Eye of the tiger!

Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Cosplay!
Part 2: More Cosplay!

Kate Bishop a.k.a. Hawkeye, and Samurai Iron Man!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

In this special miniseries I’ll be sharing memories and photos from our own C2E2 experience and its plethora of pizzazz…

If it’s a convention, that means it’s time for more cosplay photos! Anne and I are fans of costumes and try to keep an eye out for heroes, villains, antiheroes, supporting casts, and various oddities that look impressive and/or we haven’t seen at other cons. First up: a great big batch of characters from assorted iterations of the Marvel Universe, movies as well as comics. These aren’t even all the Marvel characters we saw, but I had to draw my arbitrary dividing lines through our nearly five dozen costume photos where I could. Caveats for first-time visitors to Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

3. We didn’t attend Sunday. As previously explained at excessive length, we also nearly never do costume contests anymore. Sincere apologies to anyone we missed as a result.

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

5. Enjoy!

Loki and Hela, who probably get along better in another timeline.

Another Hela and Dr. Strange.

Future movie star Captain Marvel and USAgent, a sort of alt-Captain America from the ’90s who hasn’t made it to the big screen yet.

Thor modeling the Infinity Gauntlet in front of the Avengers: Infinity War poster at the Marvel booth.

Ghost Rider, the very first cosplayer we encountered this weekend.

I brake for the unbeatable Squirrel Girl (and Tippy-Toe!) whenever and wherever possible.

Mandatory Deadpool variants, 1 of 4: Santapool. You better watch out! You’d better not DIE.

Breakfastpool brings his own unicorn cereal and, uh, Infinity Gauntlet.

I like to imagine Sheriff Woodypool yelling, “THERE’S A SNAKE IN MY BOOT!” and then shooting his own foot off, because it’s the only way to be sure.

Lady Deadpool demonstrating how we felt later when we had to settle for convention center cheese pizza for dinner.

The Wasp, one of the original Avengers from back in the day, well before Captain America joined the team and began hogging all the glory.

Say what you will about X-Men: The Last Stand, such as “It was sooooo horrible!” or “Why did you say that name? Uuuuggghh”, but Kelsey Grammer’s performance as the Beast, if not his fur, was eminently salvageable.

The Juggernaut, another scarred X3 survivor.

Hip-hop Hulk out in the lobby Saturday afternoon, kicking it old-school.

Hulk’s dance partner Spider-Man, who also happens to be one of the guys down at my local comic shop.

Punk rock Spider-Man bringing a different vibe.

Marvel Team-Up presents Elektra and X-23.

The Beetle, a classic Marvel villain who’s fought both Spidey and Daredevil, but has yet to be invited onto a live-action Marvel stage. Someday, maybe?

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

Part 1: Another Jazz Hands Gallery!
Part 3: More Cosplay!
Part 4: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 5: Comics Creators Cavalcade
Part 6: Still more stuff, but not so much cosplay. Specific subjects pending…

Jedi Retiree Luke Skywalker swigging green milk, a nutritious part of every space breakfast.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

In this special miniseries I’ll be sharing memories and photos from our own C2E2 experience and its plethora of pizzazz. If it’s a convention, that means it’s time for more cosplay photos! Anne and I are fans of costumes and try to keep an eye out for heroes, villains, antiheroes, supporting casts, and various oddities that look impressive and/or we haven’t seen at other cons…

Part Two featured the majority of Marvel characters we met. This time around, the arbitrary chapter divisions bring us to the amazing world of DC Comics, including a handful of Marvel/DC team-ups. As a value-added bonus, also on deck are heroes and villains from the Star Wars universe plus a selection of video game personalities, just because. Same disclaimers apply as in Part Two. Enjoy! Again!

Blue Beetle (the Jaime Reyes version) and Okoye from Black Panther.

Batman Beyond and an unlikely partner in the Mole Man, the very first Fantastic Four villain.

Bane and Doctor Octopus, hoping in vain for a future Batman v. Spider-Man film.

We previously hung out with the Joker at Wizard World Chicago 2017 as part of a group stymied at a seriously annoying security checkpoint. His vocal and physical performance are an eerily accurate tribute to Mark Hamill, and lend themselves to some great photos on his Instagram feed.

Vigilante, one of DC’s cowboy heroes from way back when. He also appeared in an episode of Justice League Unlimited with the voice of Nathan Fillion.

Also animated: the Legion of Doom from Super-Friends — Gorilla Grodd, Captain Cold, Bizarro, Catwoman, and Black Manta. Bonus points if you know which one was not a Legion of Doom member.

I’m old enough to remember watching Plastic Man’s show on Saturday mornings. Too bad nobody ever cosplays as Hula-Hula or Baby Plas.

I believe you know Wonder Woman.

Mera, star of the upcoming blockbuster Aquaman, whom you may recall from three of the weirdest minutes of Snyder and Whedon’s Justice League.

Speaking of which: Aquaman alongside Winged Warrior Woody Woodpecker.

Costar of another blockbuster franchise: Supreme Chancellor Snoke, whose backstory will probably be explained some day in a six-part Algerian children’s audiobook, but never ever in an actual Star Wars movie.

Clone Wars star Ahsoka Tano.

Mara Jade Skywalker, proving the Star Wars Expanded Universe will never actually die as long as all the bookshelves of its fans never catch fire simultaneously.

Jawas! Making the world safe for undertall cosplay.

Darth Vader: the original Kenner action figure! Complete with unyielding, awkward, hard plastic cape and lightsaber that retracts inside his arm. This is a painstakingly accurate depiction of why I preferred GI Joe figures.

Also from my childhood, sort of: Super Mario’s big bad King Bowser.

Another Bowser, this one riding in his Koopa clown car from Super Mario World, plus a Princess Peach who’s scandalized that we paparazzi have caught her with him.

A hero from my young-adult arcade years: Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat.

From my old-adult gaming years: 9-Toes, one of the first bosses from the original Borderlands.

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

Part 1: Another Jazz Hands Gallery!
Part 2: Marvel Cosplay!
Part 4: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 5: Comics Creators Cavalcade
Part 6: Still more stuff, but not so much cosplay. Specific subjects pending…

Princess Lolly from Candy Land, the classic board game that taught us kids all about colors and sugar.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

In this special miniseries I’ll be sharing memories and photos from our own C2E2 experience and its plethora of pizzazz. If it’s a convention, that means it’s time for more cosplay photos! Anne and I are fans of costumes and try to keep an eye out for heroes, villains, antiheroes, supporting casts, and various oddities that look impressive and/or we haven’t seen at other cons…

Part Two featured the majority of Marvel characters we met; Part Three covered more Marvel, DC Comics, Star Wars, and a bit of video games. This time around: all the cosplay that’s fit to print and left to post. Same disclaimers apply as in Part Two. Enjoy! Some more! Still!

G-FORCE! Tiny and Jason from Battle of the Planets. Or Gatchaman, if you’re hardcore.

Ralph Hinkley, the original Greatest American Hero.

Dream a.k.a. Morpheus from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein.

Sophia from The Golden Girls is easily recognizable to us Gen-X-ers, but Anne and I debated quite a bit over which ones the other two were.

The Rocketeer, doing Dave Stevens proud.

Kaylee’ s lovely ball gown (and strawberries) from the Firefly episode “Shindig”.

Quidditch team representing for the world of Harry Potter, along with an accidental Syndrome from The Incredibles. I usually leave unintentional Easter-egg cosplayers unlabeled for readers to discover on their own, but what the hey.

One of our convention traditions is a little game called “Cosplay Stumpers”, in which we photograph a few cool costumes we don’t recognize and see if my son knows them later. He failed to identify this winged warrior and forfeited many points.

Also stumping us: similar to one of Aquaman’s old color schemes, but a design akin to Princess Ariel’s.

My original caption was “Medieval knights from that one thing with the medieval knights in it”, but I just now dug more deeply and confirmed these are Riften guards from Skyrim, which should’ve been included in Part Three with other gaming characters. My bad!

The Egyptian god Anubis.

Dueling Reptars from Nickelodeon’s Rugrats.

Dueling Walter Whites from not-Nickelodeon’s Breaking Bad.

The Queen of Hearts from Tim Burton’s colorful but depressing Alice in Wonderland sequel.

Aang from Avatar: the Last Airbender.

It’s rare to see sports-legend cosplayers, such as Super Bowl XLIX breakout star Left Shark.

Moana and Hei Hei, who thankfully didn’t keep running headlong into dealer displays.

Miguel from Pixar’s Coco, my favorite film of 2017. I still tear up every time I think of “Remember Me”.

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

Part 1: Another Jazz Hands Gallery!
Part 2: Marvel Cosplay!
Part 3: More Cosplay!
Part 5: Comics Creators Cavalcade [coming soon]
Part 6: Who Else We Met and What We Did [coming soon]
Part 7: Random Acts of Pop Culture [coming soon]

This year’s new C2E2 reading pile. Part one.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

In this special miniseries I’ll be sharing memories and photos from our own C2E2 experience and its plethora of pizzazz…

…which as always includes the densest Artists Alley in the Midwest. Eleven double-length rows of writers, artists, cartoonists, painters, print makers, button sellers, novelists, professionals, amateurs, up-‘n’-comers, elder statesmen, internet sensations, and quiet ones you gotta watch. Diversity fans could find something to their tastes in virtually every conceivable corner of the medium. I tried to walk it twice per my annual ritual, and saw every table at least once — with or without their assigned artist at them — but had to bow out a few rows before the end of the second run-through when exhaustion and budgetary conscience both began tearing me down.

Many talented creators put up with my wife and me within the space of a valuable moment of their time at C2E2 in between finishing commissioned sketches and other, more desirable endeavors. I made a point of throwing money at them and once again added several pounds to my reading pile and our convention bags. Anne did what she could to help me out when my back began failing under the accumulated weight, but now I owe her a new bag for the damage done. Next year I need to remind myself to wait till the end of the day before splurging on any hardcovers.

Some of the winners of my money and gratitude in exchange for arts rendered, in order by their books pictured above:

Adam Fotos, showing off his most recent, intricately illustrated book Beyond Paper Walls, about his travels to Japan. I grabbed a copy of his first book, The Panopticorn, a Twilight Zone-ish tale involving a most peculiar cornfield.

Hannah Blumenreich captured the attention of Marvel fans with a few funny Peter Parker short stories that neatly summed up the heart-filled nature of his best stories from back in the day. I bought a Regular Show collection from her, read the entire thing later that evening, and confirmed her contribution “Fancy Dinner” was simply the best. The day after C2E2 came the announcement of her next gig as writer of the upcoming IDW series Big Hero 6, based on the very good Disney film based on the forgotten Marvel comic.

I first heard of Amy Chu when she appeared as a panelist at Indiana Comic Con 2015. Since then she’s racked up credits at Marvel, DC, and Dynamite, where she’s now having to endure the wrath of Green Hornet fans and their long laundry list of everything wrong with every version ever, not just hers, because the 273-year-old Green Hornet canon is of course Serious Business and woe betide any who dare fail to uphold established continuity from ye olde vacuum-tube radio serials.

We keep bugging Charles Soule every time he’s at C2E2. This year he took a break from the 73 different Marvel series he’s presently writing to hold a Friday-only two-hour signing of his first novel The Oracle Year, which was just released the week before. You can read his recent essay on its premise over at John Scalzi’s blog.

Tyler Ellis, creator of the ongoing SF webcomic Chimera and nominee/finalist for the 2018 Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics as bestowed each year at the Long Beach Comic Expo.

Justin Greenwood, current artist on Greg Rucka’s Oni Press detective series Stumptown. He also illustrated a biography of Alexander Hamilton and had an animated discussion with Anne about historian/journalist Ron Chernow’s massive tome on the same subject.

Max Allan Collins is a longtime detective writer whose fictionalized Eliot Ness novels were a fun part of my late-’80s reading diet. In the world of comics, his resumé includes 15 years of the Dick Tracy comic strip, a short stint on post-Crisis Batman (where he helped reboot Jason Todd), the graphic novel Road to Perdition (later adapted into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman), and the antihero Wild Dog, a version of which now costars on TV’s Arrow.

But wait! There’s more to this year’s C2E2 pile. Some days I wish I could write more quickly — or go back to sleeping less — so I could have more time for reading.

Writer/artist Ray Fawkes has done numerous creator-owned projects for Image, Oni, and Top Shelf, but has also been dabbling in the darker corners of the DC universe with Constantine, Batman, and a recent creepy revamp of Ragman, as formerly seen on TV’s Arrow.

Chicago journalist/writer Markisan Naso touted his ongoing Action Lab series Voracious, about a chef with a crappy life who develops a time-travel specialty in dinosaur cuisine. The first collection Diners, Dinosaurs & Dives had me at the title and at one of the two best covers I saw all weekend long. (Bad timing on my part: artist Jason Muhr was away from the table when I came by.)

I first saw the work of artist N. Steven Harris on a Grant Morrison project for DC called Aztek, which was one heck of a weird place to enter the field. Of late he’s worked on the indie series Watson & Holmes and the DC reboot spin-off The Wild Storm: Michael Cray, in which the titular gunman is assigned the grim task of hunting down corrupted alternate-Earth versions of DC’s biggest names.

The works of Andrew MacLean include the Dark Horse book ApocalyptiGirl and the Image Comics ongoing Head Lopper, for which I saw a recommendation from one of the more eclectic comics fans I follow on Twitter.

Two artists met but not pictured: Hollywood animator Stephan Franck, whom I first met at C2E2 2015 (likewise sans photo) and who’s now into Volume Three of his graphic novel series Silver; and writer/artist Jeremy Haun, who had the other best cover of the Alley, an homage to one of the Dungeons & Dragons sets of yesteryear adorning the hardcover collection of The Realm (colored by Nick Filardi — cf. C2E2 2016). I walk briskly past comic-book covers that just show a character standing motionlessly and staring at you without any indication of premise or any discernible activity that requires more than a single verb to summarize. If your dude is just standing, running, or flying, and that’s your entire cover, then I’m walking.

Knowledgeable comics fans may notice a dearth of ostensible “hot” A-list talents on the list. That’s not for lack of trying. Tom King, one of my favorite writers of the moment who ranks near the top of my Must List, is currently driving Batman up the sales charts and was therefore too, too beloved for me to get to, based on the hour-by-hour schedule he tweeted for Friday and Saturday. As soon as we general-admission fans were allowed inside Saturday at 9:55, I made a beeline for King’s table in Artists Alley, only to find that over five dozen VIP fans had already beaten me there. And his first signing was only an hour long before he had to go tend to other panels and appointments. The math didn’t work out. I never saw his line any shorter the rest of the weekend and reluctantly gave up. Maybe I’ll have a shot at saying hi when he’s 60, or if he ever flies out to the Superman Celebration in Metropolis.

King wasn’t the only hot ticket in the house. Also blessed with long lines were writer Gerry Duggan (Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy), eternal British fan favorite Alan Davis, and Big Hero 6 creator Chris Claremont, still an icon after the many decades he spent overseeing the fates of the X-Men. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar were deemed so popular that C2E2 let them use actor-sized autograph booths for their respective signings. Millar — the creator of Wanted, Kingsman: The Secret Service, and the elderly version of Wolverine that was a big influence on James Mangold’s Logan — was also deemed soooo massive that fans with lots of disposable income could buy pricey VIP admission packages in his honor with shiny perks. (Marvel’s and DC’s respective booths had their own signing schedules and perpetually long lines as well, but I knew better than to pay attention to those.)

That sweetheart Anne tried taking a surreptitious pic of Chris Claremont, but only got his head floating over Adam Fotos’ comics. She also has a blurry pic of the thigh of a dude who walked between her and Tom King.

That’s not to say all my dreams were dashed upon the unforgiving rocks of frustration and failure and futility. One writer who deserved to have a line reaching from Artists Alley to the show floor entrance and out the front doors of McCormick Place did not, sadly, have such a line. General audiences should at the very least know of Christopher Priest as the inventive genius whose significant contributions to the Black Panther mythos factored heavily into director Ryan Coogler’s recent runaway blockbuster. Currently he’s wrapping up a ten-issue run on Justice League while continuing the knotty machinations of Deathstroke, my favorite DC Rebirth title to date. Going back farther, I’d have to begin typing voluminous paragraphs about Quantum & Woody and Power Man & Iron Fist, to say nothing of obscure gems such as The Falcon, The Crew, The Ray, and Xero, plus there was that time he was the first black editor at Marvel Comics, where he gave future comics writer Peter David his first opportunities, and jump-started the careers of who knows how many other comics pros.

Priest was and is cool, in person and on Usenet’s comics newsgroups when those were a thing. Priest is hyper-intelligent and fun to listen to even when he’s answering other fans’ questions before he gets to you. Meeting Priest essentially made my C2E2 2018. Even if we’d left and gone home right after his table, it would’ve been money well spent.

For the record, Anne showed the photo to Priest for his approval, which he did grant, acknowledging an occasional penchant for “bridge troll” pics.

He didn’t have any books for sale, but he graciously signed my copy of Quantum & Woody #1, which artist/co-creator Mark Bright signed for me at Cincinnati Comic Expo 2016. My entire 2018 in comic conventions is hereby made. I’m dead now. Also, Priest was one of several established talents who had donation buckets at their tables on behalf of the Hero Initiative, a non-profit tasked with drumming up support for elderly or ill comics creators in dire need of financial assistance. Making comics is reportedly a blast, but it’s not a career that comes with a built-in pension or health insurance.

Most recently they confirmed they’ll be lending assistance to former DC writer William Messner-Loebs. Check out their official site for more about what they do for other legends of the medium.

I wish I could’ve bought more than this, but our funds and time were regrettably finite. Now if I can just figure out where to store all these new books, I’ll be all set…at least until our next convention, whenever that is.

Slightly over half of C2E2’s Artists Alley this year, cutting off a good six rows or more because we had no drone to take the shot for us.

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

Part 1: Another Jazz Hands Gallery!
Part 2: Marvel Cosplay!
Part 3: More Cosplay!
Part 4: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 6: Who Else We Met and What We Did [coming soon]
Part 7: Random Acts of Pop Culture [coming soon]

We don’t play Cards Against Humanity, but their advertising is always the best.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

In this special miniseries I’ll be sharing memories and photos from our own C2E2 experience and its plethora of pizzazz…

…and it all comes down to this: photos of stuff and things around the exhibit hall. If you’ve never attended a comics or entertainment convention, or if you missed this year’s C2E2, or if you just really like photos of stuff and things, please enjoy this gallery of geek sights and eye-catching outtakes, guaranteed to have 65% fewer words than Part Five and 85% fewer words than Part Six. Yay pictures!

Wonder Woman and Superman looming over the DC Comics booth.

DC bought out MAD Magazine several years ago and is planning a relaunch with a new #1. Kids, be sure to ask your grandparents who Alfred E. Neuman was.

Valiant Comics reminds everyone they’re still publishing the once-great Quantum & Woody without the participation of creators Christopher Priest and Mark Bright.

Famed superhero painter Alex Ross stopped doing conventions a bit before Anne and I began doing them regularly, but this year he sent his people to hawk his wares in his place.

Next door to DC, a giant ad for the animated project Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors features Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Spider-Gwen, Quake from Agents of SHIELD, Inhumans star Lockjaw, America Chavez, Patriot from the Young Avengers, and some Inhuman I don’t know named Inferno.

Tauntaun a la taxidermy at the 501st Legion’s base camp.

Mandatory astromech droids.

An Imperial Officer guided this remote-control Mouse Droid around the middle of the show floor and somehow didn’t hit me.

The car from the original Mad Max, not The Road Warrior. You may recognize the vehicle in the next space.

We’re not sure if Atreyu from The NeverEnding Story was a team costume like a Chinese dragon or just a humongous stuffed animal.

Funko Pops continue to rule the merchandise booths and are in no danger of going the way of Beanie Babies yet. Give ’em a little more time.

Retro gamers enjoyed classic consoles on ye olde-tyme CRT-TVs. I braked when I noticed the second gamer from left was playing one of the Crash Bandicoot games.

State-of-the-art meets vintage nostalgia in these Skyrim pinball machines.

Glitch Gear carries more Borderlands merchandise (including this Psycho prop mask) than any other booth around — perfect timing for me since I just finished Borderlands 2 a month ago. I remain years behind the average gamer.

The most brilliant marketing idea we saw, courtesy of Bernina: in a room filled with hundreds of fans in homemade costumes, someone’s gonna need sewing machines.

The last thing we saw as we departed McCormick Place at 11 p.m. Saturday.

The End. Thanks for viewing! Lord willing and guest list pending, we’ll see you again next year.

Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Another Jazz Hands Gallery!
Part 2: Marvel Cosplay!
Part 3: More Cosplay!
Part 4: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 5: Comics Creators Cavalcade
Part 6: Who Else We Met and What We Did

One-third of this year’s FCBD reading pile.

It’s that time of year again! Today marked the seventeenth Free Comic Book Day, that annual celebration when comic shops nationwide offer no-strings-attached goodies as a form of community outreach in honor of that time-honored medium where words and pictures dance in unison on the printed page, whether in the form of super-heroes, monsters, cartoon all-stars, licensed merchandise, or entertaining ordinary folk. It’s one of the best holidays ever for hobbyists like me who’ve been comics readers since the days when drugstores sold them for thirty-five cents each and Jean Grey had never died before.

Each year, America’s remaining comic book shops (and a handful in the UK that can afford the extra shipping charges) lure fans and curious onlookers inside their brick-and-mortar hideaways with a great big batch of free new comics from all the major publishers and a bevy of smaller competitors deserving shelf space and consideration. It’s easy to remember when to pin it on the calendar because it’s always the first Saturday of every May and virtually always coincidental with a major movie release. Some folks were concerned about a break in tradition when Avengers: Infinity War moved up a week, but millions of psychologically devastated viewers still have it fresh in mind and haunting them to this day, so there’s no danger of anyone forgetting about superheroes in the near future.

The second third of this year’s FCBD reading pile.

Normally my wife Anne and I venture to one of Indianapolis’ six or seven remaining comic shops an hour or two before they open, hang out in line with other fans, avail ourselves of any freebies offered while we’re waiting, march inside when the figurative starter pistols are fired, grab some of the free offerings, and spend money on a few extra items as our way of thanking them for their service in the field of literacy.

It’s worth remembering Free Comic Book Day is not free for shop owners. The publishers and distributor still charge money for all these comics, which shops then turn around and pass out to anyone who asks for $0.00 apiece. Participation is not cheap. Whether they do it for love of comics, or because they don’t want to look like miserly super-villains, most comic shops join in the fun anyway. No one expects newcomers to the medium to be aware of that, to feel guilty, or to chip in like it’s a charity.

For longtime readers? It depends on our conscience.

And now, the exciting conclusion of this year’s FCBD reading pile.

This year my Free Comic Book Day involvement took on a different form. My local shop offered a special deal that sounds crazy on the face of it: for a fair sum of money, we could pre-purchase a bundle of all 52 Free Comic Book Day comics that their stores planned to order. Normally these would all be free, but you’d look like a schmuck for casually walking in, picking up all 52, and walking right back out. I’m reminded of a moral that Anne and I frequently invoke for many situations: just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.

For the one flat fee up front, they set aside copies of all those comics, bagged ’em up, and let buyers pick them up late Saturday afternoon, once all the furor and hubbub had subsided. So I went for it. I liked the idea of playing the role of patron, donating extra cash to help facilitate Free Comic Book Day for other folks in town, in a way that would help my shop offset the costs. If you really like comics, then sometimes you do things to ensure there will be more comics. And the economic realities of the comics business have not been kind to shops over the past 20+ years. It’s kind of a miracle that Indianapolis still has this many active shops, far more than a lot of large or even larger cities can say. I rather like the idea of them staying in business for as long as I remain attached to their wares.

Now that I’ve done my part, next is the harder part: reading all of these. The next step in my weekend will be to plow through these as quickly as possible, in 100% random order, collating thoughts and images as quickly as I can for sharing with You, The Viewers at Home. Once I finish this entry and a few other errands, I’ll be reading and tossing tidbits online as I go, either on Twitter or on Instagram, or both, depending on my mood. Fair warning to anyone who already follows me on either account: you’re about to see me either flooding my feed, or failing and flailing. Who knows where my time and attention span will take me. At least I know the roads in either direction will be paved with worlds of wonder and pallets of pure imagination. And apparently some Power Rangers, which is not my thing at all, so that comic better not suck.

A boy and his toys go to war. From Maxwell’s Demons #1, art by Vittori Astone.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: on May 5th I once again had the pleasure of once again observing Free Comic Book Day, the least fake holiday of them all, that annual celebration when comic shops nationwide offer no-strings-attached goodies as a form of community outreach in honor of that time-honored medium where words and pictures dance in unison on the printed page, whether in the form of super-heroes, monsters, cartoon all-stars, licensed merchandise, or entertaining ordinary folk. Each year, America’s remaining comic book shops (and a handful in the UK that can afford the extra shipping charges) lure fans and curious onlookers inside their brick-and-mortar hideaways with a great big batch of free new comics from all the major publishers and a bevy of smaller competitors deserving shelf space and consideration.

This year my Free Comic Book Day involvement took on a different form. My local shop offered a special deal that sounds crazy on the face of it: for a fair sum of money, we could pre-purchase a bundle of all 52 Free Comic Book Day comics that their stores planned to order. Normally these would all be free, but you’d look like a schmuck for casually walking in, picking up all 52, and walking right back out. Instead they set aside copies of all those comics, bagged ’em up, and let buyers pick them up late Saturday afternoon, once all the furor and hubbub had subsided. I went for it. I liked the idea of playing the role of patron, donating extra cash to help facilitate Free Comic Book Day for other folks in town, in a way that would help my shop offset the costs.

I spent the rest of Saturday night and nearly all of Sunday reading all 52 and then posting my impressions on Twitter after each comic, along with photo excerpts from every single comic. I took photos rather than scans because (a) our scanner sometimes ruins the hard work of comics colorists, (b) I wanted to capture the feel of comics on actual physical paper, (c) I wanted to test my new phone, and (d) snapping pics was faster than scanning. This reading/photography project took until 11:30 p.m Sunday night to complete, and would’ve taken until sometime Tuesday if I hadn’t cut corners somewhere. I had to put this entry off for a few days because I needed a break after spending so, so much time with them all.

This entry, then, is a condensed version of that epic-length tweetstorm: my ranking of the twenty best books of the bunch, followed by my six least favorites of the entire stack. I never trust a comics reviewer or website that shares nothing but relentlessly glowing opinions — nor, conversely do I trust a critic who hates all comics and can’t be pleased — so this is my way of not becoming that which I disparage.

Up first: that happy Top 20. On with the countdown!

1. Maxwell’s Demons #1 (Vault Comics) — A boy genius is called to fight in another dimension’s war, which may or may not involve his favorite stuffed animals, all beneath the notice of his alcoholic dad. Science fiction in the vein of Ender’s Game and The Last Starfighter by way of Calvin & Hobbes but with a dash of Chronicle to give it a darker resonance. I’d never heard of writer Deniz Camp before this, but he’s absolutely one to watch.

It’s not exactly Take Your Doggie to Work Day. Art by Jim Rugg.

2. Street Angel’s Dog (Image Comics) — Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca warm up for the next chapter in their popular graphic novel series with a done-in-one that gives the scrappy homeless heroine a dog, sort of. Funny/sad with a bit of animal cruelty (though justice is meted!) and a huge moment of WHOOOAAA in a good way. My son once did a report on a Jim Rugg book for school, but returned it to his school library before I could flip through it myself. It’s nice at long last to have a turn with him.

Exactly how comics readers go overboard when a newcomer shows the slightest interest in learning more. Art by Robb Bihun and John Kalisz, with Derek Drymon.

3. Spongebob Freestyle Funnies 2018 (United Plankton Pictures) — An anthology of shorts starring the most-water absorbent cartoon hero ever features great bonus strips by James Kochalka and Maris Wicks, but the winner is the headlining “Super-Villain Team-Up”, in which Our Hero and a most unusual version of Mermaid Man parody today’s superhero crossover events in a style harkening back to the glory days of EC Comics’ original MAD before it went magazine-sized.

TV shows that can’t be bothered to introduce their own characters are the WORST. Art by Warren Wucinich and Fred C. Stresing.

4. Invader Zim (Oni Press) — Several comics were based on TV series I’ve never seen. This was the best of those. I know smart folks who adore what Jhonen Vasquez has done, and now I agree — they are smart. This reprint of a 2017 issue is just 22 pages of TV binge-watching (a la Portlandia‘s famous Battlestar Galactica sketch) but the characters’ dedicated inertia is utterly delightful.

Your move, Benji. Art by Nina Matsumoto.

5. Sparks (Graphix/Scholastic) — Ian Boothby and Nina Matsummoto, previously responsible for some of the best Simpsons comics around, quickly won me over with two cats (think Pinky and the Brain, but cats) performing heroic deeds together by piloting a robot dog suit. Rin-Tin-Tin meets Pacific Rim in a mesh of comedy that had me cackling at midnight Saturday/Sunday and had to send myself to bed before my punchy delirium woke up my family.

High-stakes video gaming in a bygone era. Art by Rafael Loureiro and Dijjo Lima.

6. The Mall #0 (Scout Comics) — A tiny publisher blatantly aiming to become a Hollywood IP farm throws down hard with this drama about a 1984 video game geek, a Mob legacy, a daring bet, a risky deal, and one of those old shopping-mall piano stores that never had customers. Tangled, deadly serious in tone, and sharp enough to avoid the easy trap of nostalgia overdose.

Big Easter eggs for middle-age fans of Batman and the Outsiders or the original Brave and the Bold. Art by Troy Nixey and Michelle Madsen.

7. Starburns Presents #1 (SBI Press) — Patton Oswalt! Dan Harmon! Starburns from Community! They’re making comics! Oswalt’s true tale about a visit to the Hollywood Walk of Fame has heart and obscure DC callbacks; Harmon and co-writer Eric M. Esquivel bring a Luthor-esque villain origin with realistic ugly child abuse and a tantalizing main character that would be a great fit for Jemaine Clement. Two other shorts are included, both on the cutesy-strange side.

When confidence is used for good in high school instead of evil. Art by Svetlana Chmakova.

8. Crush (Yen Press) — Svetlana Chmakova’s follow-up to her previous YA books Awkward and Brave, this time centering on a big, confident, respectable high schooler who turns flabbergasted when he realizes there’s a girl who likes him. Charming, and I want to see more.

Evangelism done horribly, horribly wrong. Art by Andy Clarke and Dan Brown.

9. Relay #0 (Aftershock Comics) — Prologue to a new sci-fi series about slow-burn galactic conquerors whose toolbox includes space missionaries and 2001 monoliths. Highly literate and fairly intriguing, depending on where the allegory is going. If the ultimate point is “HAW-HAW, YOUR RELIGION SUCKS!” then I won’t be along, but at this point before all the cards have been turned face-up, it’s well done for what it is.

Fanfic is hard work, too. Art by Christine Larsen.

10. Adventure Time with Fionna and Cake (Kaboom!/BOOM Studios) — A return engagement for Fionna and Cake, gender-swapped versions of usual heroes Finn and Jake who triumphed in a single episode. They’re back and on a quest, debating the merits of fearing strangers vs. helping them, and slamming grimdark fanfics in between life lessons. All-ages super-fun.

I was never given an opportunity to go away to any camp ever, and this scene confirms my lack of regrets. Art by Vera Brosgol.

11. Comics Friends Forever (First Second Books) — One of two FCBD samplers from the graphic novel publisher, this one pulled well ahead on the strength of an excerpt of Vera Brosgol’s upcoming all-ages book Be Prepared, which hits Peanuts-level notes with one girl’s summer camp insecurities. That’s a pretty high bar to reach. Additional solid teases from Hope Larson and Charise Mericle Harper are among those rounding out the lineup.

Ominous gifts of the Oooold West. Art by A.C. Zamudio and Carlos N. Zamudio.

12. Shadow Roads (Oni Press) — I’m a few volumes behind on Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s The Sixth Gun, but the new spin-off — very nearly the only horror title in the entire FCBD stack — promises more Western suspense and reminds me I really ought to catch up on the original series, too.

Locker room talk, but for kids! Art by Yancey Labat and Monica Kubina.

13. DC SuperHero Girls: Date with Disaster (DC Comics) — The hit cartoon, now on paper! It’s girlish and whimsical at times, but the super-hero action scenes are straight-faced, and writer Shea Fontana refuses to dumb it down or talk down to the fan base. Setting aside the slightly frilly parts and brighter colors, it’s a lot like the all-ages DC Universe of my childhood. Anyone who wants their favorite DC heroines without any dark baggage would do well to check this out.

Action! Espionage! ACTION! Art by David Lopez and Nayoung Kim.

14. The Ghost in the Shell: Global Neural Network (Kodansha Comics) — My lone Ghost in the Shell experience prior to this was the original anime film, which I watched a good twenty years ago on grainy library VHS, which left me frightened and confused even as a former fan of ’80s cyberpunk SF. A friend tried to summarize the products released since then, and the fear and bafflement began to resurface. Much more accessible is this self-contained story from the upcoming Global Neural Network anthology, incentive to go further into the universe if not as far as the lambasted live-action U.S. film.

Not your father’s comic book ads, from Ellen Forney’s forthcoming sequel memoir Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life.

15. World’s Greatest Cartoonist (Fantagraphics Books) — The long-lived Grand Poobah of the independent comics scene continually supports the most eclectic cartoonists around, particularly in this sampler that mixes excerpts with brand new stories. I don’t connect quite so readily some of their more Dadaist, less linear offerings, but I liked the new Dash Shaw vignette, Ellen Forney’s bit, some reliable Jim Woodring bizarre animals, and a one-pager from Georgia Webber about the time she once spent several months literally voiceless.

“YOU WANNA END UP LIKE THIS POOR TEDDY BEAR?” Art by Steve Ellis with Jen Lightfoot.

16. The Only Living Boy #12 (Papercutz) — One of the leading contributors to the 741.59 shelf in the juvenile section at your local library, Papercutz steps into the FCBD spotlight with one of its ongoing titles, action-fantasy about a displaced Earth kid and the motley crew he’s assembled far from home. Creators David Gallaher and Steve Ellis once beat an old message-board peer of mine in a webcomic contest, and continue that rewarding partnership in a boys’-adventure vein.

Bumblebee reminding the readers at home that real heroes care about caring for the innocent. Art by Alex Milne and Sebastian Cheng.

17. Transformers: Unicron #0 (IDW Publishing) — I’m shocked I liked this, but I do have to remind myself Michael Bay doesn’t do comics. This prelude begins the end of the bots’ long run at IDW, soon leading to a no-holds-barred, planet-killing robo-pocalypse. A solid setup for a major event in the making (also guest-starring fellow Hasbro toy ROM Spaceknight!) ends with two Autobots dead because seriously THE END IS NIGH.

Another day, another clique of third-string villains. Art by Ryan Ottley, Cliff Rathburn, and an unidentified Martin.

18. Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel Comics) — In which our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler kicks off his next Marvel relaunch (sigh) with the return of old villains, the company of Mayor Wilson Fisk (I, uh, may have missed some developments?), and the ol’ Parker wit on point. It’s old-school hero fun, but docked several notches on the countdown because writer Nick Spencer’s previous works include the maddeningly secretive Morning Glories, the ghastly Infinite Vacation, and the “Captain America, Super-Nazi” storyline that had mobs of comics fan ready to burn Marvel down. Chances are, sooner or later this will eventually all go horribly wrong, too.

Best double-page spread of all 52 comics. Art by Joe Benitez, Martin Montiel, and Beth Sotelo.

19. Lady Mechanika (Benitez Productions) — I only tend to encounter Joe Benitez’ steampunk heroine on FCBD, but it’s still one of the best-looking books of the day, and eminently readable if a bit short on solid answers and extremely To Be Continued. Half of this was already reprinted for a previous FCBD, but is paired with a new tale that promises to lead to more gear-filled goods.

Right-to-left demon hunting, art by Shirow Miwa.

20. My Hero Academia (Viz Media) — The manga in this year’s entries assumed readers would recognize the preserved right-to-left reading pattern without explanation, which shows how far that section of the comics field has come in the last 25 years. This one had two stories, leading with My Hero Academia, which is DragonBall Z meets Disney’s Sky High, which is not a compliment. But I dig the textured linework on the monster-hunting RWBY backup, which nicely balanced its action lines with judicious use of white spaces and Bob Ross happy trees.

* * * * *

As promised, the following were my least favorite comics. Some obviously weren’t aimed at me. Then again, neither were some of the great ones listed above. These are alphabetical by Your Mileage May Vary.

You are happy. I am happy. We are happy! Art by Angie Nasca.

* Miraculous Adventures of Ladybug & Cat Noir (Action Lab Comics) — I had to Google this one because I no longer have a small child to keep me in touch with today’s kiddie cartoons. Simplistic fare meant for very young girls who prefer only twenty words per page and like learning new vocab like “desperate” and “judgmental”.

It’s like Muppet Babies but if we knew one of them would grow up to become super problematic. No art credits were provided in this comic.

* Howard Lovecraft’s Big Book of Summer Fun (Arcana Press) — I hoped this was a satire. I’m now fairly certain it isn’t. This recaps two animated films that amounted to What If Kid H.P. Had Cartoon Adventures Like Coraline or ParaNorman. Long before I knew he had bigotry issues, Lovecraft’s turgid verbosity was never my thing, and trying to make him and it cutesy is a laughable notion. I just shook my head while reading. A lot.

It’s funny because 28 seasons later, smart people are still boring! HAW HAW! Art by Phil Ortiz, Mike DeCarlo and Nathan Kane.

* Bongo Comics Free-for-All 2018 (Bongo Comics) — Simpsons comics soldier ever onward, still accepting money from the show’s last remaining fans and still grasping for plots. This time around: Cletus meets Kang & Kodos! It’s Lisa’s turn to do Krusty’s show! Bart, uhhh, doin’ Bart stuff! Laugh counter: 0.

What they do when activating their latest Megazord just feels too gauche and gaudy. Art by Diego Galindo and Marcelo Costa.

* Power Rangers: Shattered Grid (BOOM Studios) — Maybe fans will love the idea of them reimagined as a pompous Parliament of Toys debating whether or not to fight the evil Jason David Frank of Earth-3. They might even gasp when a longtime cheesy character is murdered for shock value at the end. This former Saturday morning phenomenon was after my time and will therefore never have me clamoring for anyone to render their impression of Alan Moore sophistication using this particular set of toys.

A universe where Jerry Springer is probably God, but not for any predictable reason. Art by Joe Ng and Tamra Bonvillain.

* The Legend of Korra (Dark Horse Comics) — The titular tale has cute pets and a nifty lesson about selflessness, but is seriously hobbled by its goofy backup story “Arms”, based on a Nintendo fighting game where everyone has Slinky arms. Um. Why. How. WHAT EVEN IS THIS. Possibly for anyone who thinks Stretch Armstrong is too complicated.

“Comics contain worlds of whimsy and wonder and pure imagination! In case you’ve lived under a rock for the past thirty years.” Art by Brendon and Brian Fraim, and House Imagi.

* The Overstreet Guide to Collecting (Gemstone Publishing) — Literally a PSA for collecting stuff and things — not just comics, but collecting any objects that you think are really keen, as long as they’re in a field that’s covered by one of Overstreet’s many hobbyist price guides. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned from the fields of comics, stamps, Hot Wheels, or Beanie Babies, it’s that any really fun thing can be turned into an investment strategy for the sake of securing your retirement funds. Speculation and profit are cool; reading pleasure and artistic merit are options, but not features.

* * * * *

…and that’s exactly one-half of the reading pile that was. If you’re interested in seeing the original live-tweeting of all 52 comics, you can jump to the first tweet in the tweetstorm and just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Internet detectives can scrutinize them closely and notice which ones earned any interaction, which one has the most popular creator on social media, and which photo I forgot to crop. See you next year!

Once upon a time, this dead author was the gateway to a crimefighter’s lair. Who knows where he’s headed next.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 my wife Anne and I have taken a trip to a different part of the United States and visited attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. For 2017 our ultimate destination of choice was the city of Baltimore, Maryland. You might remember it from such TV shows as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, not exactly the most enticing showcases to lure in prospective tourists. In the course of our research we were surprised to discover Baltimore also has an entire designated tourist-trap section covered with things to do.

As a fan of comic books for nearly four decades and counting, I wish I could say we find comic-related tourist attractions everywhere we go, but that’s nearly never the case. Leave it to one of the most powerful men in the comics industry ever so kindly to place one in our Baltimore path. And not just comics — Geppi’s Entertainment Museum is a haven for collectible 20th-century pop culture in general.

Its founder and namesake is Steve Geppi, also the founder and owner of Diamond Comics Distributors, the near-monopolistic juggernaut through which the vast majority of American comic shops are required to receive their weekly comics and ancillary products. Geppi has been a leading figure in the industry since the 1970s, with Diamond rising to indispensable prominence when the tumultuous 1990s market saw the company either outliving or outright buying its competitors. In 2006 Geppi — himself a big fan of all those worlds — decided to try something different and opened his Entertainment Museum on the second floor of the former B&O Railroad Station, with its exhibits curated out of his own enormous personal collections.

As of June 3, 2018, those paragraphs became past tense.

The doorway to adventure on the second floor. The first floor was empty, formerly a sports museum.

The Comics Beat recently reported the news that Geppi’s Museum would be closing its doors for good after a 12-year run marred by financial issues. This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a museum with comics in it shut down. See also: Manhattan’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which closed a year after our 2011 visit. In Geppi’s case the unfortunate ending promises a brighter coda: Geppi would be donating over 3,000 pieces from his collections — worth a good 7-figure amount — to the Library of Congress. Hopefully that’s a better and very different fate than tossing his prizes into a warehouse where they can be “researched” by Top Men.

An old pop-up book lets Mickey Mouse spring to life, unlike Geppi’s place.

We enjoyed our visit, but I can’t say why others can’t say the same. Maybe the admission fare was beyond their means or preference. Maybe it was the fact that all the comic books were behind glass at a distance and hard to appreciate from covers alone, most of them with no accompanying plaques to provide context. Maybe it was the lack of interactive exhibits, an integral feature of children’s museums and even the two small-town toy museums we later visited in Wheeling, WV, and in Bellaire, OH. Maybe it was the somewhat remote location, next door to topically unrelated Camden Yards but quite a few blocks from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where their tourists tend to stay flocked. Judging by the number of thriving museums in and around the Inner Harbor area, the issue certainly isn’t that people hate museums.

From the Director of The Exorcist.

Anne and I took enough photos on our visit to compose at least two full chapters in Our 2017 Road Trip. I was tempted, but I ultimately figured the one gallery was enough to convey the experience and left most of Geppi’s outtakes offline. In honor of their farewell, we here at MCC now offer the following unplanned bonus gallery so that You, The Viewers at Home, can get another round of glimpses into what you missed. I’m sorry to see the place go, but here’s hoping America’s next east-coast comics museum will be even better.

With this handy Wimpy mask, kids could have fun offering to pay people Tuesday for a hamburger today, only to weasel out of paying like a chump.

Rotating exhibits included this spotlight on comics artist J.G. Jones, co-creator of Wanted, which later spawned a movie that barely resembled it.

Trivial Pursuit meets Operation in Bullwinkle’s Electric Quiz Fun Game.

International poster for Saludos Amigos, one of the Walt Disney Animated Classics no one talks about anymore.

In the early days of the McDonald’s Happy Meal, their marketers entertained numerous cross-promotional opportunities with things children were sure to love, such as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which proved to be a big hit with some kindergartens during naptime.

Original art from the 2000 graphic novel Last Day in Vietnam by comics legend Will Eisner.

Sample from Eisner’s job drawing military safety materials during World War II.

Like Eisner, Superman did his part to support the right side of history in WWII.

Unexplained Superman toy hiding in a skyscraper alcove.

Once the world was safe from Nazi evil, Superman and other super-heroes turned their attention to a new pet cause: luring kids into buying Hostess snack cakes.

DC Comics merchandising potpourri.

Batman movie poster promises Caped Crusaders in all the colors of the wind. Or something.

If you only know Steve Ditko from Spider-Man movie credits, there’s a lot you don’t know.

Comic book fans are in mourning tonight over the news that legendary artist Steve Ditko was discovered dead in his apartment on June 29th. To the majority he’s known for a variety of creations and co-creations to his name — not just Spider-Man, but Dr. Strange, Squirrel Girl, DC’s the Question, the Creeper, and a long list of lesser-known quirky, oddly dressed champions of justice.

If anyone asks what the quintessential Ditko comic is, the correct answer is Amazing Spider-Man #33, an unconventional story then and now. Our Hero spends nearly the entire issue trapped under several tons of wreckage, unable to free himself easily, despondent that this may be his last hurrah, but slowly, surely, convincing himself he can find some way to save the day.

When I heard of Ditko’s passing, Spidey #33 wasn’t the first comic that popped into my head. As my brain is wont to do, it went obscure and reached farther back in time to a comic I hadn’t thought about in years.

I’ve been a regular collector at least since December 1978, when I officially got hooked on comics for life and convinced my mom to let me pick up a few each week with our groceries. We weren’t rich, but back then they weren’t expensive. A handful of funnybooks at thirty-five cents apiece didn’t dent her budget too much. Sometime within the following year or so, I have a vague memory of being gifted by persons unknown with a stack of comics they didn’t want. I forget nearly all but two, reprints of Charlton Comics’ 1974 series E-Man, who was basically a yellow-and-orange Plastic Man made of energy instead of rubber. Whimsical super-heroics, good times.

Each issue had a backup story starring other heroes. One in particular struck me in a weird way like no other comic had before: a strange tale of a silent hero named Killjoy, tasked to fight criminals who argued that their illegal acts should be permissible for the most nonsensical of reasons. It was probably one of my earliest experiences with the concepts of true political satire and moral relativism, though it would be years before I recognized either for what they were.

It would be not quite as many years before I recognized the stylings of the writer/artist who didn’t sign his work. Once I realized around age 9 or 10 that all comics have writers and artists (believe it or not!), I began keeping tracking of them and learning to recognize their individual styles. Once I began seeing Ditko’s work regularly via the Marvel Tales series, which in the mid-’80s reprinted his thirty-eight issues of Amazing Spider-Man and the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual, it took only an issue or two before his inimitable facial expressions and distinctive portrayals of super-acrobatics. A few years after that, I began cataloging my entire collection on index cards, came back around to the E-Man issues, and realized Killjoy was 100% undiluted Steve Ditko. I’d had some of his work in my stacks a lot longer than I thought.

Spider-Man was a huge part of my comics reading experience all through childhood, but I think that one bizarre Killjoy tale affected me at an impressionable age on multiple levels. It’s hard to explain and I don’t have time to psychoanalyze myself at length, which is just as well because that isn’t the point of this entry. Posted below is that eight-page Killjoy story from E-Man #4 — written, drawn, and lettered by Ditko circa 1974 when he was 46 (my age today), which should give you far deeper insight into what Ditko stood for than all the Spider-Man products in stores today. If you’re alarmed at any elements in this tale that remind you of 21st century American life, don’t blame me.

I’ve photographed rather than scanned the pages because I savor the visual sensation of aging paper, and because sometimes our scanner is cruel to colorful documents. Enjoy! Or make harsh faces and shake your fist at it in annoyance. I suspect Ditko would’ve been more satisfied with that reaction.

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Doctor Octopus is ready for battle, as is the brand new carpeting in the Stephens Center lobby!

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I made another journey up to Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we found ample enjoyment and new purchases alongside peers and aficionados of comics and genre entertainment. A few guest cancellations dampened our spirits somewhat, but we persevered and enjoyed our couple’s outing anyway, especially since Anne’s entire weekend admission was free as a consolation prize given to her and a couple thousand other fans after David Tennant’s last-minute cancellation last year.

Once again we lead off a new convention miniseries with the mandatory cosplay galleries. We captured whoever we could while wandering the show floor Friday and Saturday in between the autograph lines, the random bits of shopping, and the nightmarish photo-op area, whose Saturday morning state I previously described on Facebook as “a dumpster fire run over by Pamplona bulls being chased by multiple Sharknados.” Anyway: the first three chapters will represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costumes that were in the house. Because I always feel the need to divide cosplayers into arbitrary categories, our first set spotlights the stars of screen and page from the multimedia worlds of Marvel and DC Comics. As always, keep in mind we’re not paid professionals with $3000 cameras. We’re a pair of geeks all too happy to share photos and give away amateur journalism for free. Enjoy!

An old-school Doc Ock mixing it up with his worst enemy.

Okoye! Black Panther! Ulysses Klaue! Killmonger!

Ant-Man and the Wasp and their new bouncer Drax.

Scarlet Witch and Dr. Strange, who probably could’ve taken Thanos together if CERTAIN HEROES hadn’t SCREWED UP.

Years into it, the Deadpool cosplay craze still hasn’t died. This one brought his own unicorn pool-pal.

Another Deadpool insists that’s not an inflatable unicorn. This is an inflatable unicorn.

Everyone loves Deadpool’s unicorn, from Harley Quinn…

…to Poison Ivy. Well, maybe Rey and Kylo Ren don’t love Deadpool.

Another Deadpool accompanies a classic villain called Taskmaster, who duplicated all the weapons and physical abilities of the Avengers. Sadly for him, none of the Avengers was a unicorn.

Bob Rosspool, all but certain his favorite happy place is in a unicorn painting.

Wolverine was dead for awhile recently, and Deadpool was right there with the tasteless protest at his funeral.

Beverly Goldbergpool is more about ducks than unicorns.

Mandatory Squirrel Girl. I’d post an entire Squirrel Girl cosplay gallery if only we’d met more. Rats.

Starfire and Raven of the Teen Titans, now in theaters! Unlike Squirrel Girl, who is not.

The great Mary Marvel, who probably won’t be in next year’s Shazam movie unless they can find a less litigious name.

A better Green Lantern than Ryan Reynolds. Then again, who hasn’t been.

I didn’t mind Mark Strong as Sinestro, but this one is a contender for that coveted yellow ring.

Special shout-out to Jimmy Olsen, who kept my wife company in Tom Welling’s autograph line while I was off bulldozing my way through a crowd of upset Outlander fans. They agreed Olsen was a far better photographer than Peter Parker, glorified master of super-selfies.

Speaking of which: Spider-Man and his amazing variants!

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

Part 2: Movie Cosplay!
Part 3: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 4: Ghostbusters!
Part 5: Who Else We Met and What We Did [coming soon]
Part 6: Objects of Affection [coming soon]

Costume Contest winners, Group/Duo division: various ghosts from the cast of Beetlejuice, including Michael Keaton and Alec Baldwin!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I made another journey up to Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we found ample enjoyment and new purchases alongside peers and aficionados of comics and genre entertainment. Once again we lead off a new convention miniseries with the mandatory cosplay galleries. We captured whoever we could while wandering the show floor Friday and Saturday…

Rather than piling 50-60 photos into a single entry that takes weeks to scroll through, our process of arbitrary gallery groupings continues, this time with a batch of characters from assorted movies, both live-action and animated. Some are admittedly movie-adjacent, but the point is costumes. Enjoy!

A different kind of spirit: a pair of Pennywises from Stephen King’s It.

Li’l Georgie Denbrough, floating up here.

Ghostface, leader and sole member of the Occupy Sidney movement.

Cruella DeVil carrying her future hat.

Jack Skellington and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

An awfully chummy Ripley and xenomorph remind viewers that Alien Resurrection is canon whether they like it or not.

I know zilch about Star Wars New Canon outside the movies, so for all I know this Sith could be on the list.

Or they’re both “Bring Back Legends” characters that my wife never mentioned. Or she mentioned them but didn’t show me photos.

From the new hit film, Christopher Robin with pals Pooh and Piglet.

The soon-to-be-rebooted Hellboy hanging out with Mad Moxxi from Borderlands.

You might remember Lady Liberty from such films as Planet of the Apes, Cloverfield, X-Men, and Ghostbusters 2.

Elastigirl gets a helping hand from TV’s the Tick and Bob the Builder,

Also from The Incredibles: Edna Mode and Dash, naturally looking fabulous.

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

Part 1: Marvel and DC Cosplay!
Part 3: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 4: Ghostbusters!
Part 5: Who Else We Met and What We Did [coming soon]
Part 6: Objects of Affection [coming soon]

Yutaro Katori from The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird. Or if you’re on Twitter a lot, the “IS THIS A PIGEON?” meme, live and in 3-D!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife and I made another journey up to Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we found ample enjoyment and new purchases alongside peers and aficionados of comics and genre entertainment. Once again we lead off a new convention miniseries with the mandatory cosplay galleries. We captured whoever we could while wandering the show floor Friday and Saturday…

…and here are all the rest, all the other cosplayers whose works we appreciated and whose souls we captured. We apologize sincerely for the hundreds of other great cosplayers we didn’t photograph, but: (a) we were trapped in lines a lot; (b) we’re getting older and recognizing fewer costumes; (c) Deadpool variants notwithstanding, we tend to sidestep characters that show up in packs of fifty; (d) I’m getting less excited every year about competing with roving herds of Instagrammers who don’t even bother to learn the names of the characters they photograph; (e) we don’t do costume contests anymore; (f) no ever runs up to us and demands we take and post their pic, which would be most welcome and super convenient for us if they did; and (g) by 5 p.m. Saturday we’d accomplished all our goals and lost our wills to walk.

If you don’t see yourself here, I’m really sorry, but I do hope you get to see a few other fellow cosplayers that you missed this weekend. We saw a lot of fine efforts all around the Stephens Center, breathing new life into favorite characters and generally enriching the WWC experience. Enjoy!

Skeletor, another Costume Contest winner.

The Energizer Bunny! The other side of his drum had a very special message written on it, but I’m keeping it all to myself to make myself feel special inside.

Princess Peach, in exactly the right castle.

Big in-joke for fans who convened on the scene to meet the four main cast members from Boy Meets World. Sadly, William Daniels could not be reached for comment.

The Tick’s partner Arthur, represented by one of several pro performers from Acrobatica Infiniti Circus.

Also from Acrobatica Infiniti: Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

From The Simpsons: Prom King Artie Ziff, Jimbo Jones with Milhouse wrapped in VOTE QUIMBY tape, naturally Homer, and Selma with Jub-Jub. Our best guess on the lady in green is…someone else from Acrobatica Infiniti? Maybe? No?

From the Department of I’m a Horrible Person, Part 1: Ariel and Captain Planet’s Planeteers, but I cut off one teammate at the end. Really sorry.

Department of I’m a Horrible Person, Part 2: I thought this was the fighting chicken from that one Family Guy episode, but it’s actually Richard from Hotline Miami. His two companions were from the same game, but I snapped this before I realized it and cut them out and feel bad about it and have more guilt.

A green Dalek insisting if the the Doctor can have companions, so can they.

Also old-school: Klingons!

SPAAAAAAAACE GHOOOOOOOOOST!

Guards from Resident Evil‘s Umbrella Corporation.

Cthulhu and campaign manager. In this climate I wouldn’t count them out.

A Skull Kid from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

Some people aren’t into costumes, like Jim Halpert in his 3-hole punch getup from The Office‘s season-2 Halloween episode.

As seen on the Disney Channel, the cast of Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir — Plagg, Cat Noir, Tikki, Ladybug, and Gabriel Agreste with Nooroo.

(Special thanks to my son for naming assistance on two of these. Old or not, I still like learning about new and unknown universes.)

That’s practically all the costume photos we have, but the chronicle of our Wizard World Chicago weekend is far from over. To be continued!

Other chapters in this special MCC miniseres:

Part 1: Marvel and DC Cosplay!
Part 2: Movie Cosplay!
Part 4: Ghostbusters!
Part 5: Who Else We Met and What We Did [coming soon]
Part 6: Objects of Affection [coming soon]