The man! The myth! The master of musical mirth!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the third annual GalaxyCon Columbus in Ohio’s very own Greater Columbus Convention Center. The show returned with another lengthy guest list for fans of all media across the pop culture spectrum…though the two of us didn’t actually do a lot this time for a variety of reasons, and this year’s edition had a few logistical issues. Nevertheless, the show went on…
And what a show it was! We accomplished all our primary objectives, which was a shorter list than usual due to self-imposed budgetary restrictions. Frankly, we’ve had a long year of fiercely competitive, increasingly more expensive comic-cons and some non-geek expenditures we need to handle at fun’s expense. Also, unlike the last two GalaxyCons, there just weren’t a lot of actors on the list we wanted to meet that badly. We’d met several of them before, including the arguably biggest name, former teen star Hayden Christensen, who was at Indiana Comic Con last March. We had a couple of maybes on the list, but ultimately we had to be choosy.
I may also have been more nervous than usual because of an old comic-con war wound.
Among our personal geek-out rules: we don’t attend a con for the sake of meeting just one and only one guest. If that lone guest cancels, then what do you do? Throughout our years we’ve seen many a fan heartbroken because they bought tickets to a con just to meet the one celebrity they wanted to meet more than anyone else in the entire universe, only for that singular talent to cancel, leaving the fan forlorn and feeling purposeless and stuck with a nonrefundable ticket. Sure, they could’ve gone anyway and found other things to do. Usually they don’t, and choose to despair instead. Despair sucks.
Longtime MCC readers may recall that happened to us once upon a time in 2017, when a show in Louisville with an already-shaky reputation totally swore the headliner at their next annual event would be the amazing colossal “Weird Al” Yankovic. We broke our rule, bought tickets on the strength of his name alone, despaired when he canceled, watched in bemused horror as thirty other guests canceled, and eventually walked into a fiasco held in an abandoned department store. (On the bright side, the cosplayers rocked.)
Seven years later, here we went again: last August, GalaxyCon announced “Weird Al” would be coming. Did we dare hope? Would lightning actually strike this time? What if there’s a “Weird Al” curse that dooms any con daring to invoke his name? What if it’s a huge industry secret that he’s a big fat jerk and this is a prank he likes to pull just to make his listeners cry? What if we buy the tickets and then we die? How many other ways could this go wrong and force me to put on my amateur journalist hat again and start documenting another FIENDISH WEB OF LIES?
Then we remembered GalaxyCon had been pretty swell for us so far, two years running. So we bought our tickets four months ago on the strength of his name, took it on faith there’d be other folks we’d want to meet as the announcements rolled on, and prayed for the best.
The lines to registration, badge pickup and so forth. At left is one of the center’s permanent art installations, the interactive As We Are.
The exhibit hall was scheduled to open at 2 p.m. Friday; registration would open at 1. Our three-hour drive from Indianapolis landed us in Columbus shortly after 11. We parked in our favorite garage, attached by tunnel-bridge to the convention center so we could leave our coats in the car rather than lug them around all day. Over 500 spaces were open at this time, so that wasn’t an issue for us early birds. We wandered into the convention center to use the bathroom before going to grab lunch on nearby High Street (keeping our coats with us for the few blocks’ walk). This year the bridge entrance had a new feature: a security checkpoint. With no one in line yet, we fairly sailed through.
After lunch we came back to the garage, dropped off our coats amid the day’s 22-degree chill, and survived the mere hundred-foot walk from my car to the bridge entrance unprotected, like Gordo and Tracy Stevens running across the moon. Security had a line this time, but a short one. We strolled into the main concourse at 12:25. A couple hundred attendees were already in line for registration, which had been moved this year to the north end of the convention center — the polar opposite end from where it’d been the last two years. The relocation was knowable in advance if you’d gone to their website and clicked on the Schedule button, which took you to a PDF of the entire 2024 program. Page 23 of that PDF was the only place in their entire site that had a map of the complete show floor — the exhibit hall, all the panel rooms, the few relevant rooms upstairs, and a caption in the corner pointing to registration. If you entered the center from the north end (as we did), you’d trip over the clearly labeled booths right there. If you were among the several thousand who entered through any other doors and hadn’t found the super-secret map that was not in the official GalaxyCon app (whose tabs only had a map of the exhibit hall, nothing beyond its walls), then you’d spend a good while wandering the length of that rather huge building, begging for directions or joining the first line you saw, little realizing you’d chosen poorly. We witnessed a lot of unguided, unsupervised wanderers who had no idea.
We waited over half an hour in the general-admission line before we realized they had a separate table for us fans who’d pre-purchased the 3-day “deluxe” pass. That line only had four or five people in it. A few minutes later, we were badged up, ready to con, and overloaded with freebies that came with our otherwise barely useful “deluxe” pass. Beyond the blessedly shorter line, our package came with a slightly different badge and, most importantly for Anne’s collecting purposes, GalaxyCon lanyards and pins. Each oversized swag-bag also included a blank GalaxyCon sketchbook, the first issue of Marvel’s miniseries adaptation of Ahsoka season 1 with GalaxyCon exclusive variant cover by Georges Jeanty, a 2021 wrestling comic with three stories (including a cute Christmas tale illustrated by Jill Thompson!), and a 2019 AWA Studios sampler of eight series published under their Upshot imprint that no longer exists, two of which I’d already bought.
Once again Anne wore her Santa hat, now with her new GalaxyCon 2024 pin affixed.
From there, as with past years, we weren’t sure which of the three sets of doors would be letting everyone in at 2:00. Among the choices of Halls A, B, or C, we joined one of the lines leading to Hall C because it was closest. While Anne held our spot, I ran the two big, unwieldy, unhelpful swag-bags back to the car, once again braving the wintry air unsuited like Douglas Quaid stumbling around Mars and shuffled through security a third time, taking longer still as more fans were showing up. Back in line, we enjoyed chatting for a while with a young couple next to us — Civil War re-enactors from Maryland, one of whom was wearing the costume he uses for those very occasions. Same as she’d done at last September’s Star Trek to Chicago event, Anne brought along badge ribbons to hand out to whoever came within proximity and accepted them, beginning with this lucky couple.
If you attended this show and saw these around the place: that was Anne. She still has leftovers.
Shortly before 2:00 a woman with a megaphone walked up and down the densely packed hall, mumbling at top volume that — well, we think she said — anyone wanting to enter the exhibit hall needed to line up at Hall A, on the polar opposite end from where we now stood. Very few people felt moved by this alleged direction. We decided to obey what we thought we heard, bade our line companions farewell, and trudged through the teeming masses down to Hall A. Its doors were locked and no one was standing at them.
We retreated slightly the other way, in the direction of the doors to Hall B. While I joined the next line we found and held a spot for us, Anne volunteered for reconnaissance — she walked toward the very front of said line. A minute later, she confirmed a volunteer said we were indeed in a line for the exhibit hall. This came as complete news to the next seven or eight people ahead of us in line, all of whom thought it was for registration. We knew where that was and gave them directions. They all left and we moved several feet closer to our eventual destination. We’re glad we could be helpful.
Several minutes after 2:00, we weren’t moving. Anne volunteered for reconnaissance again. She returned moments later after seeing what vaguely resembled an unannounced ribbon-cutting ceremony at the entrance with special guests. Opening ceremonies aren’t entirely unheard of (C2E2 has grown fond of them), but they’re always held before the scheduled opening time. The surprise delay wasn’t appreciated on the far end of the line(s) that couldn’t see or hear them.
At 2:20 the line finally moved and we were in. We headed directly toward Weird Al’s table and lined up behind a few dozen other folks. To our delight, among them was another couple we’d met at last year’s GalaxyCon. It was fun catching up until the crescendoing crowd noise complicated chitchat. Anne gave them badge ribbons.
Two women ran the table; Al himself sat inside a curtained booth next to it. They did a nice job of alternating between VIP fans and us non-VIP fans, letting each line take turns having our brushes with polka-based greatness. A few minutes after 3, we were treated to a wacky interruption: fellow guest and comedian Thomas Lennon, along with a cameraperson, darted into our area, paused while Al finished up with a fan, then burst through the curtains for, presumably, a quick moment of hilarity. I couldn’t hear from our side of the curtains, but I’m sure the footage will be online somewhere if it isn’t already. Lennon was in there maybe thirty seconds at most.
Lennon awaits his moment for ambush in his Reno 911! costume. Pics from other attendees indicate he wore it all day long.
Our turn came a few minutes after this brief guerrilla intermission. Anne handed badge ribbons to the duo at the table, we entered the curtains, and Al signed my DVD set of The Weird Al Show and waited graciously while I babbled at him for a minute — nothing he hasn’t heard and waited out before, I’m sure. As a value-added bonus, every autograph purchase came with a free selfie! He was just that generous.
Once again! With feeling!
I could go on and on about his influence on my life. I was 12 when “Eat It” hit the airwaves. I lost count of how many times I listened to his album Dare to Be Stupid on cassette again and again and again, more than the rest (which all got their turns!). I saw UHF in its original theatrical run and loved it, but couldn’t understand why our theater was so empty. I caught the only episode of The Weird Al Show that our local CBS affiliate bothered to air (the one with future Runaways costar Kevin Weisman as a lousy “friend”) and was over the moon when Shout! Factory released the entire series on DVD. I finally got to see him live in 2015 on his Mandatory Fun tour. I saw quite a few of his cameos in random shows and films over time, but might’ve missed a music video or two, though I once wrote about some of them. Along with other sources such as the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker oeuvre and Cracked Magazine (the print version in its John Severin prime), Weird Al’s expertly crafted song send-ups helped cement a love of spoof, parody and satire that I’ve held since childhood, even after six billion YouTubers differently influenced by him showed up in the 21st century and diluted the song-parody market into a full-on glut. Admittedly even I wrote a few spoofs in my time, but at least I didn’t perform them. I did what every real geek used to do: I buried them in places where they’ll never be unearthed, like message boards and Usenet and a blog.
So yeah, this was kind of a big deal. I met one of the biggest celebs who ever had any direct, measurable effect on my life and I found closure on our 2017 Louisville debacle at long last.
This memorable moment wrapped up ’round 3:15. We’d also prepaid for a Weird Al photo op, which was scheduled Friday at 5:30. You’ll note the results in our lead photo, looking better than we’d dreamed. His photo-op line was shorter than expected, no doubt because most fans were fine with the sweet free-selfie-with-autograph-purchase deal. Sometimes we’re okay with photos at the autograph table; sometimes we like to go a little bigger for posterity. We were done at 5:36 and…well, Far as I was concerned, anything else we did would be extra credit.
Case in point: we attended a sketch duel! They’re a lovely concept we’ve enjoyed at other cons in Chicago and Cincinnati. A moderator corrals two or three artists into a panel room where the audience helps choose a subject or scenario for each to draw within a certain time limit. While they’re trying to sketch and concentrate and do the work, the moderator pumps them with questions, their own or the audience’s. When time’s up, the results are revealed and the sketches are given away to lucky audience members. Otherwise, it’s all in good fun in this game, where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.
I don’t attend sketch duels for the chance to win freebies; I love ’em because panels about comics are increasingly rare nowadays (apart from comics-making seminars) and they’re a great chance to hear the artists talk shop and watch them amaze us with their talents. The main reason I never commission sketches in Artists Alley (besides pricing in some cases) is I feel extremely awkward standing there and looming silently over someone for long minutes while they work. Sketch duels are a far more fun, small-scale community gathering where I can blend in with a crowd and sit instead of loom. And the older we get, the more we desperately need excuses for sitting.
After the Weird Al photo op we arrived early for a 6 pm sketch duel with a trio of Artists Alley guests: Thom Zahler (whom we’d previously met), cartoonist behind such creator-owned works as Love and Capes and frequent contributor to IDW’s My Little Pony comics; Dave Wachter, whose resumé includes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Planet of the Apes, Marvel’s most recent version of the Punisher, and his ongoing Image book Uncanny Valley; and Cory Smith, whose credits range from TMNT to Star Wars to Wolverine, some upcoming Fantastic Four, et al.
Left to right: Zahler, Wachter, Smith, and Victor Dandridge Jr.
Our host Victor Dandridge Jr. is a frequent moderator at our Midwest cons from Chicago to Columbus (and probably beyond). He’s tabled on occasion, and we last saw him at Fan Expo Chicago 2024, where he was among the opening acts for the Mark Hamill. He knows how to keep a panel light and moving, never runs out of questions, and carries an infectious energy to bring just about any interviewee to life. I’m happy anytime I see him at the front of a room.
Smith answers a question while Zahler and Wachter prep their workspaces.
Dandridge started them off with a warmup exercise — five minutes to draw an audience member’s suggested character: Princess Peach. All were completed on time and uniformly excellent. Full disclosure: to my delighted shock, I won Zahler’s Peach sketch. You heard it here first: people really win at sketch duels!
Next was their main challenge: draw their favorite character running a lemonade stand. Dandridge grilled them while they worked. I didn’t take notes for every question because I wanted to sit back and relax at least a little. Among the subjects covered:
- Their “Mount Rushmore” lists of influential artists would include Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Darwyn Cooke, George Perez, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Chris Bachalo, and Bernie Wrightson.
- Praise was rightfully heaped upon G.I. Joe #21, the classic “silent issue”. They couldn’t remember the issue number and I didn’t feel like shouting.
- Favorite art tools! Smith prefers analog penciling. Wachter enjoys brushwork as well as his iPad. Zahler was the most exacting: Raphael Series 2 brushes with Russian sandalhair (or something like that, maybe I misheard?) and Col-Erase pencils (I had some in my youth!).
- Zahler is a Kubert School alum (’89-’92) but notes that some dropouts went on to better careers than graduates (e.g., Scott Kolins, inker Kim DeMulder). Smith also graduated from Kubert (’01-’04) back when the Kubert family (Andy, Adam, and the late, great Joe) were all still personally teaching there, but wishes they’d also had classes about the business side of comics. Wachter went to the Art Institute of Chicago (we’ve visited there!) and dabbled in filmmaking for a while till he lost interest in the “cat-herding” nature of that medium.
- Most frustrating things to draw! For Smith, it’s cars. For Wachter, office interiors are a crashing bore, especially whenever a writer asks for several pages of dialogue set there. Zahler shares a lot of artists’ antipathy for drawing horses. (He acknowledged the irony in light of his MLP catalog.)
- All their responses to the question, “What was your best fan interaction?” were great, but I’m hoarding those for myself. Maybe you can ask them at a con yourself sometime.
…and so on. Dandridge called time and showed off the finished works, though viewing the results was awkward due to technical issues with the room’s screen projector. Our trio drew lemonade stands manned by the likes of Firestorm, Swamp Thing, and one character I couldn’t make out who looked like a blob from afar. MCC congratulates the winners of those pieces as well as my two fellow Princess Peach winners.
Dandridge just asking questions while the guys draw and double-check online for visual reference material.
That concluded our Friday at the show. The next thirteen hours were spent on non-con travel stuff we’ll cover in a separate post for any readers who stick around.
Come 8 a.m. Saturday, we returned to the same garage, got an even better space out of the 593 that were still available by then, sped through the security checkpoint (my fourth and final time, Anne’s third) and joined one of the lines leading to Hall B. We chatted with two guys who were veterans of Florida’s Megacon, among other shows, and with a father and daughter who were excited about the con’s dedicated space for the Toontown Rewritten MMO. This time we were let inside the hall promptly at the scheduled time of 10:00 with no further shenanigans for us early birds. I cannot say the same for the later birds.
We had almost nothing planned. After browsing Artists Alley the day before and not buying much, I returned to the tables of two of our sketch-duel participants and added to my reading library.
Thom Zahler! I picked up a collection of his Webtoons strip Warning Label, which sounds like another winning comedy.
Dave Wachter! I’ve now read the first two issues of Uncanny Valley, in which he and writer Tony Fleecs hit a lot of sweet spots for me. I’ll be hitting up my local comic shop this Wednesday to see if they have #3-up.
Behold my major award, Zahler’s five-minute Princess Peach! Also, Wachter’s available prints included this awesome Columbo piece, which brought Anne great joy as a fan of the show. She had to have it.
Other than Weird Al, the guest list had one (1) actor I wanted to meet. Anne and I do love character actors and will track them as we hop around from one TV show to the next, whether from the vintage network days or in today’s lower-paying streaming gigs. Sure, stars and A-listers are cool, but our eyes light up whenever they’re supported by the best character actors around — those folks who never earn seven-figure paychecks, who have to genuinely work for a living, and who bring a little something extra whenever a filmmaker will stand back and let them.
Hence: special guest Kurt Fuller! You may have seen him in such films as Wayne’s World, Ghostbusters II, or The Running Man; in his main role on the CBS/Paramount+ series Evil; or in recurring/guest spots in countless shows such as NewsRadio, Sledge Hammer!, the Night Court revival, Studio 60, The Tick, and tons more. His appearance here was part of a cast reunion for the USA Network series Psych, which we haven’t seen. Looking over his IMDb entry, I also would’ve seen him in True Believer as well as Best Picture nominees Ray, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Midnight in Paris. I won’t pretend I remember then all with 4K clarity (especially not the Woody Allen period-piece), but they’ve all added to my mental picture of Fuller as a welcome player every time.
I wasn’t sure if he’d do jazz hands till I saw him stabbing himself in the neck with another fan’s cosplay blade, so that worked out.
Fuller was extremely nice and called Evil “my retirement series”. If it was indeed his farewell to 14-hour workdays on sets, his career has had one heck of a run.
There concluded our complete GalaxyCon Columbus 2024 guest-list experience. Otherwise, all we had on deck was more browsing and a bit of shopping. All around us, geek merch begged for what little dough we allowed ourselves to spend.
Christmas Yoda! A Santa fan just like Anne, he is!
High-end Lord of the Rings statues!
Darth Vader’s crushed helmet! The vendor regaled us with tales of past cons and sharing after-show bar rounds with the likes of Ron Perlman and Peter Weller.
Merely a supersized display item, not for sale: Snort, a mascot from Otherworld, a local specialty art museum.
Just as a big chunk of our cosplay gallery comprised members of the 501st Legion, so did the Star Wars props and statues filling their enormous booth space add up to the largest gallery among all our exhibit-hall pics.
Roron Corobb, an Ithorian Jedi and Clone Wars animated bit player.
A Talz, one of Episode IV’s OG Cantina aliens whose race was later spotlighted in the Clone Wars episode “Trespass”.
A speeder bike, though I don’t recognize the model offhand.
R2-D2 and Huyang, most recently seen in Ahsoka.
Dawn of Order, a pro-Palpatine sculpture by 501st member Nick Hahn just begging to be toppled by Rebel Alliance activists.
These were not the jazz hands we were looking for.
Congratulations to the following vendors and artisans who successfully pried our money from our warm, living hands:
- Author and erstwhile Comics Buyer’s Guide staffer John Jackson Miller, whom we’ve met multiple times and who brought his latest novel Batman: Resurrection, a sequel to the 1989 blockbuster film that reimagines the original Clayface in a Tim Burton vein.
- Drew Blank, whose collections of sitcom buttons are another frequent go-to for me at cons, though in recent years he’s found success with pillowcases and tote bags bearing faces of assorted hot-guy actors accompanied by pun-altered, fan-affirming quotes.
- Gem City Books, Dayton’s dependable purveyor of deep discounts on omnibuses and oversized graphic novels. They’re my guilty pleasure.
- Glitch Gaming, who read my mind and just knew I was on the lookout for Fallout merch.
- A dealer who didn’t have their shop name posted but carried what Anne was seeking above all else — Hallmark Star Trek ornaments from years past.
…and that was a wrap for the Goldens at GalaxyCon Columbus 2024. We were still exhausted from the day before, had another time-sensitive site we wanted to check out elsewhere in town, and we liked the idea of arriving home before nightfall. We sprang for one last quick buy — lunch at the convention center’s “Homegrown Market” de facto convenience store, which had absolutely no line, unlike all the other overwhelmed food stands. I had a veggie salad with chickpeas and kalamata olives; Anne had ice cream. And then we left early, all primary objectives accomplished. We were tired but content.
GalaxyCon backdrop for taking happy comic-con selfies after a fun time has been had by all!
Meanwhile all around us, things were apparently falling apart.
At the time, we hadn’t really thought about it. As we headed back to the garage around 12:30, we thought the lines to (re)enter the exhibit hall seemed ridiculously long. Over at the registration booths — hours into the day, mind you — the lines were as thick as they’d been on Friday morning, as if thousands of locals with no weekend plans had casually decided to come check out the festivities and assumed you could just drop in anytime, like a shopping mall or a Walmart. We pulled out of the garage with no trouble, but orange cones stood in front of the entrance, barring any more incomers.
Later in the day, we began reading war stories online from other fans. All the garages in the vicinity allegedly maxed out early on, sending latecomers on hours-long side quests for the next-best options that would, if nothing else, help them get in a few days’ worth of steps. At least one garage tunnel experienced a severe security-checkpoint backup, causing an onerous wait time just to walk in the door. Later hordes of would-be attendees continued struggling to find the registration booths. Most calamitous of all, we understand at one point the convention center’s entire wi-fi system crashed for a while, bringing commerce to a full stop except between vendors and customers who were equipped to deal in cash rather than in cards or phone-pay methods. Hence the registration throngs, possibly. We were told the ATMs ran out of cash as well, but really, that’s typical of every comic-con ever. Never, ever, ever tell yourself, “Well, if I run out of cash, I’ll just stop at an ATM in the convention center!” YOU FOOL.
Anyway: we were sorry to hear of so much disappointment. It isn’t quite the same as walking into a fiasco short thirty-one canceled guests and held in an abandoned department store, but fan letdown of that magnitude sucks. We hope things got better, but we were long gone by then — off to another geek-minded attraction that we’ll cover in a separate post for any readers who stick around.
The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con. And if you like Star Trek, Anne should have some badge ribbons waiting for you.
The rest of our loot. Yay shopping!