Alternate shot of Bluepool and the Captain America: The First Avenger Dancing Girls Costuming Group.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover 2½ months ago:

For years we’ve been telling friends in other states that we’d one day do Atlanta’s Dragon Con, one of the largest conventions in America that isn’t in California or New York. We’ve been in Atlanta, but we hadn’t really done Atlanta. Hence this year’s vacation, in which we’re aiming for a double proficiency in Atlanta tourism and over-the-top Dragon Con goodness…

Upon our return home, I did my best to post our photos of the experience as quickly as possible, twelve chapters’ worth plus prologue and epilogue. Seven of those galleries were devoted to their gargantuan cosplay parade through the streets of Atlanta…

The proud annual tradition of the Saturday morning Dragon Con parade is definitely not a thing we can see back home at any of our usual cons. Multiple groups and organizations walk, ride, roll, and gallivant together in a united display of pop culture through downtown Atlanta. Hundreds of participants boast costumes and gear from across the wide spectrum of entertainment. The festivities draw thousands of onlookers every time — not just D*C attendees, but Atlanta citizens as well…the spectacle is nonetheless a staggering feat of community and imagination. Of the nearly 1800 photos Anne and I took over the course of our eight-day trip, roughly 400 of those were from the parade alone…

Some 140-150 photos later, I convinced myself it was time to move on:

…and that’s essentially it for the Dragon Con parade at long last, well after the cosplayers involved have probably already recuperated, forgotten about photos, and moved on to planning for their next major events.

And here we are today, not moving on but rather moving backward. Because I can! Feel free to try and stop me retroactively somehow.

The following surplus gallery marks where the 14-chapter Dragon Con saga fits into the larger narrative that is Our 2019 Road Trip. It also serves as one last hurrah of outtakes, excerpts, and baffling oversights. Some of these I wasn’t happy with the first time around and wish we’d done the cosplayers better justice. On some of them I’ve second-guessed whether or not I was too picky. A few were simply, inexcusably overlooked and underappreciated during the hours I spent curating, editing, uploading, labeling, sharing, and being driven to exhaustion by laboring over so many photos in such a short time frame…which I’ve gone ahead and done yet again for what I presume is the last time, but for real now. I think. Enjoy!

Among the previous omissions were numerous photos of assorted famous cars of pop culture. Exhibit A: a S.H.I.E.L.D. cruiser.

The ECTO-1 is a familiar convention sight, usually brought by fan groups for charity fundraising initiatives.

The ’67 Chevy Impala from TV’s Supernatural, now celebrating its 86th season.

Steampunk golf cart.

Alternate shot of one of the sweet celebrity-carrying sports cars. In the back seat a cheery Lou Ferrigno shouts, “NO FREE PHOTOS! EVERYONE OWES ME $80!”

The Scooby Gang’s Mystery Machine. Its presence here means someone in Atlanta is faking ghosthood for profit.

A Cheshire Cat car.

Pirates disembark from their ship for group photos.

Olivander Jr. taking it to the streets with his wand cart. Why buy from an ice cream man when you can buy a wand and create your own treats from thin air?

TIE Fighter pulled along on a trailer, which is how most of them end up after a dogfight with the Millennium Falcon.

YO, DAWG, I HEARD YOU LIKE MANDALORIANS.

(Minor note of peevishness: in addition to cashing in on this week’s Mandalore Mania, that photo is also my clearest shot of the two individuals who, during the parade’s final twenty minutes, each decided to jump out in front of the more orderly fans who’d been in position and politely toeing the line for hours, and started adding to their Instagram stories at the expense of anyone standing behind them. Pieces of their anatomy appear in several of our photos as unwanted Easter eggs if you look closely. Triple extra credit points to any readers game enough to look back at the original chapters and spot the one photo where you can see the one lady standing on the other side of the street before she crossed over and began hogging ours. I was tempted to devote an entire entry to the matter, but decided to vent my pettiness in this paragraph instead and then, one hopes, let it go.)

Rey and the best turnout of Stormtroopers we’ve seen from the 501st Legion outside of a Star Wars Celebration.

Elite Praetorian Guard from The Last Jedi.

Crunk Jedi! Looking for inroads into that New Canon.

Jawas!

Cobra Commander (third from left) reunited with assorted GI Joe nemeses.

Fauna,Flora, and Merryweather, the fairy godmothers from Disney’s Cinderella.

Black Superman (take THAT, IDris Elba), Joker, and, well, Where’s Wakanda?

The Vision, polka-dotted Wonder Woman, and X-Men charter member the Angel in his old X-Factor costume.

Historians and history buffs representing real-life pioneers for the D*C Skeptics track.

Dr. Horrible and Speed Racer, members of Atlanta’s own Seed & Feed Marching Abominable band.

Catwoman and Cheetah.

Pepper Potts with an Arc Reactor in her bouquet.

Groot, dressed from that time someone in comics thought it made total sense for space renegades to wear matching military uniforms.

Pink Bender from an alt-timeline Futurama.

Blastoise!

The Sixth Doctor, bringing his own shade to buffer Atlanta’s overbearing summertime sun.

…and here endeth our Dragon Con 2019 parade coverage. Most likely.

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 sign-up 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!]

Me with Jonah Heston and Kinga Forrester, a.k.a. Jonah Ray and Felicia Day from Netflix’s MST3K revival. Yes, this was a very good day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last year my wife Anne and I had the sincere pleasure of attending the inaugural Louisville Supercon, a three-day festival of comic-con goodness with screen actors, anime/animation voice actors, comic book creators, and other talents in the house to sign, pose, chat, and thrill. A con on the cusp of a holiday season was a tough sell for us, but we gave it a shot and had a blast, albeit on a tight budget at year’s end.

Fast-forward to today, and here we are again. Our budgetary crunch was even tougher because this year half the inanimate objects in our house have broken down and demanded attention. We made plans for a return engagement in Louisville anyway, now subsumed into a larger organization and rechristened GalaxyCon Louisville. Once again all the dreams we could afford to indulge were fulfilled, and we didn’t experience a single issue that could be blamed on the con. It was smoothly run A-plus fun except for the part where our aging bodies failed and imposed limits upon us. (Among other lessons, I learned trying to carry a heavy convention bag with the strap slung on your shoulder that’s just received a flu shot the day before is…not a pleasing sensation.) Otherwise: 12/10 very awesome, much entertainment, would convention there again.

The day looked awful on the outside, but all our plans were on the inside. The two-hour drive from Indianapolis to Louisville was rainy and dreary, but expedient and uneventful. We pulled into town at 9:00 sharp, picked up our glittery 1-day wristbands, and joined the modest General Admission line already in progress. As the time drew near and the skies slightly cleared, the line easily tripled or more in length. At one point a volunteer regaled the middle of the line with some geek freestyle, which helped pass some time amicably.

My biggest primary objectives — i.e., guests I was dying to see most — are up there in our lead photo: Jonah Ray and Felicia Day, costars of the eleventh and twelfth seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Netflix. MST3K has held a special place in my heart ever since June 1996, in a fateful confluence that marked one of the darkest points in my life and the release week of the first wave of MST3K episodes on VHS from Rhino Home Video (as I recall, Pod People, Cave Dwellers, and The Amazing Colossal Man). Since I couldn’t afford cable TV back in those days, those episodes were my gateway into the show and 23 years of fandom and counting. In the hands of creator Joel Hodgson and the new cast and crew, the show’s recent revival was an unexpected blessing and has been an absolute delight. (The season 12 opener, which skewered the infamous E.T. ripoff Mac and Me, left me gasping for air.)

So yes, saying hi to Day and Ray was tops on my to-do list. I previously met Day at Wizard World Chicago 2011, but made that occasion awkwardly painful by asking about a direct-to-video oddity called Prairie Fever, in which she’d had to put up with TV’s Kevin Sorbo and recite reams of Scripture in raving madwoman tones. It was a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law, who probably found it on the Kroger discount rack and thought something starring TV’s Hercules might be up my alley. Her misconceptions in that sentence easily outnumbered the film’s good points.

Previously unshared file photo from WWC 2011 with me and Day plus Jeff Lewis, her costar from The Guild.

But all that was prior to her hopping aboard the new MST3K at the request of the esteemed Mr. Hodgson himself. Now that she was part of a different legacy, that meant grounds for a new autograph — specifically on my beat-up, dog-eared copy of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, my personal artifact of my MST3K experience. Naturally I had to have Jonah Ray sign it as well, which was pretty wild considering he grew up a fan of the show. But now he’s part of that grand movie-mocking legacy that was there for me at a point when I needed comedy most. It helps that he and the new cast are great at what they do and didn’t mess it all up. Always a plus!

(For those keeping track at home, that means my ACEG has now been autographed by Jonah, Felicia, Joel himself, Mike, Kevin, Bill, Mary Jo, Trace, and TV’s Frank. It’s quite a busy-looking book on the inside.)

Value-added special guest at Day’s booth: this adorable doggo named Flower who has an Instagram account and who makes Baby Yoda look like the Toxic Avenger.

I wish I could’ve spent more at their booths. Day brought along books that for now will have to go on my want list. To my nostalgic shock, Ray brought along copies of his recently released five-song EP You Can’t Call Me Al…on glorious, old-fashioned audiocassette. He had plenty of vinyl copies, but back in my music-fandom heyday, audiocassette was my format of choice because CDs hadn’t been invented yet, LPs always scratched or warped on me, and 8-tracks were on their way to obsolescence, where tapes later joined them. Once again that’s Jonah Ray performing kindly deeds for us odd old folks. I couldn’t resist buying that, my first brand new tape since the Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore hit stores in 1998.

I got their autographs on the ACEG at their respective booths before we did the dual photo op later. Both remembered me; Day even remembered my name. My brain actually froze for a full two seconds because I was that astonished. As someone who resembles far too many stereotypes, I operate under the assumption that I do geek stuff under a certain aura of utter and instant forgettability. Being remembered, even though it was only like an hour later, overloaded my circuits. Then I snapped out of it and they totally went for jazz hands.

…so yeah, kind of a magical day. For that alone, Louisville gets maximum thumbs-up from me.

…

…oh, hey, wait. We did other stuff, too!

Also on the jazz-hands wish list: Christopher Eccleston! The Ninth Doctor was our first Doctor when we finally jumped into the world of Doctor Who and is therefore on a pedestal in our modest estimation.

He noticed Anne’s shirt! And they chatted! In a photo op! I thought that was illegal!

Meanwhile nearby, Anne’s priority-one meet-up was with Terry Farrell, a.k.a. Jadzia Dax from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, unanimously called “the best Trek series of all time” in our household. Anne has met a couple dozen Trek actors over the years (including quite a few that I haven’t), but Farrell was one of the few DS9 cast members that remained out of reach until the good folks at GalaxyCon did magics.

The two of them agreed the photo caption should be “The Long and Short of It”.

Also in the house: Jim O’Heir! Despite the nonstop jokes about obesity and gullibility in us Hoosiers, Parks and Recreation is one of the very, very, very few shows for which I still actively pursue ancillary merchandise whenever I see it because it was a sharp, witty, nuanced, layered, complicated wild ride. And as Jerry Gergich, the put-upon office klutz, O’Heir was a key player in the team dynamic even if no one else would admit it, including Jerry himself. In person he’s charming and gregarious and the first Parks and Rec cast member we’ve ever met, which means he wins.

We learned he’s visited Indiana before for family reasons, not just for that one time he got to eat at St Elmo’s Steakhouse. Jerry 1, me and Anne 0.

One more entertainment GalaxyCon loot!guest, with feeling: Dino Stamatopoulos! I first knew him as part of the writing/producing staff behind the late, lamented Community, second only to his recurring role as Alex a.k.a. “Star-Burns”, the most aptly nicknamed student at Greendale. Beyond that show, which I’d praise at length here if I hadn’t already used up all my best adjectives in this entry, Stamatopoulos went on to create Adult Swim’s Moral Orel, as well as co-found the multimedia company Starburns Industries, which has made comics I’ve liked as well as the Oscar-nominated animated film Anomalisa (of which I was a Kickstarter backer). He also sings and plays in a band called Sorry About Everything, named after an erstwhile podcast.

Among his other table deals, he offered to write a personalized song for anyone for a fair fee. I was very tempted.

He had copies of the complete Moral Orel for sale, plus a graphic novel he wrote called Trent: A Light Tragedy with Music. To my nostalgic shock, he also brought along copies of Sorry About Everything’s 2017 album Shivers in the Cold…on glorious, old-fashioned audiocassette. I couldn’t resist buying that, my first brand new tape since Jonah Ray’s You Can’t Call Me Al went into my con bag twenty minutes earlier.

Those were really all the entertainers we could afford to meet, which was just as well. The lines for higher-end celebs such as Dave Bautista and George Takei were hours long. Anne and I met Takei at a local Trek con over twenty years ago and are extremely glad the SF convention business was under quite a different paradigm at the time. In other rows of the exhibit hall, actors of varying statures and IMDb entry lengths dealt with their own vicissitudes. Some appeared to have the time of their lives.

Donnie Dunagan, Amanda Bearse, and Margaret Kerry cruising by on a golf cart like it ain’t no thang.

I regret my Artists Alley experience was shorter than I’d prefer. That’s due to my restricted budget and to my finickiness this time around. I’d met a good deal of the comics folks on the guest list and didn’t see a number of “must-see” names among the rest. But I definitely wanted to say hi to Steven Grant, who’s been in the biz since at least the ’80s. He wrote the very first Punisher miniseries back in the day, hopped around a number of Big Two titles, created or reworked concepts off the beaten path, co-created the first female-ninja comics series in Whisper, wrote a fascinating tale about Kennedy’s assassination called Badlands, and saw his creator-owned collaboration 2 Guns turned into a movie starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

Washington and Wahlberg don’t do cons yet, but Steven Grant was there!

Not pictured in this entry: J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the renowned Babylon 5 and wordsmith on such works as Murder, She Wrote; the ’80s Twilight Zone relaunch; a several-year run on Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man, including the famously emotional 9/11 issue; and more, more, more. I’d seen his name on the guest list but had assumed he would have a large crowd and I shouldn’t bother. Also, I’m only 17 episodes into Babylon 5 season 2 because I’ve been working through that series very, very, very slowly on DVD and don’t have any questions yet. My brain froze up for the second time this day when I noticed he had no line. At all. I didn’t get it. Then I snapped out of it, ran up and bought a copy of his new memoir Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood, which I’m hoping to fast-track on my reading pile.

If you’ve read or at least impatiently scrolled this far, it means you’ve all been good and everyone’s earned a cosplay gallery! The following represents a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total cosplayers spotted all over the place. It was tough to take photos in the crowded aisles, tougher to find cosplayers in the more desolate areas who weren’t specifically trying to take a break, and toughest to find cosplayers representing characters from the imaginary worlds we actually recognize considering it’s impossible for us to keep up with ALL the youth cultures anymore. Also, we got too tired to keep up with so many fast walkers, because old.

Regardless: enjoy the intermission!

Mork from Ork. Nanu nanu!

Tired: Baby Yoda. Wired: sequoia-sized Wookiee.

Svengoolie! Rubber chickens sold separately.

Scoops Ahoy, the unstoppable cosplay sensation of 2019!

Princess Peach and Unipool.

Bob Rosspool, ready to dot any landscape painting with tiny chimichangas.

Victorianpool, whom you’ll note brought his own tea service. Every joke I can think of after this is puerile.

Captain America with Mjolnir.

Captain Spider. Or Spider-America. Whichever.

Mr. Freeze, standing guard with the food vendors.

Big Brother and Little Sister from Bioshock.

Darkwing Duck!

Quick shout-out to the food vendors who got us through the afternoon, and with mostly better results that we’ve found at the average convention center:

Chicken in waffle cones, which was tasty and brilliant until the spicy honey sauce oozed out the hole in the bottom and dripped all over my clothes and con bag.

Ehrler’s Ice Cream, a Louisville business 150 years old and counting. Their chocolate/peanut butter ice cream was beyond reproach, perfectly salty and sweet. Their bourbon pecan, on the other hand, was not my thing.

By 1:45 all our main goals were accomplished and then some. We adjourned to the largest panel room and caught the last half of a Q&A with actor John Cusack, whom we previously met at C2E2 2016. After we came in, questions about a number of his beloved works invariably confirmed they were a pleasure to work on, with a maximum of two sentences per answer. The big exception was Identity, whose set was built on a massive gimbal and whose daily filming routine involved blasting him with so much water that he never needed coffee to wake up.

Our final GalaxyCon activity for this year commenced at 2:15 with the Felicia Day Q&A. Roughly 70% of the questions concerned her recurring character on Supernatural, whose enormous fan base seems like good people who really, really, really want to talk about Charlie from Supernatural and might mutiny if she doesn’t return for the final season. (Full disclosure: I’ve only seen two episodes.)

Felicia Day with YouTuber/interviewer RealBreakingNate. I believe this was when they were arguing over how crystals are non-magical.

In between questions about Charlie, the other Charlie, and the two main stars’ hi-jinks on set, gleaned tidbits included but weren’t limited to:

• She’s a big fan of FX’s What We Do in the Shadows (I cringe and turn away whenever they go too far, but it’s generally a hilarious show)
• She was pretty happy with the cheesy Syfy film she once did, Red: Werewolf Hunter
• She briefly mentioned Prairie Fever, but this time she brought it up, not me
• Dr. Horrible also drew quite a few questions, especially about the music
• Her Codex costume from the one music video they cobbled together for The Guild (“Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?“) is now officially in the Smithsonian’s collection as an artifact representative of “new media”, given that The Guild, which Day still fully owns, predated common use of the term “webseries” and YouTube creators as an entertainment workforce, and proved new shows could be made and build fan bases without the blessing or funding of TV or cable networks)

…and of course the burning question: the status of a hypothetical thirteenth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains in limbo while Joel Hodgson is on a six-month tour. Fingers crossed he feels up to the task when he returns.

She was kind to every single fan who asked a question, and clearly knows how to keep a Q&A moving and on track. Moderator dude didn’t really have to moderate.

…and then we trudged to the car and left. For us the day and the con were a rousing success, even if we’re now too logy to feel roused.

Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see Louisville again next year.

My total haul, including two new cassettes. And yes, I still have a working cassette player. Dual-cassette, even. Shut up.

Guarding the front door were Ruby Rose, Yang Xiao Long, and Blake Belladonna from RWBY.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in March 2017 my wife Anne and I attended the inaugural Hall of Heroes Comic Con in Elkhart, Indiana. Under the same ownership as the nearby Hall of Heroes Museum (which we’d visited the year before), HoHCC was a two-day convention contained entirely in Elkhart’s historic Lerner Theatre, a beautiful 94-year-old venue for live plays and other cultural events. The organizers made creative use of the available spaces and had the assistance of a bevy of friendly volunteers. Initial response from fans statewide and beyond was so overwhelming, they earned themselves an encore presentation, this year in a much warmer September as opposed to that wintry March.

Before we narrate any further, once again we lead off a new convention miniseries with the mandatory cosplay photos. For logistical reasons (a bit more on that in Part 2) we were only able to attend Sunday this year, traditionally a less crowded and activity-filled day at comic cons. That means we fell far short of our usual goal of catching at least 5,000 different cosplayers in one day. To be fair, we never meet that goal, but I like to think it’s nice that we have goals. In the meantime, quite a few fascinating folks caught our eyes…

V, he of the infamous Vendetta. Meanwhile, a volunteer sneaks Ghost Rider’s motorcycle past us.

Lego Scarlet Witch, an ideal hero for a world in which nearly every character has the super-power of magical Lego-kinesis.

Deadpool and trusty unicorn pal on their way to — wait for it — a ‘pool party. Bonus points for the chimichanga hat.

A stylish Catwoman, a.k.a. MissChibiArtist, one of the fine artists in attendance.

One of many helpful volunteers sporting a sound-effects suit that reminds me of my Doctor Who shirt. I was shocked to learn this is actually available from Kohls.

A dancing wizard, trying to bring da noise AND da funk all by his lonesome.

…and that was nearly it for our Sunday until shortly after 1:00, when a Cosplay Parade was listed on the schedule at the Main Street Stage, part of this year’s much-needed and smartly planned outdoor expansion onto Main Street Elkhart. We assumed we’d find cosplayers in a single line, marching in formation to…somewhere? What we found instead: COSPLAY DANCE PARTY! Because why not.

While a DJ in a Mandalorian helmet spun some tunes, fans got down with their bad selves. Let’s see C2E2 match that.

Like a classic masquerade ball minus the upper-class privilege or tragic horror ending.

More Mandalorians, blowing off steam after a hard day at the office.

Buddy Christ, Alice, Star-Lord, Rick, an Imperial officer, Batman, and Gwenpool jump on the line. (We’ve actually met Batman before. Hi, Shane!)

Riddler, Scarecrow, Green Arrow, Joker, and Penguin were like, “Uhhhhh, we were told this would be a parade?”

“Look, guys, I don’t know, just roll with it!” shrugs Malcolm Merlyn.

Spider-Man and an anime furry make room on the dance floor for Li’l Super Saiyan Goku.

Without Joker or Ivy around, Harley Quinn finds a new partner in a Warcraft Orc. Hijinks ensue!

As always, these folks were a fraction of the available talents in attendance. We left before the official costume contests began, but hope folks had as fun a time as we did, especially considering how humdrum our outfits were by comparison.

To be continued!

It’s William Katt! The Greatest American Hero! Believe it or not!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In March 2017 my wife Anne and I attended the inaugural Hall of Heroes Comic Con in Elkhart, Indiana. Under the same ownership as the nearby Hall of Heroes Museum (which we’d visited the year before), HoHCC was a two-day convention contained entirely in Elkhart’s historic Lerner Theatre, a beautiful 94-year-old venue for live plays and other cultural events. The organizers made creative use of the available spaces and had the assistance of a bevy of friendly volunteers. Initial response from fans statewide and beyond was so overwhelming, they earned themselves an encore presentation, this year in a much warmer September as opposed to that wintry March…

…and it very nearly didn’t happen for us. Our original plan called for driving three hours from Indianapolis to Elkhart on Saturday, enjoying HoHCC, and returning home the same evening; then on Sunday driving 70-odd minutes west of Indy out to Turkey Run State Park for Anne’s annual family reunion. We would’ve been wasted come Monday if Plan A had happened. All lights were green through early Friday evening. Then a couple of things spun out of our control.

The weather, first and foremost, destroyed outdoor plans for countless Hoosiers and organizations all weekend long. Central Indiana found itself under a solid two-day deluge from western to eastern border. Our backyard lawn looks fantastic now, but a state park foray was out of the question. Relatives had already begun to drop out by the time the cancellation was made official. Anne had already been bummed from a hard week at work and was disappointed by the development, but yelling at God about the ruinous shenanigans of our uncooperative planet rarely result in an immediate thundercloud disintegration.

Then came surprise illness. Never fun, never welcome, and never when you need it, which is never. Again, though, some things can’t be helped. It was clear upon awakening Saturday morning that a six-hour round trip was out of the question for us. I figured Hall of Heroes could keep our prepaid Saturday admissions as a donation of sorts, and was prepared to leave it at that. It sucked and our moods weren’t great. Later I peeked at their Facebook page and noticed they’d posted a few live videos — gray skies all around, but plenty of smiles and no rain-out. I was glad for them in a sense, but that didn’t help our moods.

By mid-Saturday illness began to fade a tad — not altogether cured, but improved. We talked about the possibility of doing HohCC Sunday instead, provided that we were careful and didn’t overexert. We normally don’t do cons on Sunday because we’re either at church or recovering from a Saturday con experience. We’d previously cleared out that Sunday for the reunion. With that dismantled, Sunday was technically free if we were up for it.

“NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES”, warned the killjoy disclaimer on our tickets that threatened to dash our last hope. I called the convention’s box office, explained the situation, and asked if exchanging Saturday for Sunday would be possible under the circumstances. They took my name and number, and said to check in at Will Call on Sunday and they’d see what they could do.

Three hours later, based on the scant info I’d given to them, I received an email with revised tickets. Hall of Heroes were officially deemed awesome lifesavers in our household that day.

Thankfully no horrible relapse occurred overnight. Sunday we were on our way. All we had to do was ignore any and all ill omens along the way, such as the two stalled cars we passed or the rains that continued flooding Indy.

A semi with omega-shaped taillights was not encouraging.

About 80-90 miles down the road we left the storms behind. We arrived in Elkhart shortly before 9:30, half an hour before showtime. We parked in an empty public lot two blocks west of the Lerner Theatre and walked beneath ugly clouds to Main Street, cordoned and ready for another day of festivities.

We previously did an art-walk around downtown Elkhart back in 2016. We noticed a few new decorations added since then, such as this jazzed-up electrical box.

Friendly volunteers at the Will Call tent traded us a pair of Sunday wristbands for our tickets and sent us to the entry line. Soon, fun would be ours for the having.

The light crowd on a Sunday morning. Hundreds more joined the scene by early afternoon once all local church services dismissed for the day.

Last year’s con had been contained entirely inside the Lerner. The space was interesting and the art ‘n’ architecture had been fascinating to behold, but everyone had found themselves jam-packed wall-to-wall and in danger of arousing the fire marshal’s ire. Hundreds had to be kept waiting outside for any of us to depart and trade places with them. In an early March with lingering winter keeping temps in the 30s or lower, the outdoor experience wasn’t pleasant. This year they rethought that part and not only moved the show to September, but they also expanded onto Main Street, with a large tent containing over two dozen vendors, an extra stage, and a selection of local food trucks and concession stands.

In short, they effectively co-opted the model used each year by the famous Superman Celebration down in Metropolis, Illinois. As long as the weather cooperates, we’re big fans of that model. When we arrived this year, temps began in the mid-50s and inched upward throughout the day — basically twice as warm as last year. Better still, it never rained while we were in Elkhart. Northern Indiana in general and the con in particular had been blessedly spared. I hadn’t bothered to check the weather and had worn shorts ill-suited for the mid-50s, but that’s my fault, not theirs.

VIPs were escorted inside promptly at 9:30, with us General Admission folks exactly half an hour later. Once inside, we headed straight for the most important attraction of all: the bathrooms. We are old now, and both three-hour drives and chilly outdoor waits have bigger drawbacks than they used to.

Then we headed straight for the line to the celebrity autograph room. Once again the line reached back to the upper balcony of the Lerner stage, where fans could watch programming while they waited.

Now showing in this wondrous setting: 10 a.m. cartoon mini-marathon featuring Batman: The Animated Series.

We’d already met two of the celebrity guests and didn’t watch the shows in which two others costarred, but as kids Anne and I were both huge fans of TV’s William Katt, star of the hit series The Greatest American Hero. Those were dark times when super-hero TV shows were an extreme rarity rather than the overstocked commodity they’ve become today, even after the success of Christopher Reeve as Superman. Leave it to genius showrunner Stephen J. Cannell to see a hole and fill a hole in the pop culture landscape.

The plot was brilliant to us: bright schoolteacher Ralph Hinkley stumbled across an alien spaceship that gifted him with a caped super-suit but failed to give him the instructions before they took off. Hilarity and life lessons ensued as Ralph tried to figure out its many random powers, which resulted in him flying into every brick wall in town, cringing as bullets bounced off him, turning invisible in short spurts until losing concentration at the worst times, and apologizing for breaking so many collapsible props. As kids we ate it up and thought highly of Mr. Hinkley.

We also remember him from such films as House, Carrie, the late-’80s Perry Mason TV-movies, and Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, a near-forgotten dinosaurs-live predecessor to Jurassic Park. William Katt was our #1 reason for showing up, and would’ve been our biggest regret if we’d had to suffer the heartbreak of missing the con. Katt was a patient and ebullient gentleman, seemed happy to hear Anne also waxing eloquent about his mom (actress Barbara Hale, who’d played Perry Mason’s assistant Della Street for decades), and — in a surprising moment that warmed my heart — became the fourth actor we’ve ever met who knew about jazz hands in general and the late Bob Fosse in particular. I had no idea he’d done Pippin (see also: Barry Williams), but now I do.

But our HoHCC experience didn’t stop there. Other fine folks in the house included longtime comics writer Tony Isabella. I’d met him twice before (most recently at Indy Pop Con 2015), but figured third time’s the charm. Everything’s been coming up Tony lately ever since one of his creations, DC Comics’ own Black Lightning, was adapted into his own TV series for The CW.

He has a new book out, volume 1 in a series called July 1963: A Pivotal Month in the Comic Book Life of Tony Isabella, in which he plans to read and review every comic book published the same month as Fantastic Four Annual #1, the comic that changed his life.

We attended part of his 11 a.m. Q&A with Hall of Heroes owner Allen Stewart. Among the topics of conversation were his uniformly positive experiences with the cast and crew of Black Lightning; his undying love of Godzilla; that time he hung out with Sinbad, the first actor ever to don the Black Lightning costume on TV; and the joy of seeing Lawrence Fishburne play Bill Foster in Ant-Man and the Wasp, a character Isabella later helped upconvert into a superhero named Black Goliath. (The editor refused to let him reuse “Giant-Man”.) Isabella also confirmed that the residuals for Black Lightning’s appearances in video games (three and counting) are significantly more awesome than his comics residuals.

Also up for an MCC reunion: Luther M. Siler, self-published SF author and fellow WordPress user. Previous crossovers include Starbase Indy 2015, C2E2 2016, and Indy Pop Con 2016. As it turns out, Siler had a great time at Hall of Heroes and took far more cosplay photos than we did.

Siler also has a very fun idea in store for future convention appearances and his Patreon supporters…

I also found a comics vendor with boxes full of $5 graphic novels, from which I dug up two rarities that had to come home with me. A few other bonus sights along our path:

Joining the ranks of upstanding geek snack vendors were Mini Delights Bake Shoppe, who offered brownies with tiny character toppers and a lineup of iced sugar cookies that weren’t excessively sweet, and were thin and crispy instead of thick and chalky.

It wouldn’t feel like a real con without Terry Huddleston, one of the most recognizable ubiquitous artists in the Midwest convention scene.

Iron Man statue!

For lunch we adjourned to the outside vendors’ block near the Main Street Stage. The winner of my money: Ron’s River Dogs, because sometimes a solid hot dog is just the thing for a festival atmosphere.

I recommend the Dogzilla, a quarter-pound chili dog. From the optional toppings at their fixings bar, I added shredded cheese, jalapeno mustard and dried shoestring potatoes. 11/10 would gulp down again.

The Main Street Stage schedule said the 11-noon hour would feature a local act called Wesley and the Crushers. Their website claims six members; we saw only one DJ in a Mandalorian helmet. For DJ stylings he laid down the beats fine, but I’m not 100% sure he was them.

Unless he was Wesley and “the Crushers” were his equipment and toys.

We returned indoors for one last event: a noon Q&A with John Schneider, star of TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard and Smallville. He’s costarred in Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots for five seasons and counting, and continues to record and release new music independently through Louisiana-based John Schneider Studios, whose Facebook page he insisted everyone go and like — several times tongue-in-cheek yet not insincerely. Anne had previously met him at Wizard World Chicago 2010, but this was our first time seeing him answer questions live.

The man, the myth, the Duke boy, the Pa Kent.

Schneider was self-effacing, downright hilarious, and candid on any number of topics. He addressed the time he and Tom Wopat left Dukes for a while, reminisced about Christmas Comes to Willow Creek, honored the great father figure that was Denver Pyle, remembered how Burt Reynolds used to hang around the Dukes set a lot because he was close friends with James Best, swapped regrets about the pains of divorce with our host, and revealed that he appeared in the Smallville series finale basically for SAG minimum pay because they couldn’t afford to grant him one last series-regular paycheck.

He had zero kind things to say about the raunchy 2005 Dukes movie (“It would have to be better to suck”), but his eyes lit up while discussing fingerstyle guitar playing with an enthusiastic young learner. He took a serious but caring tone while offering advice from a personal perspective on dealing with Asperger’s syndrome, which one of his children has. He confirmed he’d be appearing on the next episode of Inside Edition, but didn’t tell us why because he wasn’t sure what angle the segment would take. (Looking it up in hindsight tonight, call me a bit…um, taken off-guard at the results, which explain more things than I expected.)

In all, hindsight aside, the Schneider panel in itself was a rollicking experience, though I’m kicking myself now for not asking him about the time he played a villainous country singer in an episode of Leverage. I’ll have to save that one for his next appearance.

After his panel and the subsequent costume parade, we officially considered ourselves done for the day. Other events and Q&As were on the schedule, but we had one more three-hour drive ahead of us, and a work day looming large the following morning. We walked the two blocks back to our car, where a handful of other fans’s cars had joined us.

It was cool to know we were in good company.

About 60-70 miles down the road, we ran into those central Indiana rains, still dropping strong and dousing the rest of our weekend. It couldn’t touch the best parts, though.

And that’s the con that was. Lord willing, physical health and budget permitting, we’ll see you next con, and maybe next year in Elkhart. This was indeed a fun time and we’d love to do it again.

Imprisoned in Azkaban for the heinous crime of practicing signing “Mrs. Sirius Black” in a notebook 500 times.

There were some thing Thor would never agree to do. That’s why Loki needs more pals like us.

Hey. So. How was your day?

We’re just up in Chicago at the inaugural Ace Comic Con Midwest celebrating Anne’s birthday. After spending half the day roaming through downtown Chicago — some of that in light rain, all of it in numbing autumn temps — then we headed over to Navy Pier, an odd place for a comic con. A few miles of walking over several hours left us basically dead by night’s end. The more birthdays the celebrate, the tougher these exciting expeditions get.

Our tales and photos of who we met and what we did will mostly have to wait till we get home. Until then, please enjoy this fleeting moment of jazz hands with Tom Hiddleston. You may remember him from such works as The Night Manager and Kong: Skull Island. Among other stuff.

No more typing. Must lapse into happy coma now.

Just me hanging out with Emmy Award Nominee Zazie Beetz. With my wife’s permission, honest!

This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the inaugural Ace Comic Con Midwest, the third show from the new geek-convention company that previously exhibited in Seattle and in Glendale, AZ, before turning their attention to someplace within our driving distance. The creators were previously the bigwigs behind the Wizard World empire, but parted ways a while back, decided to do their own separate thing, and took all their learned lessons and deep Hollywood connections with them.

We’re used to Chicagoland cons taking place in large-scale venues such as McCormick Place and the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont. Whether due to creative choice or limited options so late in the year, Ace instead took place at Chicago’s famous Navy Pier on the shores of occasionally beautiful Lake Michigan. Few attendees knew Navy Pier has an event space big enough to hold a con. Beyond the Pier’s shops, restaurants, Children’s Museum, climate-controlled Ferris wheel, and other forms of entertainment, on the second floor near the eastern end is a Festival Hall with a 60-foot ceiling and tens of thousands of square footage waiting for big companies to come fill it with booths, fans, and fun.

One catch: the transportation situation. A lot of folks can take buses, cabs, Uber, or Lyft into the area. The trains will only get you so far and require a Plan B to span the remaining distance. For those who prefer to steer their own destinies, the Pier has its own parking garages with 1500 spaces available at $30 per day. If you’re planning to hang around the area for more than a few hours, $30 is pretty competitive with the exorbitant Chicago parking scene. If that’s too rich for your blood, there’re better offers to be had with certain parking apps, as long as you don’t mind the extra walking.

That’s why Anne and I arrived at the show Friday afternoon already dead tired. As part of her big birthday weekend we parked two blocks away from the Pier for $24, but then spent the four hours preceding the con walking all over downtown Chicago — over to the Magnificent Mile for a stop, down to the lakeside park area, over to the Loop for light shopping, then all the way back to the Navy Pier for our feature presentation. It didn’t help that temperatures had been in the mid-40s all day, or that light rain at one point dampened our clothes and spirits while we looked for things to do. We’re now in our late 40s, clearly not at peak health as our photos might attest, and perhaps should’ve thought a little harder about our tourism strategy.

We reach the Pier around 3:30 local time, already fairly in pain. We’d walked its length once before, five years ago — not quite enough exposure to have the layout memorized. We assumed we’d see signs of where to go on the outside, so we charged onward through the long, outdoor march. On our right, cruise ships had signs promising Lake Michigan tours but had no takers in the gray autumn doldrums. On our left, one long, long building that never seemed to end and said “Ace Comic Con” at exactly zero points on the outside. Blocks later, the sidewalk ended at a deserted beer garden and a set of doors leading inside, where we found signs of conventioning at last, and, more importantly, heat and shelter.

Sign art by Ace guest Ron Lim, no doubt drawn before major headliner Josh Brolin had to cancel due to family plans.

Everyone was herded upstairs toward the easternmost entrances to the Festival Hall and divided into VIP and General Admission lines. At 3:40 we joined the GA line behind hundreds of other fans far more energetic and dry than we were. The line headed back west, past a series of sections under unsightly construction that hampered our view of ostensibly scenic Lake Michigan.

Not too many seagulls or smiling suns out there in October.

The doors were scheduled to open at 4:00. Based on line size alone, we had serious doubts about getting anywhere convention happiness anytime before 6:00. We were pleasantly surprised to discover a speedy admission process that got us wristbands by 4:30, even from our faraway position in the crowd GA, even including a walk through the first round of security checkpoints immediately at the front door. They saved us a bit of time by barely glancing into our bags, but got bit consternated with me setting off the metal detector in dumbfounded ignorance until I remembered I was wearing steel-toe sneakers. That’s what I get for shoe-shopping only a week before showtime and promptly forgetting my footwear had special features. Fortunately at least one security guard knew shoes and recognized steel-toes when she saw them. They didn’t double-check to ensure I didn’t also have a 9mm tucked in my belt, but I promise I didn’t.

Thirty feet beyond the front door were tables where we traded admission tickets for wristbands with no delays or complications. At last, it was time to go crazy, comic-con style.

Based on our readings about the first two Ace Comic Cons, we knew their primary focus was on the celebrity interaction experience. The average Ace guest list is shorter than the average Wizard World roster, but not bolstered by character actors, B-listers, and retirees. We’ve been perfectly happy to meet folks from all of those career levels and will likely continue to do so in the future, but Ace’s roster boasts actors more popular and (for now) stratospherically higher on the Hollywood food chain, drawing especially heavily from the world of superhero films. The showrunners behind the most recent Wizard World Chicago struggled to tap that vein and in some respects also appeared to have forgotten how to run a convention. By and large, Ace Midwest did not share their problems.

Ace had its own set of drawbacks, which bothered some fans but left others unaffected. Artists Alley offered only 20-25 creators, and the entire Festival Hall sported about thirty vendors. That’s a significant pullback when you’re used to seeing hundreds and hundreds of dealers, shop owners, publishers and self-publishers sprawled across multiple halls. More could have been accommodated in exchange for narrower walkways, but apparently that’s not Ace’s thing. To be candid, Anne and I find ourselves buying fewer and fewer items from typical exhibit halls, and were exhausted enough that it was a sort of perverse relief not to have all that extra walking, window-shopping and not-buying to do.

On the other hand, I’m much happier when Artists Alley is bursting with recognizable names and visibly talented newcomers, which is why C2E2 has remained a must-see for me every year. Most of the Ace lineup comprised creators who’ve shown up at other Midwest cons. I made a point of buying from one who’d impressed me previously — Ryan Ruffatti, creator/writer of a series called Teleport (illustrated by Moomie Swan), of which I’d bought #1 from him at Cincinnati Comic Expo 2017. I jumped as soon as I saw he had #2 at his table.

Between Friday and Saturday, we made what we could of the show floor.

FYE representing on the major-corporate tip and selling geek novelties such as cartoon cereal.

Acme Design Inc., a company specializing in digital modeling and 3-D printing on demand, brought decorations such as this replica of Chicago’s “Cloud Gate”, a.k.a. “the Bean”.

One vendor dared fans to lift Thor’s hammer in exchange for prizes and presumably glory in Valhalla.

Midwest con-goers can never get enough of Wild Bill’s lifetime-refillable soft drinks, which we won’t go near because we hate spilling things. Scuttlebutt is they have plans afoot to figure out how lids work in 2019. Huge if true.

Jabba surveying the lay of the land from on high.

We had no appointments until 6 p.m. and killed a little time enjoying seats for a Main Stage Q&A starring a pair of WWE wrestlers. We don’t watch wrestling, but we needed to sit down. The shortest exhibit hall is still a burden when you’re old and you’ve overextended yourself. Anne took a few shots while we recuperated. The Friday night celeb lineup was mostly wrestlers, but their fans appreciated them coming out.

Our view from the back rows, where we couldn’t make out the stage but could stare upward at that Navy Pier ceiling. All these empty seats were filled when it came time for Saturday’s biggest panel event.

Anne’s best shot of Seth Rollins and Alexa Bliss, who I’m told are famous.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover we shared the highlight of our Friday night: meeting Tom Hiddleston, star of the BBC miniseries The Night Manager, which aired in the U.S. on AMC and whose finale begat one of my all-time biggest live-tweeting nights on record. Also, he was Loki and tried to murder Thor a few times. Ladies apparently love him. Like, lots. Lots and lots and lots.

Those jazz hands again. Several Tom Hiddleston fansites shared this pic on Instagram and made MCC’s own traffic look pathetic. Thanks, Instagram, sort of, I guess!

When we first planned to do Ace Comic Con for Anne’s birthday weekend, we drew a line and determined we could only spend up to a certain limit to meet any given actor. When Don Cheadle was announced as an Ace guest on September 29th, we tiptoed a few inches over the line and bought a prepaid photo-op with him. When Cheadle canceled on October 7th due to last-minute filming changes, we were bummed and in a vulnerable state. Not until Thursday the 11th — literally 24 hours before this moment — did we decide to go wild and overindulge in this brief brush with Hiddleston. His line began moving a bit late, but not unforgivably so. He was in good spirits, about nine feet tall, and far more energetic than we were. Clearly he hadn’t spent all day strolling up and down Michigan Avenue before clocking in and filling the Festival Hall with awe and wonder.

The only other hard part about doing his photo-op besides the asking price was the mandatory extra security gauntlet. Every Ace Comic Con to date has included a second wave of metal detectors in front of their autograph/photo-op sections. Even if you entered the front doors without a problem, you had to do the same thing all over again. At Ace Midwest the main difference was the second wave of security cared even less if we were packing than the first wave. They stared at us as we approached, hardly moving, not even to offer the courtesy of pushing us one of those doggie dishes where you’re supposed to dump everything from your pockets. They didn’t touch our proffered bags, not a single poke. They seemed even more tired than we were, or simply intensely bored, and about as enthusiastic as extras playing security guards in the final half-hour of Saturday Night Live.

Naturally I had to complicate the process by getting my jacket and bag strap tangled up and looking like an idiot dancing in place while trying to remove things obediently. This time, though, at least I knew to announce “steel-toe shoes!” before walking through the detectors. They checked our photo-op ticket, but didn’t bother to see if I was also carrying a nasty, jagged shiv that I’d somehow cobbled together from spare table parts after clearing the front-door check, but I promise I didn’t.

Once we’d finished with Hiddleston at 7:20. we died. Then we walked back through the now-darkened halls of Navy Pier, having realized we didn’t have to walk it entirely outdoors. We grabbed dinner at a chicken place that took over twenty minutes to cook our order, then got our separate “original” and “spicy” requests backwards, much to Anne’s burning regret. We died while waiting, ate half our meals, continued onward, eventually reached our parking garage, died inside our car, had to beg security to let us drive out when the ticket reader didn’t recognize our prepaid status, drove out to our hotel in Oak Brook, and then spent the rest of the night continuing to die, but at least now we could lie down while dying.

* * * * *

COSPLAY INTERMISSION TIME!

Full disclosure: we took very few costume photos. I know fans love them and search for them and share them far and wide, but the truth is not much stood out to us. Much of the Ace population comprised newcomers to the convention scene — some flying in from as far away as England, Japan, and Argentina — and had fun joining the crowd in their own ways. In many cases this meant either no costumes, Halloween costumes, or dressing as Marvel heroes. That’s cool and I hope everyone felt welcome and had as much of a blast as we ultimately did, but in recent years we’ve gotten extremely finicky about what we photograph and save for posterity. Also, when crowds thickened Saturday, stopping cosplayers midstream grew increasingly challenging. Also also, that severe exhaustion I mentioned dulled our reflexes and our attention spans.

Behold what passes for our Ace Comic Con cosplay photo gallery for Friday and Saturday:

Loki and Tersseract, naturally.

2 Loki 2 Thor.

Heimdall, on break from Bifrost.

A walking Infinity Gauntlet, size Galactus.

Lydia from Beetlejuice enjoying some light reading.

Also bringing their own reading material: my favorites of the show, Sam and Suzy from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

END TINY COSPLAY INTERMISSION.

* * * * *

Sleep provided a bit of recovery, but my legs were still aching when we showed up Saturday morning over an hour before the Festival Hall was scheduled to reopen at 10. To our relief, apparently everyone behind the scenes got really hyper and started letting us in early. Also to our relief, another guard recognized steel-toe shoes and let me in without touching my bag. Less of a relief was the argument we got to overhear while waiting for the detectors, in which another guard kept bickering over his walkie-talkie about someone named “Keena” who was clearly doing something that upset him enough to make him curse in front of an all-ages crowd. The respondent on the other end ultimately pulled rank and said approximately, “Let’s not do this over the walkie-talkie…” at which point he stormed off, presumably to go throttle Keena.

Saturday was the big day for all the biggest guests to be in the house, actors as well as comics creators. Two gentlemen in particular have been doing fine works since I was a kid and were a pleasure to meet. Most famous among them was Jim Starlin, best known as the creator of such Marvel personalities as Thanos, Gamora, and Drax the Destroyer. He also played a major role in the life of the original Captain Marvel until his death from cancer, and orchestrated all the best stories starring Adam Warlock, that vague outline of a being revealed at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 who may mean more in future films. Over at DC Comics he co-created the Superman villain Mongul as well as a Batman foe named the KGBeast, who was brought to the big screen as a henchman in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. While playing in their universe he also famously helped murder Robin through a publishing stunt that allowed fans to call a 1-900 number and sentence him to death. As a kid I also dug his creator-owned sci-fi series Dreadstar.

Starlin signed my 36-year-old copy of The Death of Captain Marvel and, when I began to rattle on about how it had affected me at age 10, turned to Anne and apologized for the damage.

Also appearing was Ron Lim, whose career dates back to the late ’80s and such titles I collected such as Captain America, Silver Surfer, Badger, Psi-Force, and the back half of the original Infinity Gauntlet miniseries — i.e., the basis of the next Avengers film. He had an energetic style that lent itself well to the action heroes of the time, especially Badger because the Badger was awesome. Most recently he drew a few pages of Nazi-punching action in this year’s Captain America Annual, which I’d picked up right before the show.

As of this writing, his Wikipedia bibliography fails to include Badger #33-36, 40-51 as well as Psi-Force #16-23. Someone please feel free to reference my comic collection up in there. I’d do myself but I’m sure some petty editor would gripe at me.

Ron Lim and Jim Starlin also did an 11 a.m. Main Stage Q&A about The Infinity Gauntlet and other comics-related matters. Starlin is a much funnier man in person than his classic death-filled stories convey.

Big-screen version of same panel with our moderator Angélique Roché, whose pop-culture hosting credits include work with Marvel, Syfy, SiriusXM, and the social-media influential Black Girl Nerds.

(Ron Lim was a late addition to that panel, which was originally scheduled to feature Starlin, creator of Thanos, and Donny Cates, who writes Marvel’s current Thanos series. A few days before showtime his name was quietly deleted from the panel description. Ace’s official site listed him as a guest for the weekend anyway, but neither fan comments nor his own Twitter feed confirm his presence there.)

The rest of our Saturday focused on meeting actors. Of those on hand, we’d already met Matt Smith (cf. Wizard World Chicago 2014) and Karen Gillan (the first and only Wizard World Indianapolis in 2015); we don’t watch wrestling or TV’s Lucifer; and we kept waffling over whether or not Elizabeth Olsen would be amenable to jazz hands.

And then there was the super-sensational Chris Evans. Once he was added to the guest list, his Saturday opportunities sold out at light speed. We couldn’t attend Sunday, and even if we had, his prices were at least as out-of-this-world as Hiddleston’s. We couldn’t possibly do both, though Evans’ sold-out status made our self-control easier in his case.

Nonetheless, we had two more guests to meet. This meant more trips through the second-wave metal detectors, but my system of announcing “steel-toe shoes!” was saving some seconds and awkwardness. Once again they didn’t bother to touch our bags, and didn’t check to see if I’d also gone out Friday night after the show and bought a shotgun from Turk in a van down by the river, but I promise I didn’t.

The only actor autograph I’d purchased was for Lee Pace. You might remember him from such films as Guardians of the Galaxy, in which he was the big blue jerk Ronan (who’s returning next spring for the retro-set Captain Marvel), and in The Hobbit trilogy as the creepy elf lord Thranduil. More recently, viewers caught him as the star of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, while New Yorkers may have caught him on Broadway in this year’s Tony-winning revival of Angels in America. But Anne and I knew him best as Ned the Piemaker, hero of the late, lamented Pushing Daisies, which ABC couldn’t figure out how to promote or connect with viewers. A young Pace had to master the fine art of machine-gun-speed baroque dialogue while surrounded by outlandishly cultivated Barry Sonnenfeld/Bo Welch set decorations, a top-notch supporting cast, and the dead bodies he had to bring back to life for quick, bizarre testimonies. This very show was his first American convention appearance. We preferred not to miss it.

We joined the autograph line at 11:30 behind several dozen other folks. We were scheduled for his photo op at 1:00. At 12:20 an Ace volunteer loudly insisted everyone with the tickets for the photo op should leave the autograph line now now now, go join the photo-op line early, and then rejoin the autograph line much later. After several people in front of us bought this scenario and left, we found ourselves maybe 10-12 equally stubborn fans away from Pace’s table. We stuck it out, got to his table right at 12:30, and enjoyed the moment and the pleasantries and Ned the Piemaker in reality minus superpowers.

Then we did the photo op. And, um, kind of wish we’d been in a position to ask for a retake.

He smiled fine in other photos. I’m fairly certain the photographer snapped a millisecond too soon before he could assume full Piemaker-face.

My loot pile effectively stopped accumulating around this point. Two autographs, one new comic, a Black Panther magnet for my work desk, a free sticker, and a few business fliers isn’t as much to show off as we normally have from an average con experience, admittedly.

something something quality over quantity

While we waited in line for Pace’s photo, we enjoyed one of Ace’s other perks: TVs around the show floor live-streaming events as they occurred at the Main Stage. If I’m not mistaken, the venues for the two previous Ace shows had advantageous super-sized Jumbotron-ish screens that could broadcast the goings-on writ large for all to see while trapped in lines or milling around the show floor. Navy Pier had no such amenities — hence the TVs. They were a nice perk if you could get near one and the sound was turned up loudly enough. From Pace’s line I could catch much of the Q&A with Zazie Beetz, the last actor I’d be meeting later.

Accidentally censored at right was her host, comedian and fellow guest Brian Posehn.

Marvel fans know her best as Domino from this year’s smash hit Deadpool 2, returning to theaters this December but whittled down to PG-13 so now it’ll be fun for the whole family like most other superhero films, some of which made less money than either Deadpool movie. But I knew her first from TV’s Atlanta, the Emmy-nominated FX series starring, created and produced by TV’s Donald Glover. While much of the show focuses on Glover’s character Earn and his misadventures as a would-be manager for his rap-star cousin — when it’s not ignoring the “rules” of half-hour TV shows and experimenting with narrative and format — Beetz is up in there as Van, mother of Earn’s daughter, trying not to strangle him throughout their on-again off-again relationship. The show is risky, audacious, inventive, subversive, thought-provoking, and never boring. Beetz has played a major part in that.

She was among the first guests announced after Ace Midwest itself was announced. I was sorry her Q&A conflicted with the Lee Pace schedule, but I appreciated the opportunity to experience much of it secondhand but still live. In case I had missed it, one comics news site later turned nearly every other thing she said into separate news articles, which amused me to no end and failed to improve my opinion of them.

Beetz, on the other hand, remained classy, as seen in our lead photo. Her photo op was our last activity of the entire convention. In a rare shocking move, they began ushering her line through early. She complimented my shirt (twice!) and…well, you can see the results. It took all my remaining energy reserves to come remotely close to keeping up with her spirit in that shot.

(Special shout-out to Ace for making digital copies of every single photo op a free perk, not an upcharged item as they are at Wizard World and many other shows. That rocked.)

Meanwhile at Ace Comic Con, thousands of attendees took nearly all the chairs at the Main Stage for the 2:30 Avengers panel starring Karen “Nebula” Gillan, Lee “Ronan” Pace, and Captain America himself, Chris Evans. For the majority it was their one and only chance to see Cap without putting his superstar fees on their credit cards. My spot in Beetz’ line left me far away from any TVs and 100% unable to hear what was going on. When we began filing into her photo booth I took a few shots of the nearest TV before it was my turn to move on.

Our Heroes — Evans, Pace, and Gillan — confab with the returning Ms. Roché.

Arguably our least worst shot of Chris Evans, and probably the closest we’ll ever get to him.

I’m aware all the Q&As have now been posted on Ace’s Facebook page in full for watching anytime. That’s an option, but once the show is over, such artifacts lose a bit of their power and sway.

Thanks to the unexpected acceleration of that final line, our Ace Comic Con experience ended around 3:10 p.m. Saturday. We had a few regrets, but another round of memories and souvenirs to cherish for some time to come. We left the Festival Hall, walked the full Navy Pier length one last time, returned to the parking garage, had to petition security to let us ago yet again without double-charging us, then returned to the hotel and died yet again.

So far there’s no official word as to whether or not Ace Midwest will become a permanent annual event, whether it’ll return to Navy Pier or move to a commoner venue, or whether it’ll even stay in Chicago or hop around the Midwest according to the showrunners’ moods and negotiations. We wanted to try it at least once and we’re satisfied with our results to the extent that we knew what we were getting into. Our heads are still buzzing from all that fan overload, but as to whether or not it’ll be an annual ritual for us…at these prices, I can’t promise it will.

That awkward moment when you don’t get to do jazz hands with world-famous actors.

On Friday my wife Anne and I had the sincere pleasure of attending the inaugural Louisville Supercon, run by the company responsible for Florida Supercon since 2014 and Raleigh Supercon since 2017. Like many convention companies they’ve now turned their attention to the Midwest, which has been enticing and enthralling show promoters for a good five years now, ever since they noticed some of our states have money and geeks in them, in that order. Mind you, I’m not complaining.

Longtime MCC readers may recall the last time we attended a con in Louisville, it didn’t go so well, if I may understate it grandly while I’m reminiscing about that time MCC did something loosely approximating journalism. Louisville is only two hours from our hometown of Indianapolis, an easy ride for road-trippers like us, but a fiasco like that wasn’t a good look for their city and didn’t encourage us to keep tabs on their local scene.

On the bright side, that show’s official website has disappeared and the URL is officially up for grabs, for the price of mere spare change, slightly more than its net worth.

If I knew how to rig a redirected URL, I would absolutely be tempted to lay down a buck and have it redirect to our own write-up.

When we heard about Louisville Supercon, we had other reservations beyond the one time we were burned. Late fall/early winter tends to see harsher weather that discourages large-scale events that depend on a number of attendees wearing thin outfits that offer little protection from the elements. The weekend after Thanksgiving is usually reserved for lying around the house comatose and catching up on all the rest we couldn’t possibly have gotten over the busy holidays. And the Christmas shopping season generally isn’t a great time for unplanned expenditures. We had expected October’s Ace Comic Con to be our final outing of the year. We were reluctant to commit to Supercon for months.

After much deliberation and waiting, a few names on the Louisville Supercon guest list — actors as well as comics creators — lured us in. We kept ourselves to a tighter budget than normal. We reviewed the guest list for autograph/photo-op possibilities and vetted the names with extreme finickiness. As an added budgetary measure, we decided to attend Friday rather than Saturday, which worked well because (a) we both had vacation time to use up before year’s end; (b) Friday tickets were nearly half the cost of Saturday’s; and (c) nearly every actor we wanted to meet would be there Friday as well, which is uncommon for cons. (Our biggest regret: special guest Richard Dreyfuss would be there Saturday only. Another time, perhaps, hopefully someday.)

Thus we were off and running. A two-hour drive brought us to downtown Louisville and the Kentucky International Convention Center. It reopened last August after a two-year renovation project and really doesn’t look like a forty-year-old facility. In a bit of wondrous timing, temperatures were in the 50s most of the day.

The main entrance as viewed from the closest parking garage.

On Friday the show floor would open at noon. We arrived in town shortly before 11 a.m. and found parking as near as possible. Not only is excessive walking getting harder as we get older, but Anne has been dealing with a sprained foot the past few weeks. That strategic move, plus her space-age bandage and our ibuprofen supply, helped save her energy and discomfort.

The crowds were light but in good spirits. Registration was a cinch. Locating the main entrance on the Upper Concourse wasn’t hard. We joined the short entry line, where Anne sat down on the floor and we watched teens in anime costumes enjoying each other’s company and taking turns posing for pics and whatnot.

A photo-op setup near the entrance starring Supercon’s official mascot, who appears to be a small child bitten by a radioactive urinal cake.

Ten minutes till showtime, cameras gathered for brief, unofficial opening speeches by a representative on behalf of the showrunners, a local city-councilwoman, and Supercon guest John Wesley Shipp — star of TV’s original The Flash, recurring guest on The CW’s current version, and accredited graduate of a Louisville high school.

We met him last year at a con in Knoxville. Great guy, highly recommended.

We all flooded into the exhibit hall promptly at noon and made a beeline for the celebrity autograph area, which were to Anne’s dismay in the corner farthest away from the doors. We had no idea what time to expect any actors because no autograph schedule had ever been released. As we walked through the autograph area, a handful of celebrities were already at their stations and ready to meet-‘n’-greet, including the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, Jabba the Hutt’s slave dancer, and the voice of Skeletor. Anne was afraid to look around because she didn’t want to be distracted from her primary objective.

Thus we continued without stopping and set up base camp for the next hour in front of the table reserved for TV’s Henry Winkler. Despite her infirmity we were first in line.

You might remember him from such shows and films as Better Late Than Never, Barry, Happy Days, The Waterboy, and more more more.

For us this would be delayed gratification realized at last. Winkler had been previously scheduled to attend last August’s Wizard World Chicago, but had canceled two days after we bought our tickets. Anne was disappointed at the time but held out hope that one day she’d meet Arthur Fonzarelli himself.

The Fonz arrived around 1:00, by which time a dozen of us were in line. He greeted each of us individually, gave a solid pitch for the various forms of merchandise he had for sale, then did the extra-friendly thing where he stood in front of his table to converse and sign instead of sitting behind the table.

Among the vast selection of 8×10 photos available, Anne was tempted by one from the Parks & Recreation episode in which Dr. Saperstein and his terrible son Jean-Ralphio spent the day watching cartoons in matching bathrobes. Winkler was very helpful in talking her through the photo choices, like a benevolent salesman trying to match the right car to the right driver. With his coaching she landed upon a candid photo of him at home with a happy dog. When Anne meets actors, she prefers to get photos of them as themselves rather than as their characters because that’s who she’s come to meet. Not only did Winkler peg her well, but he sold me on his 2011 book of photographs and non-acting personal memories called I’ve Never Met an Idiot on the River. When in Rome, and so on.

None of our photo-ops were scheduled till late afternoon, freeing up the next hour or so for wandering Artists Alley and the rows reserved for assorted comic book professionals, some of whose contributions date back to my childhood. A fraction of the talents on hand included:

* Fabian Nicieza! Cons love billing him as the co-creator of Deadpool and Cable, which today’s successful Marvel movies have all but guaranteed he’ll be celebrated as for the rest of his life. Back in my day he was the writer of such top-notch and often underrated series as Psi-Force, Thunderbolts, New Warriors (which almost became a TV show), and Troublemakers for Valiant/Acclaim Comics. As someone who highly regarded his Psi-Force run in particular and Marvel’s ill-fated “New Universe” in general, I was stunned when he told me the book was selling 40,000 copies a month when it was canceled because those were low sales back in the late ’80s. Today that figure would make it a Top 10 book.

I missed him at a previous C2E2, where The Co-Creator of Deadpool had a near-infinite line. Here at Supercon on a quiet Friday, line length was not a problem.

* Mark Bagley! Co-creator of the original Ultimate Spider-Man as well as Venom’s villainous spin-off Carnage, he was the long-running artist on such Marvel books as New Warriors, Thunderbolts, Amazing Spider-Man, and the nearly forgotten Strikeforce Morituri.

With a reputation for speed and reliability, he’s among the very few artists still active in the field today who can handle drawing a monthly title, even in an age when computerized coloring technically leaves pencilers and inkers with less work to do.

* Keith Giffen! When I first started reading comics as a kid, he was the regular artist on Legion of Super-Heroes. He went on to co-create DC’s Lobo and Ambush Bug, as well as Marvel’s Rocket Raccoon, though he only drew his first appearance and has hated drawing him ever since. (His detailed list of con sketching prices insists on $500 for Rocket, to ensure no one asks.) He’s widely known as the driving force behind the post-Crisis “funny” version of the Justice League, among other hilarious books that dared to put the “comic” in “comic book”.

In person he’s as cantankerous as I expected, and suspect I may be someday.

* Emi Lenox! A relative newcomer compared to the other guys, her work first caught my eye on the Image miniseries Plutona written by Jeff Lemire. Imagine Stand by Me except the band of teens find the body in the first act and it belongs to a superhero. Their reactions spiral out of control from there as the kids’ flaws turn into disturbing psychodrama.

For what it’s worth, her Tumblr isn’t quite so dark.

Approximately 90% of Supercon’s narrow Artists Alley was arts-and-crafts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it’s not what I look for at cons. There was much fine work to be seen, but I don’t have good display space for too many art objects, nor did I really budget for it. I did emerge with purchases from two stands: a anthology from the Louisville Cartoonists Society, which I didn’t know was a thing; and once again from Drew Blank, one of the lone purveyors out there creating unofficial merchandise celebrating the genius of both Parks and Rec and The Office.

The mandatory “stuff I bought at the con” shot, including a small print of the Keith Giffen cover for one of DC’s funniest-ever funnybooks.

After comics came lunch. To our delight, the KICC’s food options weren’t terrible. We enjoyed gyros from a stand that had a tiny grill for cooking the meat strips while we watched. Later in the afternoon came giant ice cream waffle cones from another booth. Other options included pulled pork, Philly steak sandwiches, chicken and waffles, walking tacos, and a bit more. Convention centers have a terrible track record when it comes to edible resources, particularly for shows held in facilities with virtually no affordable restaurant competitors within easy walking range. The KICC is also surrounded with chain restaurants outside, a veritable banquet compared to, say, the grueling lunchtime moonscape that is Wizard World Chicago.

Very few tables stood nearby, none with chairs. Fortunately we found hundreds of empty seats in front of a nearby wrestling ring. There’s something else we don’t see often at other cons.

The big show was later that evening. Promotional photos promised that it would indeed feature guys in costumes beating on each other, forming some unlikely inter-company death-matches.

COSPLAY INTERMISSION TIME!

So, um, about that:

I make no secret of the fact that cosplay photos drive traffic on these convention entries. Like, extremely heavily if we’re on our game. Real talk: convention cosplay and overwrought movie reviews compose the preponderance of any and all MCC back-catalog traffic, which keeps me satisfied that my little hobby-site here isn’t a complete waste of my time. Despite how much weight and effort I put into all these travelogue entries, those are a joy to assemble but generally sink to the bottom within 48 hours because in the long term no one cares much about those. At all.

Unfortunately, we took very nearly zero cosplay photos due to a number of factors:

• We spent more time in lines than on wandering the exhibit hall
• Fridays typically have far fewer cosplayers walking the floor than Saturdays do
• The narrow aisles between vendors wasn’t conducive to cosplayers wanting to walk the floor much
• We tend to skip costumes we don’t recognize, which gets complicated when the field is overtaken by characters from universes I know zilch about such as Overwatch, Fortnite, and today’s hip anime
• It’s harder to chase down cosplayers when they’re in a hurry and we’re older and have injuries

with that in mind, sincere apologies for the paltry costume gallery. In keeping with past efforts, readers will note once again half the pics are Deadpool variants.

Professor Pyg, a dark 21st-century Batman villain who could fit in really well in a grim-and-gritty Bioshock-meets-“Pigs in Space” crossover.

Roninpool with Infinity Gauntlet, preparing not to halve but to double the number of chimichangas in the universe.

…

…uhhh, END INTERMISSION.

Also, as with other shows, we found super fun props.

The 501st Legion brought an AT-ST and two speeder bikes. That’s me doing my best Slim Pickens impression.

Someone sculpted part of the Iron Giant. Hopefully they can finish the rest in time for next show.

We made time for one panel, which unfortunately resulted in some awkwardness. The main panel rooms were not easy to find . The convention map failed to explain the spatial relationship between those rooms and the rest of the show, simply diagramming them as a disembodied blueprint floating in space. I had to go to the KICC’s own website, not Supercon’s. to determine those rooms were located in the KICC’s east wing. Neither site showed how to get there from here. Without actual printed instructions or functional drawings, I figured the simplest way would be to go down to the ground floor and head east.

We tried this, but hit a dead end in the middle of the center. We stepped out the nearest exit and headed down the sidewalk to the east wing. We pulled on the nearest door and found it locked. Standing inside a hundred feet away was a con volunteer silently shaking her head, pointing westward, and refusing to approach or provide verbal or useful assistance.

We returned to the doors we’d just exited from the building’s west half. They’d locked behind us, one way only. We had to walk back to the doors at the far northwest corner of the Center, reenter, head back upstairs, walk toward the exhibit hall, divert to the easily overlooked narrow hallway to the left of the exhibit hall, take that toward the east wing, travel two escalators down, and then walk the full north-south length of the center to reach the room we’d wanted.

I’m glad we figured it out, but I was not happy that Louisville Supercon’s maps sucked. Somehow Anne’s foot was fine through all this, possibly in the end stages of the healing process. But now my feet were killing me.

With that out of the way, we walked into a conference room — college auditorium, style, complete with desks and laptop outlets, a great resource for anyone needing to charge their phones — and settled in to find the previous presentation was running long. Up front, artist/writer/editor Al Milgrom was finishing up a sketch of the Hulk while overhead projectors let us watch his work in progress. Once he finished blacking the last shadows in Hulk’s feet, he presented the completed work to a lucky audience member, and then their panel was over.

Next up was a Q&A with the aforementioned Fabian Nicieza, co-creator of a famous movie character who, by the other co-creator’s own description, was basically Spider-Man meets the Punisher.

Interview conducted by frequent local comic-con guest Victor Dandridge, Jr.

Topics covered throughout their chat:

• Nicieza’s birth in Argentina, move to the U.S. as a four-year-old, and discovery of comics
• His early days in the work force that led to his gig in Marvel marketing
• His breakthrough as a comics writer, which he somehow handled in addition to his full-time job
• Some of the marketing gimmicks he spearheaded, such as the Avengers ID card that came free with the first issue of Solo Avengers, which I think I still have in a scrapbook somewhere
• His time as part of the team that took over the X-Men books during the poorly handled tradition away from previous longtime writer Chris Claremont
• The thought processes behind giving the Merc with a Mouth his own Spidey-like sarcastic personality and tragic backstory
• How Writers Are Getting Deadpool So Very Wrong Today
• Why Marvel’s NFL SuperPro was a thing that existed
• His current Webtoons webcomic Outrage (with artist Reilly Brown), which has had more readers than any printed comics he’s written in the last fifteen years

Beyond the Q&A, our afternoon saw three photo-ops in all. We’d originally planned the first one to be Brent Spiner, but he regretfully canceled due to a number of personal issues. In his place Spiner suggested and the con welcomed his former coworker Jonathan Frakes.

Anne asks, “Can we do jazz hands?” Frakes looks at me and asks, “Are you in?” I say, “absolutely.” And it was ON.

Anne had already met the entire main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, nearly half of them at Wizard World Chicago 2014 (which included Frakes). She has all their autographs, but photos of almost none of them. The chances of meeting all of them a second time to collect photos are slim to none, but we figured it might be nice to take advantage of their recurring cameos where possible. We were sad that Spiner was unable to make it, but Frakes was an upstanding substitute.

In addition to his career as Commander William Riker, he’s directed films as well as TV that we’ve enjoyed. Earlier this year Anne and I finally finished watching the TNT series Leverage, for which he directed several episodes, did two cameos, and participated in a few of the entertaining, alcohol-laden DVD commentaries. On one of them, Leverage co-creator John Rogers even convinced him to yell “RED ALERT!” in his best stoic Riker voice. So yeah, I was more than happy to see him again.

Two more photo ops were our final activities of the day. In one, I got to meet the Alice Cooper — legendary rocker, performance artist, Muppet Show guest and Wayne’s World costar. Alas, in finalizing our available funds I found myself forced to choose between autograph or photo op with him. Since I don’t have a vinyl collection for him to sign like some of the other lucky fans I met in line, I went this way instead.

After the pic, Alice says, “A little Fosse, huh?” I shouted “YES! EXACTLY!” and mentally lit off lots of fireworks celebrating the fifth celebrity I’ve met who gets “Fosse fingers”. I’m not worthy.

As our lead photo already spoiled, our Louisville Supercon grand finale was a dual photo op with the aforementioned Henry Winkler and the William Shatner. It sounds like an odd pairing if you’re unaware they’re costars in the NBC reality series Better Late Than Never along with George Foreman and Terry Bradshaw. The two former pro athletes were nowhere to be found, but Captain Kirk and the Fonz were in the house and happy to hang out together.

Anne and I have had the great blessing of meeting — or at least being in the same room as — nearly the entire cast of the original Star Trek. (Alas, that curmudgeonly DeForest Kelley stopped doing cons before our time, and our Leonard Nimoy experience was us sitting at the back of his crowded ballroom Q&A at a con where he only did pre-show signings for us commoners.) But we didn’t get photos the first time around, unless you count the time Anne met Shatner at Wizard World Chicago 2010, where he was surrounded by a wall of fans playing penniless paparazzi and the autograph signing was one of those cattle-call experiences where the actor is in mute, thankless, scribble-NEXT-scribble-NEXT-scribble-NEXT mode all day long. A second chance with Shatner and a first chance with Winkler was too good an opportunity to pass up. Theirs was the one moment where we went over budget. But we forgive us.

We were concerned whether or not this would actually happen, when news came in around 12:30 that Shatner was running a few hours late. Whatever was in his way ultimately didn’t stop him. While we waited in line, we chatted with a mother/daughter duo behind us who showed off their Alice Cooper autograph, under which he’d written “Galatians 2:20”. That was heartwarming on too many levels to recount here.

In deference to Shatner’s stature, Anne insisted we not ask about jazz hands. I understood but put on a state of comic disbelief anyway. As we entered the photo booth, Winkler said, “Nice to see you again!” and we died for a few seconds because the Fonz just remembered us! Shatner stood to the far side, content to abide.

We took our positions. I began to crouch down in front of the others so I wouldn’t block anyone. I was tempted to throw up some jazz hands from down below. I was about a foot down when Shatner protested, “Stand up! You look better that way!” Not in an irritated tone, but in the tone of a parent giving advice to a kid with low self-esteem who ought to be prouder of who they are.

I couldn’t very well explain my partially formed ulterior motive. To be honest, in that split-second I was taken aback because it’s so exceptionally rare for anyone to offer me constructive criticism. On anything. At all. Ever. In that moment I took it as encouragement, thanked him sincerely, and stood tall with comical stymied frustration on my face.

Shatner was right, though.

…

…and that’s the high note on which our Louisville Supercon 2018 experience ended, skipping over the part where my feet were in pain but Anne’s seemed blessedly intact. Now that we have a better idea of the KICC’s overall layout, the one part I thoroughly detested shouldn’t be an issue if we and Supercon return for an encore.

Thanks for reading. See you next convention…

Of all the pics to lead with, of course I’m going with the one Instagram loved most, apparently one of the year’s best Tom Hiddleston photos judging by their reactions. Big thanks to Ace Comic Con Midwest for making this magically possible.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I are big fans of geek/comic/entertainment conventions. Sometimes we shell out for photo ops with actors from our favorite movies and TV shows. If they’re amenable and don’t mind taking posing suggestions from a pair of eccentric fortysomethings shaped like two lumpy bags of potatoes, our favorite theme is jazz hands. We’re not dancers and we’ve only attended two Broadway shows so far, but we love the idea of sharing a moment of unbridled joie de vivre with anyone who’s game. We can’t remember which of us had the idea first, though the inspiration surely came from a few different possible sources we share. So it’s our thing now.

We previously compiled collections of our first three years of jazz-hands photos (including one that was once used in Wizard World Chicago advertising materials), followed by a complete roundup of our 2017, the year we attended way too many cons for our own good. We didn’t expect 2018 to resemble 2017, but in tallying up the results it struck me that we had a pretty decent — and, if I may say, jazzy — year after all.

After the way our past two months have gone off the rails, we’re confident 2019 will be dramatically scaled back whether we like it or not. While we’re working on finding ways to make austerity measures entertaining, please enjoy the following clipfest starring a plethora of talented folks who have impressed us in movies or on TV who were willing to play along with all that jazz.

HorrorHound Cincinnati: Julie Benz from TV’s Angel, Dexter, and Syfy’s Defiance.

Indiana Comic Con: “Yeah, we can go back to my Broadway days!” quipped an exhausted and put-upon David Harbour, a.k.a. Chief Hopper from Netflix’s Stranger Things.

C2E2: Justin Hartley from the NBC ratings juggernaut This Is Us as well as Green Arrow from Smallville. A rare instance of a comic-con photo staff asking us to come back for a retake because something went wrong with our first one.

Also C2E2: former Firefly couple Alan Tudyk and Gina Torres, who later found bigger audiences respectively in Disney animation and in USA’s Suits.

C2E2 yet again: Brandon Routh, Caity Lotz and Dominic Purcell from The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow, where jazz hands would honestly sometimes fit right in.

Did I mention C2E2 was really good to us? Nowhere else in all of time or space will you ever see punk icon Henry Rollins workshopping his Cab Calloway impression.

C2E2 extra credit: not actually a celebrity, but an awesome Drax the Destroyer cosplayer we know. We’ve grown accustomed to his face.

Wizard World Chicago, our most stressful con of 2018, also produced the lousiest camera work for Smallville costars Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling. Unlike some cons, they charge extra for the digital copy, so we’ll never know if this was a printer issue or a crappy, possibly drunken photographer.

Hall of Heroes Comic Con: William Katt formerly The Greatest American Hero, who was once in a production of Bob Fosse’s Pippin and is one of the only five famous folks we’ve ever met who got our benign oddball request and called it by the proper phrase “Fosse fingers”.

Ace Comic Con Midwest on Chicago’s Navy Pier: our big moment with Lee Pace from Pushing Daisies and The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy, from the Department of How I Wish We Could’ve Done a Retake.

A moment of pizzazz from Ace Midwest with Zazie Beetz, costar of Donald Glover’s amazing Atlanta and the box-office-friendly Deadpool 2.

Louisville Supercon: TV/film director Jonathan Frakes, a Starfleet officer in a previous life.

Also from Louisville Supercon: superstar Alice Cooper became the fifth member of Team Fosse Fingers.

…and that’s the year that was, jazz-hands-wise. I’ve also been keeping a dedicated Pinterest board collating all our jazz hands to date — 56 photos and counting as of today. To be honest it’s the only real use I’ve found for Pinterest so far. I considered creating other MCC collages there, but I’m not sure there’s a demand, need, or whimsical reason to expand my Pinterest interest yet.

For those interested in catching us in action in the future for whatever weird reason, our much shorter 2019 convention schedule so far looks roughly like this:

• March 22: C2E2 in Chicago.
• April 11-13: Star Wars Celebration Chicago, their first time in the Midwest since SWC 2005 in Indianapolis.
• August 29 – September 1: our first DragonCon in Atlanta, which we’ve been considering for years and believe the time has come at last to put up, not shut up.

Events we’re keeping an eye on but haven’t committed 100% to yet unless someone wants to pay our way in advance: HorrorHound Cincinnati; Comic Con Revolution Chicago; the Superman Celebration in Metropolis; Indy Pop Con; Hall of Heroes Comic Con (who’re presently updating their Facebook page more than their site); and next November’s Louisville Supercon, whose extremely early guest list already tempts me deeply.

Events we’ve attended before but will likely be missing this year due to scheduling issues: Wizard World Chicago, HorrorHound Indy, Indiana Comic Con.

Updates and new Fosse Fingers as they occur!

Say hi to Chibi-Captain Spaudling and Chibi-Otis B. Driftwood from Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects.

Convention season is here again!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last year we attended our first HorrorHound Cincinnati, an annual convention in honor of the scary, icky, disturbing, stabby, psychotropic aspects of pop culture. The folks at HorrorHound Magazine orchestrate the festivities so loyal fans of the deadly and the dead can enjoy a themed geek space of their own apart from Star Wars and Star Trek and whatnot. (Well, mostly.) We’ve attended four of the same company’s HorrorHound Indy shows in our own hometown because, even though horror isn’t a primary focus for our entertainment habits, their overseers have a flair for assembling a top-notch guest list filled with actors we’ve seen in a lot of great works throughout our lives…and who also just so happen to have one or more Halloween-apropos movies or TV shows among their IMDb credits.

This year posed a challenge for us. We were on the fence about attending until a few weeks before showtime, when they added a guest I considered Absolute Must-See. Unfortunately by the time we were prepared to pull the trigger, Saturday passes were sold out. I can’t remember the last time a con ticket sellout threatened to be a major deterrent for us.

Not all guests would be there Friday. The only way to make it work was to attend Sunday, which is a thing we nearly never do. Our Sunday morning was spoken for and tightened our time frame to an uncomfortable degree. The earliest we could leave town was 11 a.m. Cincinnati is a mere two hours away — a bit less if you drive like I do, and if no fools stand in my way — but if we ran afoul of massive road construction or accidents, or if we encountered a heavy snowstorm as we did last year, we were doomed.

My heart sank when I woke up Sunday morning to large snowflakes cascading everywhere. Funny thing: none of them stuck the roads. By 11 they were all melted, we were off and running. With no accidents ahead and a shockingly zero construction sites in progress, we made it to the Sharonville Convention Center around 12:45. The con closed at 5. We had slightly over four hours to check off our entire to-do list.

After paying for parking next door (unlike other late arrivals doing laps and laps and laps around the convention center’s packed spaces) and picking up our wristbands, we made a beeline to the opposite end of the building for the Absolute Must-See actor: Lance Reddick, once known as Lieutenant Daniels from The Wire. You might also remember him as head Agent Phillip Broyles from the Fox SF series Fringe and as the concierge at the Continental from the John Wick series, soon to be a trilogy.

We couldn’t hear each other very well over some other actor’s crowd behind us, but the moment was treasured nonetheless.

Among other subjects, we discussed how the lessons of The Wire still apply today to a lot of large American cities including our own Indianapolis hometown, and how David Simon’s original nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is like a War and Peace for our generation — thick and complex and with an enormous cast, but deeply affecting, essential reading.

Anne cheerfully found a guest of her own to greet. Most folks recognize Carel Struycken as Lurch from the Addams Family movies. Anne also remembers him from several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation as the quiet Mr. Homn, assistant to Deanna Troi’s mom Lwaxana Troi.

Fun trivia: Carel Struycken is nearly two Annes tall.

Our next guest required a scavenger hunt. HorrorHound Cincinnati’s guests were spread out across three exhibit halls. Lance Reddick and the highest-profile guests were in Hall C. Mr. Struycken and assorted other actors at various points in their careers were in Halls A and B. The show floor map alleged our next guy was in Hall A. We searched up and down and saw him nowhere. We tried the information desk. Volunteer 1 deferred to Volunteer 2, who pointed us to Volunteer 3, who graciously walked with us into Hall A to help search, partly because he was curious too. We hadn’t been the first fans to come asking.

Volunteer 3 talked to the right folks and learned we needed to go back to Hall C, ignore all the guests who had visible banners and long lines, and look for a small, unassuming table in a dark corner away from convenient pathways, basic visibility, and human contact. He didn’t word it like that, but that’s where we found Garret Dillahunt. His performance as a reprogrammed Terminator in The Sarah Conner Chronicles was among that show’s many, many unappreciated highlights. I’ve also seen him in season 1 of The Gifted, the one episode of the sitcom Raising Hope I ever watched, and such films as The Road, 12 Years a Slave, Looper, and Winter’s Bone.

if The Sarah Conner Chronicles had lived on, I could totally imagine Cromartie doing jazz hands.

Extremely nice gentleman, but if I were an actor of any size and convention showrunners had tucked me into a distant corner like that with absolutely no way for fans to find me except by mounting an exploratory expedition, I’d be severely ticked.

Our final actor of the weekend may have the most familiar face of all. Steven Weber has been all over TV throughout the past two decades, from the NBC sitcom Wings and onward to parts of varying sizes in Studio 60 and Falling Skies, one episode apiece of Community and Sleepy Hollow (which I recapped at the time!) and the starring role of Jack Torrance in the 6-hour miniseries version of The Shining, which hewed more closely to Stephen King’s book than Kubrick’s classic artiness and Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top Nicholsonality did.

Your move, Tim Daly.

Weber was deep in chat with next-door table-neighbor Annabeth Gish when we approached. I hated to interrupt and cheerfully let them go on for a bit. Actors like to have fun at these events too, and it’s a shame when they pause on my account. I considered asking if it bugged him that his last name was misspelled on every single piece of HHC literature, but enjoyed the moment instead.

We did our dutiful tour of the vendors and artists and whatnot, but bought very little because (a) we’re not into accumulating as much stuff as we used to be, and (b) we have another con coming up extremely soon that more accurately caters to my accumulation desires. We did make a point of saying hi to author Mike West, a HorrorHound regular we’ve met at past shows, among other places.

Sample booth sentry.

Even though it was Sunday and full-weekend attendees were probably exhausted and ready to nap wherever they stood, cosplayers nonetheless abounded, raising spirits and property values with their imagination and craftsmanship.

Billy the Puppet from Saw, complete with tricycle with a li’l bell on it.

The Toxic Avenger, plying his wares at the Troma Films booth.

Beetlejuice and Lydia in their wedding attire.

A demon lady whose name I wish I knew, whose wings even worked. By which I mean they folded and unfolded, not that she literally flew. At least, not in front of us.

Harley Quinn! Still everywhere!

Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday and Pugsley Addams, keeping it in the Family.

I suspected this might take hours. It didn’t, for one simple reason: none of these guests had a line. At all. I like to think they spent all day Saturday overwhelmed with thousands of teeming followers descending upon them for attention and selfies, and by Sunday afternoon everyone was just too tired to move and/or thought the actors could use a breather. Whatever the reason, we wrapped up our day to our total satisfaction by 2:00 sharp, 75 minutes spent in all. There were no other panels, no other shopping needs, and not much of our modest budget left.

In all: once again HorrorHound Cincinnati was a super fun experience. We’ll see where fates and moods take us next year, and we’ll see readers again in our next set of con photos, which won’t be a long wait.

Badges! And papers! On every table-shaped surface! So. Many. PAPERS.

My brain is buzzing too much to write paragraphs right now. Our ninth foray to C2E2 in Chicago is this weekend, and I think we’re ready, but I dunno if we’re ready ready.

Our workplaces are left to their own devices and out of our hair for now, which is great because we both need a break. The relatives are notified. The things that need sitters are set for sitting. The Saturday badges and the Friday will-call papers are secured. The trade paperback want-list is slightly updated and reprinted. The Artists Alley MVPs are pinned. A few autographable objects are squared away. The convention’s mammoth event schedule is pared down to a list of a few must-sees, two jazz-hands appointments, and a wealth of optional possibilities. The favor we’re performing for a friend-of-a-friend is mapped out. The bags are packed. My stupid new pills are not being left behind. The wardrobe is selected. The hotel is confirmed. The non-Dunkin donut shops nearest our hotel are on radar. The devices are charging. The checkbooks are balanced. The official C2E2 app is downloaded and ready to be useless to me because I am old and printouts are my jam.

Maybe we’re nearly ready ready, then? All that’s left is to sleep, arise, leave, drive, arrive, line up, get inspected, stampede, say hello to talented strangers, bid farewell to my money, be severely shocked and honored if anyone recognizes us, accept there’s no shame in stopping or resting, pray for the best, and keep in mind whoever says “I’m getting too old for this” loses.

Updates as they occur through my usual social channels, unless signal quality is awful or everything is dull. Otherwise, updates after the fact. if all my accounts go too quiet, assume the worst, by which I mean either illness or broken phones, and feel free to panic for us. I promise we’ll be flattered!

We did not plan to have the same expression. This means we’re now honorary twins.

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team.

(Useless pedantic note: this was the tenth annual C2E2. It was not C2E2’s tenth anniversary. The inaugural edition was in 2010; therefore, their tenth anniversary will fall in 2020, with the show’s 11th edition. Thank you for listening to today’s episode of my Commemorative Math Pet Peeves podcast.)

One of this year’s largest attractions was arguably its least geek-themed event: a reunion of four of the costars from Amy Heckerling’s 1995 comedy classic Clueless. In the house this weekend were Alicia Silverstone (Batman & Robin), Donald Faison (Scrubs), previous C2E2 attendee Breckin Meyer (Garfield), and certified young legend Paul Rudd. You might remember him from such Marvel Cinematic Universe films as Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Ant-Man Goes to Monte Carlo, and Ant-Man Versus Godzilla. Anne and I are even fonder of his short-term stint on Parks & Recreation as Pawnee city-council candidate Bobby Newport, the friendliest scion of any candy empire ever. We loved it so much that we were this close to investing in Bobby Newport campaign T-shirts just for this photo.

Instead we decided to do our thing. Longtime MCC readers are well aware that our favorite photo-op theme at any comic-con and comic-con-shaped affair is jazz hands. Interested viewers can check out the collection to date on my dedicated Pinterest board. Hence the pose in our lead photo. Sure, we could’ve brought props, like the group of fans ahead of us in line who brought Baskin-Robbins aprons and visors for their photo, and thoughtfully brought a set for the A-lister to don alongside them. But we went with our own direction instead.

To be honest, if I may say so, this wasn’t even our best jazz-hands photo of the weekend.

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

Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

The Tenth Doctor is very, very in.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and often pose for jazz-hands photos as a team. To wit: our special moment with David Tennant. You might remember him from such shows as Doctor Who, Jessica Jones, Broadchurch, and more. Technically this moment should’ve happened sooner — Tennant was originally scheduled as a guest at Wizard World Chicago 2017 but had to cancel on the day-of for understandable, serious reasons. Frankly, I was worried he’d have to cancel again, but he thankfully didn’t encounter the same work-visa issues that have hindered the plans of other would-be convention guests from overseas over the past few weeks. For us, this photo therefore represents relief, fandom fulfilled, and extremely delayed gratification.

This quick entry also represents a stalling technique. Right now I’m dead on my feet from the three-hour drive home, only partly unpacked, and faced with the fun chore of sorting several dozen photos for posting ASAP before the C2E2 zeitgeist wears off. But a nap first might be lovely. Until I can get my head back on straight, please enjoy this glimpse of Tennant, who immediately got “jazz hands” without a single bit of coaching or waiting for us to go first.

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

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

Friday in Asgard: Thor, Odin (with Huginn and Muninn!), Malekith and Hela.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and do our best to take cosplay photos as a team. we’re 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 worlds of Marvel and DC Comics, from their movies and shows as well as their comics. 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 5, 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 Thor bid you welcome to C2E2!

Normally welcoming you would be Heimdall’s job, but this isn’t Asgard and it’s his day off.

Also big at the movies: Mera, star of Aquaman.

Aquaman and Mera vacationing on the surface world and enjoying some of its libations.

Differently big at the movies: Spider-Gwen and Spider-Man Noir, part of this year’s Spiderverse cosplay explosion.

Also from Spiderverse and my childhood: Peter Porker, the spectacular Spider-Ham.

The itsy-bitsy Spidey climbed up the Marvel stage.

Meanwhile on TV: Negative Man from the Doom Patrol.

Mr. Terrific, star of TV’s Arrow.

Meanwhile not on TV: Daredevil. The second word in his Braille sign is “DISNEY”.

Once again the Infinity Gauntlet stands out from the crowd, and thankfully too big to snap.

Fred Flintpool, somehow the only Deadpool variant we braked for. We’re losing our touch.

Kon-El, a.k.a. Superboy, sporting his totally ’90s gear from that time he helped replace Superman while he was dead.

Mandatory Bat-Villains: Professor Hugo Strange, Poison Ivy, and the Scarecrow.

Saturday in Asgard: Thor and Odin return, but Hela is now Malekith, and the previous Malekith is now Beta Ray Bill, armed with Stormbreaker. The family that Norse together is a force together.

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

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

The Mayor of Halloween Town from Henry Selick’s Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, looking on the verge of abusing his power.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and enjoyed the company of cosplayers as a team. With the same provisos and intro as our previous chapter, please enjoy a smaller but equally creative sampling of the cosplayers on hand who celebrated the various other universes that share Marvel’s megalithic corporate umbrella.

Mary Poppins Generation One.

Me and Mary Poppins Returns, one of many fellow fans we enjoyed lining up and chatting with throughout our weekend.

Darth Revan, still fighting on behalf of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

Disney villains and their amazing friends.

Ursula, taking a few minutes’ breather from conquering and terrorizing and whatnot.

They call him Han SOUL-O!

Jafar, would-be emperor of the universe with the aid of a teeny Genie.

Edna Mode from The Incredibles, whom it pains to be surrounded by so many fashion faux pas.

Miss Piggy and Darth Maul: can their love bridge the gap between their two worlds?

If they catch him in the right mood, the Mayor of Halloween Town might be more than happy to officiate that wedding.

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

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

Calvin and Hobbes, complete with Watterson-accurate expression.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and sooner or later we run out of cosplay photos as a team. It’s time to share all the cosplay that’s fit to print and left to post. Same disclaimers apply as in Part Two. Enjoy! Some more!

Two of my favorite video game villains, Big Brother and Big Sister from the Bioshock series.

Macho Man Randy Savage, questing for his Miss Elizabeth.

Hello Kitty Pez dispenser, for fans of strangers with candy.

Shaun of the Dead, who insisted it’s not a hard costume to pull off. Even so, a key part of effective cosplay is commitment and follow-through.

Pac-Man, representing on behalf of an exhibit hall vendor. Call him a “Booth Ball”.

Also shilling on the show floor: Sir Lionel and Susan, each voiced by Hugh Jackman and Zach Galifianakis in the upcoming Laika animated film Missing Link.

If you’ve ever been to a con where dozens of those inflatable orange T-Rex costumes wander around, this cosplayer aimed to get into the role more than skin-deep.

Intermission:

At most cons we end up with a small selection of photos I like to call “Stump the Olds”, in which we share photos of costumes that we thought looked somewhere between fancy and ingenious, and we took their picture even though we have absolutely no idea what character we’re looking at. If someone recognizes any of our next three subjects and can broaden our horizons by identifying them, that would be tremendously appreciated. I’m not quite satisfied with posting blind, unlabeled, anonymous cosplay pics even though thousands of convention-cosplay photogs super-love doing exactly that on Instagram all the time. I aspire to be at least a smidgen better than that if someone’ll help cure my ignorance. Much obliged!

Golden armored warrior knight soldier with a potentially evil halo.

Evil mecha crab spider queen destroyer and whatnot.

What if Mother Nature got sick of humanity and created her own mystical evil-tree armor to come rain natural sorcery revenge upon us all.

Back to easy, familiar pop-culture territory with Pikachu. Pika pika! See, him I know.

Same Pokemon, movie variant, with his old buddy Ash. We’ll come back to Detective Pikachu in a later chapter.

More faces for us middle-age fans to recognize on sight: TV’s Underdog and Simon Bar Sinister!

Bumblebee from the original Transformers. Calling them “Generation One” just makes me feel ancient, so let’s not.

Teaser photo from next summer’s smash epic Waluigi: Into the Waluigiverse.

Dancing Goku Black and friends out in the C2E2 lobby.

The genie Jeannie, our last cosplay photo of the weekend before we returned to our hotel and collapsed.

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

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

COSPLAY STRONG!

Elegantly dressed as Ramonda, Queen Mother of Wakanda, artist Afua Richardson (World of Wakanda, Genius) made the rest of us on the premises look like slobs.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and traipse together through their Artists Alley, consistently the best assemblage of comic book creators available in any large-scale Midwest entertainment convention. Scores of writers, artists, colorists, editors, and otherwise collaborative bookmakers gather in lengthy rows, some narrower than others, and tempt me to spend and spend and spend on new reading material, or at least brake for autographs on items I previously bought and brought along for the ride. This year was naturally no exception, which is why — more than jazz hands, more than the cosplay, definitely more than publishers’ freebies — Artists Alley is my favorite part of every C2E2.

Presented in order of meeting, because it’s easier for me to think that way:

Markisan Naso and Jason Muhr, the writer/artist team behind the Jurassic-cooking SF epic Voracious. I met Naso last year at C2E2, loved Volume 1, and had to brake for Volume 2.

Kyle Starks, Rick and Morty comics purveyor and co-creator of the new Image action series Assassination Nation.

Starks’ Assassination Nation partner-in-crime Erica Henderson, trying something extremely different from Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. We previously met at C2E2 2017.

Poet/musician Cecil Castellucci, writer of the recently concluded DC/Young Animal title Shade the Changing Girl/Woman. She’s now got a Female Furies miniseries in progress.

A survivor of the poorly attended Awesome Con Indy 2014 like us, Jeremy Whitley is the creator of the feminist fairy-tale series Princeless and currently getting a fair amount of press coverage for his work on Marvel’s Unstoppable Wasp, in which we recently learned our young heroine is bipolar.

Table mates still reeling from their convention debut at the previous weekend’s Emerald City Comic Con. Shaun Manning brought along a few graphic novels he’s written, including the Morrissey-referencing Interesting Drug. Andrew Rostan was a five-time Jeopardy! champion who’s just released an autobiographic novel about his experience appropriately called Form of a Question, which should fit neatly on the shelf next to Ken Jennings’ Brainiac.

I somehow missed that artist Ben Dewey (The Autumnlands, Beasts of Burden) was even on the guest list. Anne will testify I sped over the very minute I saw his table, naturally covered in fine arts.

The longest Artists Alley line we waited in belonged to Stephanie Hans, painter of Kieron Gillen’s new Image series DIE. As previously promised, I absolutely have to write about my reaction to it at length sometime.

After catching him on a Friday panel, we kicked off my second Artists Alley run-through on Saturday with a stop for Domo Stanton, now drawing the new DC/Vertigo series House of Whispers.

Editor/creator Alison Wilgus celebrated the release of her new OGN Chronin (part 1 of 2), involving time travel to 19th-century Japan.

Announced as snagging herself a Marvel exclusive contract this same weekend, writer Tini Howard (Euthanauts, Thanos) will be bringing back Death’s Head, arguably the best thing ever to have come out of Marvel UK.

Con attendees were shocked to hear of the hospitalization of C2E2 guest Joyce Chin on Saturday morning. Many of us lined up to offer kind words and wads of cash to her husband, legendary artist Arthur Adams, to whose awesome work at least half the founders of Image Comics owe their artistic careers.

Poet/professor Dr. Eve Ewing signed for a special hour at one of the larger tables over in the celebrity autograph section. Her Marvel series Ironheart is recommended reading, and she’ll be helping with a Marvel Team-Up relaunch soon.

Lockjaw! Quantum and Woody! Black Panther! Deadpool! Stephen Colbert! These characters and more have had words put in their mouths by Daniel Kibblesmith (well, okay, technically not Lockjaw).

Additional fine folks not pictured above:

• Tana Ford, artist on the Berger Books SF miniseries LaGuardia written by Nnedi Okorafor. I previously griped here on MCC about how I’d missed #2. It was literally the only back issue I cared about finding at C2E2, and Ford blessedly had copies available.
• Mike Norton, whom I previously met years ago at Wizard World Chicago (either 2010 or 2011, I forget which), but I picked up an issue of his current series Grumble, which I’d somehow never heard of before this weekend. I miss out on so many projects simply because I refuse to come within 500 yards of comic book message boards, whose constant debates by and large tend to give me abdominal bleeding.

My Artists Alley plunder as of 11 a.m. Friday. And then we stopped and had lunch because my back was already hurting from the quickly acquired, heavy load.

All my pretties from making the rounds on Saturday. Next time I must remember to keep our ibuprofen in my bag, not back at the hotel.

My favorite Artists Alley souvenir this year came courtesy of Ben Dewey. I bought a copy of The Complete Collection of the Tragedy Series: Secret Lobster Claws and Other Misfortunes, a hardcover souvenir reprinting the entirety of his rather focused Tumblr. Then he asks me what my favorite animal is. Somehow a confluence of Mike Baron and the Dead Milkmen in my head prompts the answer, “badger”. He whips out a mostly blank bookplate and proceeds over the course of a few quick minutes to adorn my new book with a fully inked and realized image of a most dapper badger, better dressed than I’ve ever been and ever will be.

The frame and “FROM THE LIBRARY OF” were preprinted. All else materialized while we watched. I never ask artists for sketches, so I’m blown away whenever this happens unexpectedly.

And these are just folks plying wares at their booths. As if they weren’t enough, we also attended more panels this year than usual and had fun seeing creators on stage…

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

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

Once again my wife brakes for Superman.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and found activities together as a team. Given that C2E2 is the most comics-centered of all the giant cons we attend each year, its activities often appeal more to me than to her. But we do try to take turns being each other’s plus-one throughout our various cons and travels, so eventually it balances out.

The Friday morning drive from Indianapolis to Chicago was surprisingly free of incident — no massive road construction projects, no traffic accidents, and only minimal delays on the Dan Ryan Expressway, a miracle itself. We dropped off the car in exactly the lot I’d wanted, walked into McCormick Place at 8:30 a.m., and joined the crowd-shaped line awaiting the 10 a.m. exhibit hall opening.

Some of us are readier than others.

The benevolent Powers That Be saw fit to begin ushering us in at 9:55. No one said “no”. Our first stop was for an errand on behalf of a friend-of-a-friend who dearly hoped we could locate a specific variant comic sold only by a specific retailer from Fresno making their C2E2 debut. Their booth was on the farthest end of the exhibit hall from the entrance, nearly hidden behind a long line of comic investors waiting their turns at the CGC booth. Many were the dudes hoping to have their most valuable comics’ conditions graded by CGC in hopes of reselling them as authenticated objets d^art, which in turn means they can ask for bigger bucks from their buyers. Not my thing, but I wish them well in profiting off our hobby.

The Fresno folks were super friendly, had exactly the comic we were looking for, and rewarded us with some free Hi-Chew candies. If only California shops came out here more often.

They even wrapped their Hi-Chews in whatever themed paper they could get their hands on. Cute and classy!

We shot straight from there to Artists Alley a few rows ahead. One hour later, my bag was full of books and giving me far too much back pain far too soon in this long weekend.

Thus at 11 a.m. we made a radical move: we grabbed lunch. I used to make fun of people who made concession stands their first stops at a con, but the truth is we had no major appointments on our Friday schedule, no photo ops or even any actor autographs in mind for that day. We were free to wander the exhibit hall at our leisure, check out dealers or not check them out as we saw fit. As we keep aging, we realize we need to find excuses to sit down more often if we’re to endure the arduous physical experience that is the typical miles-long, con-walking marathon.

Value-added plus: none of the concession stands had a line. Value-subtracted minus: dreadful prices for mediocre food. Fourteen bucks for a skimpy pastrami sandwich did not impress me. I’ve made better at home with meat from the Walmart deli. I chose poorly.

At 12:30 we attended our first panel: “SuperheroIRL! Join the Real-Life Justice League”. The subject was Pop Culture Hero, a nonprofit dedicated to anti-bullying educational programs and initiatives in a variety of forms and venues, framing their lessons on tolerance and understanding through the lens of superheroes and other mass-media protagonists who know bullying sucks and bullies are The Worst. Leading the panel was PCH cofounder Chase Masterson, best known to us as Leeta the Dabo Girl from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. (We met her decades ago at a local Trek convention.) Their mission statement, per their website:

Founded in 2013, we are a 501(c)(3) non-profit that takes a stand against bullying, racism, misogyny, cyber-bullying, LGBT-bullying, and other forms of hate,using the phenomenal popularity of media to bring justice and healing.

The Coalition’s work features global experts and advocates, including representatives from the United Nations, the Anti-Defamation League, the NOH8 Campaign, Justice League New York, and other major organizations; we also work with clinical psychologists who specialize in using pop culture stories in restorative justice and in therapy for victims of bullying and injustice.

Our Heroes.

Participants in the photo, left to right:

• Max Bever from the Illinois chapter of the ACLU, who hosts a relevant podcast called “Talking Liberties”, which I have to mention for pun value alone.
• Suzana Flores, a clinical psychologist and author of the upcoming nonfiction book Untamed: The Psychology of Marvel’s Wolverine. She not only dissects the Canadian berserker antihero at length, but at the panel she candidly shared her personal tale of how Wolverine got her through the direst ordeal of her life.
• Comics and comedy writer Daniel Kibblesmith, about whose talents I’ve previously raved here and here.
• Mike Strautmanis, a lawyer who worked within President Barack Obama’s adminsitration and is now Vice President of Civic Engagement for the Obama Foundation. Strautmanis detailed the Foundation’s plans to effect social change through the Barack Obama Presidential Center, which, if all goes according to plan, will have its campus built on Chicago’s south side. More than any other panelist, by association alone Strautmanis was treated like the biggest rock star in the room.
• Actor John Barrowman. You may remember him from such shows as Doctor Who, Torchwood, and TV’s Arrow. He spoke of his own experiences with turning the tables on would-be bullies in his youth and as he got older and better than them.
• Carrie Goldman, Pop Culture Hero co-founder and author of the book Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear.
• …and that’s Chase Masterson at the podium.

Barrowman was not listed in the program guide and was a pleasant and most welcome surprise guest. His past MCC appearances include Wizard World Chicago 2016 and Motor City Comic Con 2017.

Not pictured but late to the party was comics artist Afua Richardson, whose arrival in resplendent Dora Milaje regalia was impossible to miss and demoted Strautmanis to the second-biggest rock star in the room. She likewise shared her story — which has included bouts of poverty and other tribulations — and dropped words of wisdom, including a pearl from her grandmother (IIRC) that I made a point of writing down: “I allowed what tried to demolish me to polish me.”

Speaking of demolished: sitting down at the panel for an hour helped with our early fatigue onset, but I needed ibuprofen. With Anne shouldering some of my load in her bag, we ventured back to the car, shed a few dozen pounds of reading matter, loaded me up on meds, and returned to the fray, by which I mean walking the exhibit hall, stopping at very few dealers’ booths, picking up freebies from Marvel’s town square, and photographing the occasional cosplayer. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

Shortly before 3 p.m. we wandered over to the live stage in the far, far corner of the exhibit hall and caught a few minutes of sketching with Marc Silvestri, co-founder of Image Comics, head of Top Cow Entertainment, and Uncanny X-Men penciler in my teenage years. Officially we were supposed to be watching him draw Wolverine, but he kept answering questions and amiably chatting, and managed only a rough layout before time was up.

Silvestri with our host, Syfy Wire’s Angélique Roché. We last saw her at Ace Comic Con Midwest in October.

Shortly after 3:00 came our next event: an Animaniacs reunion! Four voice actors from the original ’90s animated series were in the house and given far too short a time frame to reminisce and crack us up. They had other get-togethers scheduled Saturday and Sunday, but neither of those worked out for us. We’d met LaMarche and Paulsen before (cf. Indiana Comic Con 2016 and Wizard World Chicago 2018), but this was our first exposure to Harnell and MacNeille.

Maurice LaMarche, Jess Harnell, Tress MacNeille, and Rob Paulsen.

Harnell was the most hyperactive, Simpsons veteran MacNeille was the best dressed, and LaMarche and Paulsen were Pinky and the Brain.

We had grown rather fond of sitting and listening to interesting people, and thereafter made our way to another upstairs panel starring Darryl McDaniel, a.k.a. DMC from Run-DMC, whom I was stunned to meet at C2E2 2017. I cry whenever I have to explain this famous rapper to folks who don’t recognize him. He and his bandmates Run and Jam Master Jay (R.I.P.) were responsible for rap breaking into the mainstream with such hits as “Walk This Way”, “King of Rock”, “My Adidas”, “Tricky”, and the beloved holiday classic “Christmas in Hollis”, a.k.a. Argyle’s theme from Die Hard. And yet sometimes I do still have to explain who he is, which I suppose explains why the room wasn’t packed.

This year DMC headlined his own panel about his company Darryl Makes Comics, for which he has big, ambitious, superhero-filled plans in mind. The panel roster included several of his collaborators, but thanks to the Friday crowds only two of them arrived on time. DMC had plenty to say nonetheless about his background as a comics-loving kid growing up in Queens, his future plans, his hopes, and his reluctance for anyone to label their output “hip-hop comics”. He went on for several minutes about that last part, which really bugged him.

Our moderator at far left was Ming Chen, costar of AMC’s Comic Book Men. At far right, pro comics writer Amy Chu, whose first appearance on MCC was at Indiana Comic Con 2015, and whom we met at last year’s C2E2.

Joining the discussion were returning guest Afua Richardson — see, I wasn’t kidding about that Dora Milaje armor — and Domo Stanton, artist on DC/Vertigo’s House of Whispers.

One of three pieces of character concept art we got to see, drawn by DMC himself. As he tells it, he learned how to draw during a childhood of comics reading long before rap ever came into his picture.

Chu and Richardson flank DMC during a couple minutes of posing after the panel.

We managed to walk a few more rows’ worth of exhibit hall after that before we labeled it To Be Continued and called it a day.

We returned Saturday morning around 8-ish and cheerfully parked in very nearly the same space as the day before. This time they opened the floodgates at shortly after 9:45…

…which is for the best because that crowd grew increasingly massive by the minute, even before opening time. By 11 a.m. Lots A and B were both full; by 12:30, all Saturday-only and 3-day badges were sold out. Fans who attempted arrival beyond that had to settle for parking in Soldier Field or worse. Horror stories abounded, including but not limited to a few fans who’d prepaid for McCormick Place parking in advance — not a small expenditure — only to be told there was no room for them. Not cool.

By mid-afternoon the exhibit hall aisles were just as congested and impassable in places.

Imagine how many folks were only wishing they could snap their fingers and erase half the population just for the elbow room.

At 11:00 was our date with destiny, by which I mean our photo op with David Tennant, who was pretty much on time and gifted with a seamless operation. Lining up was easy; moving forward was brisk; photography was on point.

My only complaint is I wish all photo-op companies included digital downloads free with every purchase. The upstanding folks at Celeb Photo Ops spoiled us at both Ace Comic Con Midwest and last December’s Louisville Supercon, where we could share our results online within minutes for the best kind of instant gratification. Meanwhile at C2E2, Epic Photo Ops wanted an extra $10 for their JPEGs. We settled for delayed gratification and sulkily waited till we got home Sunday afternoon to run our photos through our scanner the old-fashioned way like primitive chumps.

(It could be worse, of course. At the upcoming Star Wars Celebration Chicago in two weeks, Topps wants to gouge us an extra $15 per digital copy. I suspect it’ll be that kind of con where flagrant bilking is the norm. Expect our write-up to be extra cranky if that’s the case.)

Before and after Tennant, we tried crossing off more of our routine exhibit hall aisle march. Around noon we stopped for lunch, which was pretzels and cheese. That’s it. We’d had a hearty breakfast in preparation for the day, and figured we’d limit our lunch to a mere modicum of overpriced carbs because wow was I still bitter about those $14 pastrami scraps.

Around 12:30 we headed over to the autograph table of the young gentleman in our lead photo: Tyler Hoechlin, costar of MTV’s Teen Wolf, who — unbeknownst to me till this weekend — got his start as a child actor, who in fact costarred in the film adaptation of the graphic novel Road to Perdition. He played Tom Hanks’ older son, who was actually the main character in the book. Today Anne and I know him better as the guy who’s played Superman in a few episodes of The CW’s Supergirl. Actors who play live-action Superman rank very high on Anne’s meet-and-greet list.

We then returned to the upstairs panel hallway and got turned away not once but twice. DC Comics’ official panel honoring Batman’s 80th anniversary was capped shortly before we reached the door. I’m not buying any Bat-books regularly at the moment anyway, but the invited panelists, which included comics legends Marv Wolfman and George Perez, would’ve been a treat to see on one stage, especially since Perez announced he’ll be retiring from both comics and conventions at the end of 2019.

Running concurrently with the Bat-party was C2E2’s biggest event of the year: a Q&A billed as a cast reunion for the 1995 comedy Clueless. Appearing together live for the first time in decades were star Alicia Silverstone, now-A-lister Paul Rudd, Scrubs funnyman Donald Faison, and Breckin Meyer, whom we spotted briefly at last year’s C2E2 plugging his Crackle animated series SuperMansion. Judging by the major headlines on entertainment websites for the rest of the weekend, the Clueless reunion was officially deemed A Big Deal by newsmakers.

In this case the panel was beyond merely capped. It was held in the largest auditorium in McCormick Place’s South Building, yet filled to capacity anyway. We approached its entrance and found dozens, maybe hundreds of fellow attendees sitting outside the Main Stage doors and watching the panel on TVs mounted around the foyer walls. To us it wasn’t the most ideal viewing space, on screens from a distance behind other people’s heads. We retreated to a pair of abandoned comfy chairs 100 feet away, and relaxed after our early long walks. We couldn’t see the TVs, but we didn’t care that much about Clueless.

If you wanted to watch, this was your view. We’ll come back to Detective Pikachu here in a few minutes.

Once we were back up to fighting strength, we steeled ourselves for our other Saturday appointment: our 2:20 photo op with the frequently delightful Paul Rudd. We shuffled toward the photo-op area through the increasingly denser crowds until we reached total, unyielding gridlock among dozens or possibly hundreds of other fans all converging around the same time.

Most cons refuse to let anyone line up for photo ops until thirty minutes before their scheduled op. For those of us who’ve had bad experiences and want to make sure we don’t miss out (exhibit A: last August’s Wizard World Chicago fiasco), it’s a good idea to show up a bit early, mill around the entrance, and wait for your actor’s name to be called when it’s line-up time. Naturally, plenty of us had the same idea simultaneously. Net result: chaos.

One timid con volunteer was equipped with a P.A., but was thoroughly inaudible and buried below dozen of decibels of crowd noise. Another, much younger volunteer without sound equipment stood still and did nothing but plaintively, uselessly shout “AMY JO JOHNSON!” every few minutes to any Power Rangers fans who might be within earshot, which appeared to be zero given the complete lack of response every single time. So we all stood and stood and stood, and stood some more, and failed to move forward.

This, to be frank, is becoming a recurring issue at cons: the photo-op area runs smoothly in the morning, slides a bit behind as stars come and go late throughout the day, and by late afternoon everything’s turned into the running of the bulls at Pamplona if the bulls were packed too tightly to run, trample, or gore anyone, but you know they’re still savoring the thought.

At one point a funny guy wandered into our midst, waiting for his own op with some wrestlers or whatever, and loudly asked the crowd who we were all waiting for. When no one answered at first — I think we as a hivemind were too intent on staring the volunteers to death — he poked fun at the lack of response. For a rare change of pace I thought, “Eh, why not,” and answered him back, using my own extra-loud setting that I extremely rarely wield in public. We proceeded to engage in top-volume, happy-shouty banter, no anger, and amused our neighbors for a moment. Because sometimes it’s good to have a distraction from stress.

Less than five minutes after I directly @’ed C2E2’s official Twitter account and fifteen minutes before our appointed time, two more volunteers, looking much more official and confident and aware that something needed to be done differently immediately, took over the scene and began organizing hundreds of us into official Paul Rudd photo-op lines. It’s entirely possible they were already on their way before I tweeted at them with irritated concern, and that I did not, in fact, personally save the day. All I know is that, as a guy with thirty years in the customer service industry, I recognize when a company is doing a stupendously crappy job of it and needs a healthy slapping.

Eventually we got our turn with Mr. Rudd, who looked a bit worn down but nonetheless game for whatever poses were foisted on him.

Then we finished off our show-floor strolls once and for all, grabbed a few more books from Artists Alley, detoured for author Eve Ewing’s 3:00 autograph signing at Table 39 in the celebrity area (no mere Artists Alley space for her!), and returned upstairs yet again for one final panel, on an baseless whim that happened because curiosity got the best of me.

Titled “Marvel’s Next Big Thing”, Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski presided over announcements regarding Marvel’s upcoming major projects for the next six months or so. I’d learned in advance this would include confirmation of the next assignment for acclaimed grandmaster Jonathan Hickman, who previously wrote Avengers and subsequently Fantastic Four in a manner that effectively turned his runs on those families of titles into a single, epic-length work with a beginning, middle, and end across several years of comics. So he’s kind of a big deal in the mainstream comics biz. I didn’t follow any of that for long, but I’ve enjoyed his work on his creator-owned titles such as The Manhattan Projects, The Nightly News, and the still-unfinished The Dying and the Dead.

This time we were admitted to the panel before it was capped, though wound up toward the back of the room because we weren’t that early. I’m fine with my choice to meet Eve Ewing first. I wasn’t deeply invested in the proceedings anyway, simply scratching an itch.

Cebulski kicked off the panel with a silly video in which various Marvel staffers and/or freelancers pretended to argue over the critical issue of which pizza is superior, New York or Chicago. (My opinion here is the same as my opinion on “Marvel or DC?”: I’ve found merit in both, and I’ve been disappointed by both.) Then Cebulski brought out his special guests — the aforementioned Hickman, along with writer Jason Aaron (Thor, Conan, Star Wars a while back) and artist Pepe Larraz (Star Wars: Kanan). Thus the announcements began, and I found myself increasingly disengaged as I realized they were mostly talking about X-Men books, which haven’t deeply mattered to me in ages, and which inevitably lead to crossovers, which are even more Not My Thing Anymore.

…and we were dismissed. As a parting gift, all attendees on the way out were handed free copies of Avengers #17 (current series, not the one from 1965) with an exclusive C2E2 variant cover by Mike McKone, featuring Captain America, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, and Ironheart eating at an anonymous Chicago pizzeria. (It’s neither Giordano’s nor Gino’s East. Beyond that, no idea where they are.)

We returned to the main show level, took one last round of cosplay photos, and considered ourselves officially done and satisfied. We left McCormick Place, we had an incident at a parking garage, and we headed home Sunday morning without further complications.

Meanwhile online Saturday night, the good folks at Twitter Dot Com turned the Clueless reunion into a “Twitter Moment”. That’s a device that a Twitter curator will use to create “In Case You Missed It” news summaries by compiling tweets from various users and turning them into temporary threads of sorts for anyone and everyone to view at their leisure if they so choose. Instead of hiring journalists to write paragraphs, they effectively let users tell the story for them.

This time, the benevolent curator chose one of my throwaway tweets to tell a specific part of the Clueless reunion story.

As with 99.9% of my tweets, I had expected it would sink into the Twitter morass and never matter to anyone ever. Thanks to the cast of Clueless and the magic of Twitter, my “Detective Pikachu, Clueless fan” tweet became the .1%. My notifications figuratively had my phone ringing off the hook the rest of Saturday night, all day Sunday, and for half the day Monday. The total viewer “impressions” garnered by that lone, frivolous tweet soon surpassed Midlife Crisis Crossover’s cumulative seven-year traffic history. At my present traffic levels it will take MCC years a good 3-5 years to catch up with that one tweet.

This wasn’t merely My Most Popular Tweet of All Time. This tweet was, as far as I am aware, the Most Popular Thing I Have Ever Done in My Entire 46 Years of Living, Period.

I mean, it’s cool that something I did amused such a large audience. But if I dwell on it for more than a few minutes, it also makes me want to stop writing paragraphs forever because why bother in this day and age. Why not line up with the Instagram “influencers” (hate loathe despise HATE that term) and limit my creative efforts to all pictures and no words, and really chase those “impressions” for validation.

But y’know…we’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

At the end of every con, the exciting gateway to adventure becomes the exit back to mediocre mundanity.

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

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 8: Geek Commerce on Parade

This way to REGISTRATE! REGISTRATE! REGISTRATE!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! My wife Anne and I just got home from the tenth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), 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 conventions in larger, more popular states. We missed the first year, but have attended every year since 2011 as a team…

…and taken photos as a team, of whatever sights catch our eyes around the vast exhibit hall, which could contain several football games at once, though it does not because football is out of scope for geek mega-parties like C2E2.

In the spirit of the Moral of the Story from our seventh exciting chapter, in which we ultimately learned that photos are cool and words are dumb if you put too many together in a row, please enjoy one last photo gallery of stuff and things that demand your money or at least your attention. Looky!

One of the many events we skipped was an advance screening of the final season premiere of AMC’s Into the Badlands, accompanied by head honchos Alfred Gough and Miles Millar.

Large-scale replica of the redesigned star of the upcoming summer blockbuster Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

New, fancy Marvel/Star Wars
action figures from Tamashii Nations.

GUNPLA! A.k.a. the wonderful world of Gundam models.

Not just an ordinary astromech droid, but a faithful recreation of the primitive Kenner R2D2 figure that was good enough for us when we were kids.

Decor at the Marvel booth included a banner for the upcoming Savage Avengers, which I presume is like X-Force but for Avengers. If that’s Conan the Barbarian I see on the team there, that’s gonna make for interesting reprint complications if and when Marvel ever relinquishes the Conan license again.

Marvel also brought actual props from their Netflix shows, such as Daredevil’s costume.

More props: Misty Knight’s cybernetic prosthetic, the swear jar from Pop’s barber shop (R.I.P.), and the sign from the door of Nelson & Murdock.

Next door, the same-sized DC Comics needs everyone to remember how much they loved the Wonder Woman movie.

DC was proud to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Batman’s first appearance, celebrated the following Wednesday with the release of Detective Comics #1000, now in stores with loads of variant covers.

Batman Batman Batman: art by Bob Kane, Carmine Infantino (and Murphy Anderson, maybe?), Frank Miller, Jim Lee, and Greg Capullo.

C2E2 was brought to you in part by Shudder, the only horror-flick streaming service audacious enough to bring you Nicolas Cage in Mandy.

Cosplay Central contained one of this year’s biggest secrets: the booth for Vero (some social media startup or whatever) brought in special guest Ray Fisher from Justice League. Yes, really. There are photos.

Nostalgic for cereals that vaguely resembles your favorite characters and taste like Styrofoam shavings? FYE will hook you up, especially if your favorite character is booty.

Crunchyroll brought giant blueberries with eyes. I’m sure they had their reasons.

WE ALL FLOAT DOWN HERE!

You say you can’t get enough Golden Girls merchandise? Perhaps you spoke too soon..

Giant stuffed Porg foreshadowing our next major outing.

Anne with lightsaber. More foreshadowing. Check back in two weeks for the big payoff!

The End. Thanks for viewing!

Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Paul Rudd! From “Clueless” and Marvel and Stuff!
Part 2: David Tennant!
Part 3: Marvel and DC Cosplay
Part 4: Disney and Star Wars Cosplay
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay
Part 6: Artists Alley Plus
Part 7: Who Else We Met, What Else We Did

The debonair Mr. Billy Dee Williams at Cincinnati Comic Expo 2016, raising the bar for convention fashion.

This weekend my wife Anne and I will be attending the latest edition of Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm’s recurring major convention celebrating their works, creations, actors, fans, and merchandise, not always in that order. After jaunts around the U.S. coast and overseas, this year’s will be in Chicago, gracing the Midwest with its products for the first time since 2005. Previously on MCC, we shared our personal experiences with Celebrations 2002 and 2005, which were each held at our very own Indiana Convention Center. We’re happy they’ve turned our direction once more, but a bit flummoxed by a few aspects of the show, which we hope goes well despite our nervousness about a few early warning signs.

Bugging us more than anything else is the lack of big, big-name participants from either The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. We had accepted that there would be a Wampa’s chance on Mustafar of The Mark Hamill coming within a thousand miles of Chicago that weekend after his not-so-great 2017 experience in Orlando. (Ditto Harrison Ford, which we absolutely understand.) But being snubbed by the main casts of the last two non-digressive SW films stings a tad. We also despaired when special guest Temuera Morrison (Aquaman, Attack of the Clones) canceled last week. He was at the top of our must-meet list and has now freed up some of our funds for other activities, such as slightly better Chicago food.

We hope to have fun nonetheless, but of those folks scheduled to attend, we’ve already met many of them. While we’re counting down to opening day this coming Thursday, please enjoy this look back at this year’s Celebration guests that we’ve already met at previous conventions. Please feel free to pretend this is an exclusive sneak preview of the weekend to come. For other folks besides us, I mean.

(Special note for first-time visitors: the following photo gallery includes a few pics taken before we went fully digital in 2009. Our 35mm film quality varied wildly. On the other hand, three of these have been remastered for better presentation than their original appearance MCC. Another pic has never before been shared on MCC and had to be unearthed from our physical archives, which is a phrase here meaning “shoeboxes”. Thus is balance brought to the Force.)

For Star Wars Celebration 2002, legendary droid Anthony Daniels hosted a night-before event at Indy’s Castleton Square Mall sponsored by Suncoast Video. Remember them?

Somehow at SW 2002 we caught Peter Mayhew, the O.G. Chewbacca, at a rare moment without a line.

Also at SWC 2002: Warwick Davis, best Ewok ever. I should really get around to watching Willow someday.

And then SWC 2002 brought in Imperial officer Julian Glover (Game of Thrones, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

Indiana Comic Con 2016 reunited Ray Park and Ian McDiarmid, Sith Lord master and apprentice teaming up again for old time’s sake.

One of the biggest names at Cincinnati Comic Expo 2017 was Jason Isaacs. Sure, there was Lucius Malfoy and Star Trek: Discovery, but he also played a recurring villain on Star Wars Rebels, so he’s invited to SWC Chicago.

C2E2 2013 recruited a trio of Star Wars all-stars. Once upon a time, Daniel Logan was kid Boba Fett from Attack of the Clones. More recently he played a “Captain Fett” in the fourth Sharknado. Yes, really.

Again from C2E2 2013: Ashley Eckstein not only voiced the animated young padawan Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars onward; she also launched Her Universe, a line of fine geek-girl apparel.

Concluding the “Star Wars Goes to C2E2 2013” trilogy is Orli Shoshan, a.k.a. Jedi Master Shaak Ti from Episodes II and III. Today she lives in Chicago and has a variety of professions going.

TV’s John Ratzenberger was welcomed to C2E2 2016 on the strength of Cheers and Every Pixar Film Ever, but Star Wars fans know of his blink-and-miss-it role in The Empire Strikes Back. So yeah, Cliff Clavin is coming to Celebration!

I first met Alan Tudyk at Wizard World Chicago 2013, but I got a much better pic of him at C2E2 2018 with his Firefly wife Gina Torres, who also has a few Star Wars voice credits but will not be at Celebration Chicago. Tudyk voiced the snarky droid K-2SO in Rogue One, not to mention various oddballs in Disney’s last six animated films.

We’ve also met a few writers from the Star Wars universe. In February 2004 Anne managed a 24-mile solo drive to an unfamiliar side of town to meet novelist Timothy Zahn, creator of Grand Admiral Thrawn, at a Barnes & Noble signing.

13 years later at C2E2 2017, Anne finally got her wish for a vastly improved retake with Zahn.

Before Dark Horse Comics relinquished the Star Wars comics license to Marvel, John Jackson Miller made his mark on such series as Knights of the Old Republic. And as seen here at Indiana Comic Con 2016, yes, he’s dabbled in other universes.

Live from Artists Alley at C2E2 2014: comics writer Greg Pak’s greatest contribution to society so far was arguably Planet Hulk, the celebrated arc that had several elements adapted into Thor: Ragnarok. He’ll be at Celebration Chicago on Saturday discussing his plans to take over Marvel’s Star Wars ongoing series this summer, among other relevant projects.

We’ve met writer/lawyer Charles Soule three times at C2E2, seen here from 2018 with his roller coaster of a debut novel, The Oracle Year. He just announced Tuesday night he’ll be popping in Sunday and Monday for limited signings and at least one panel.

We’ve even met one of this year’s panel hosts. These are all awesome folks at Indiana Comic Con 2015, but at far left is the relevant Amy Ratcliffe, Managing Editor at Nerdist Industries. With her impressive credits at a multitude of geek sites, she’ll be meeting and introducing other awesome folks at Celebration Chicago.

Final tally: that’s thirteen actors, four writers, and one geek host. Tens of thousands of Star Wars fans will be lining up this weekend at Celebration Chicago to meet them and more! Meanwhile, Anne and I will be seeking out the “more”. Updates as they occur!

Watch this space for Star Wars Celebration Chicago 2019 updates! Or check my Twitter feed for live whining if/when everything goes wrong and I start making rueful Fandom Fest jokes! That’s when you’ll know to send in a rescue party.

Yep, this thing again.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: this weekend Anne and I are attending this year’s Star Wars Celebration in scenic, freezing Chicago. Once again we returned to McCormick Place, a mere three weeks after C2E2, so the layout and the stress levels of Chicago traffic were still fresh in our minds.

We arrived at McCormick Place at 9:15. The exhibit hall was scheduled to open at 1:00 p.m. We had no pressing appointments right at opening. Our main concern was getting a parking space somewhere within a thousand yards of the show. We’re used to the attendance volume of our normal Midwest cons, but Star Wars Celebrations are world-famous affairs that attract international audiences as well as those of us within relatively convenient driving distance. 5-day passes sold out months ago, so we knew we’d have greater odds against us.

Also not in our favor: Star Wars fans love arriving early for the sake of the brand. It’s a legendary part of the culture, ever since obsessive trendsetters decided there was an internal logic to camping out for the chance to see The Phantom Menace ahead of the rest of the world. Whether or not Jar-Jar was worth the sacrifice is a question only they can answer, but fellow fans have been following their example ever since.

So we drove from Indianapolis to Chicago, a 195-minute drive this time thanks to road construction, obtained parking pretty close to where I’d hoped, then stood in a line that promised to run 225 minutes if we were lucky. We still bear the emotional scars of Star Wars Celebration 2002, for which Anne’s Hyperspace fan club membership promised us early show-floor access and instead we entered over an hour after opening because that’s how shoddy an affair it was. We didn’t want to repeat that.

That meant we had time to kill. And kill it I did, mostly on Twitter and a little on Instagram. Facebook refused to cooperate and pretended there was no Wi-Fi, which is a lie and the Facebook app is a bandwidth-hoarding lying liar. So I amused myself where I could.

Slight exposition preamble: fans couldn’t just attend Celebration and do anything they wanted to do. For some of the exclusive Star Wars Celebration Store toys and products, and for the most popular panels (including Friday morning’s coveted panel on Star Wars Episode IX with special guests JJ Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, and other as-yet-unrevealed figures), attendees had to enter their names into lotteries to win permission to buy or do those things. If you lose, then that cool thing doesn’t get to be part of your SWCC experience.

Anne and I lost all the lotteries we entered. We won nothing. We wondered if folks who blew $850 on upper-class VIP admission were given highest priorities over us peasants, but we’ve seen evidence of VIP losers out there as well. Anyway, my point is my bitterness shows a tad in some of the following glimpses into our day. Enjoy anyway!

View this post on Instagram

On the road to #starwarscelebration, trapped in I-90 construction gridlock behind One Of Us. #starwars #traffic #geek #geeklife

A post shared by Randy Golden (@golden.randy) on Apr 11, 2019 at 7:26am PDT

View this post on Instagram

155 minutes till #StarWarsCelebration showtime. Anne hibernates, conserving her energy for the bedlam to come. #starwars #conlife #geeks #waiting

A post shared by Randy Golden (@golden.randy) on Apr 11, 2019 at 8:16am PDT

…and then we were off and running because they let us in at 12:45, so we only waited 210 minutes on the same hard tile in the same crowded hall before we were unleashed upon the premises and still not allowed to buy or do the most coveted things.

More updates coming soon!