Who’s killing members of the Suicide Squad? Find out after the break!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time of year again! Anne and I spent this weekend at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we generally had a blast surrounded by fellow fans of comics and genre TV/movies even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after three days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things.

In the first of our mandatory cosplay galleries, from the heart of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center we focus on the ubiquitous citizens of the DC Comics Universe — most, but not all, from the adjunct DC Cinematic Universe, including a special spotlight on a fun, silent skit we saw go down Sunday afternoon in the main lobby, in which Our Heroes from that recent #1 film meet an unstoppable force from another comic-book universe.

In a convention where roughly one out of every five attendees was dressed as Harley Quinn, we were worried about the state of this year’s cosplay, but were happy to run into some inspired choices. First up: the less common but no less celebrated DC heroes and villains:

Wonder Woman! Soon to star in a presumably better DC film.

Dr. Fate has been wielding magic and visiting phantasmagorical dimensions since 1940 and thinks it’s totally unfair that Dr. Strange gets a movie first.

The Jason Todd version of the Red Hood got top billing in an animated Batman film, so the two of him are pretty satisfied.

Power Girl takes flight, thanks to skillful use of concealed stilts.

Variant version of Zatanna from DC’s Bombshells relaxes over by the conference rooms.

Gotham‘s Penguin, who needs way more screen time in all future seasons.

The classic Captain Cold of my childhood, probably not a favorite with any Wentworth Miller fan clubs.

Raven from the Teen Titans hanging out with Apocalypse, maybe requesting sanctuary at DC after the performance of his own summer film.

DC Villains united! Luthor, Bane, Reverse Flash, and the Riddler representing for the not-Harley side of evil.

Pause for itty-bitty sampling from the wide, wide, wide world of Harley Quinns. I’m sure 99% of the Harley cosplayers are good people, but we’ve been doing so many cons over the past several years that, unless we’re seeing a multitude of creative variants (cf. Deadpool), we’re having trouble convincing ourselves to take pics of the same two or three costumes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

That said, some Harleys anyway:

Harley & Enchantress ruling the dance floor.

Villainesses united: movie Harley with Marvel’s Black Cat, still waiting for her turn in some future Spider-Man flick.

Joker and the kind of Harley for which it’s tough to write a caption. Lurking in the background is Uka Uka from the old Crash Bandicoot games.

And then there was that Sunday afternoon showdown, in which the cast of Suicide Squad faced their least nonsensical opponent yet: Negan from The Walking Dead.

Um, mild spoilers for the final scene of the Walking Dead season 6 finale, I guess.

Deadshot is not impressed; Amanda Waller is already counting how many people she’ll kill on her way out the door; and Joker is unreasonably excited.

Our best shot of the underrated Killer Croc and El Diablo. If they had powers for real, Negan would last about fifteen seconds flat.

Before someone got her into this mess, Amanda Waller had been walking around, pushing buttons on a phone, and trying to make people explode. That’s Joker’s kind of woman.

Rick Flag and Slipknot seem awfully smug, like they know something Negan doesn’t.

BAM! Slipknot goes down. Boomerang’s stuffed unicorn lay there like a slug. It was her only defense.

When bodies start hitting the floor, the Harley of another DC Earth watches, grateful they don’t have crossovers like this back home.

Negan v. Harley: Bats of Injustice: the Final Showdown!

To be continued! Other chapters in this MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Our Jazz Hands Gallery
Part 3: Marvel Comics Cosplay!
Part 4: Star Wars and Sci-Fi Cosplay!
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 6-7: [coming soon]

Gamora and Nebula, like the Thelma and Louise of a new generation.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time of year again! Anne and I spent this weekend at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we generally had a blast surrounded by fellow fans of comics and genre TV/movies even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after three days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things.

In Part One, we gave you great moments in comic-con jazz hands. In Part Two, DC Comics cosplay, including a special performance by the Suicide Squad. In this chapter: it’s Marvel’s turn to represent.

Okay, first order of business: a few token Deadpools. We saw far fewer Deadpool variants at WWC than we did at all our previous 2016 conventions, even those with a fraction of the attendance figures. Either we’ve passed Peak Deadpool Costumes, or he’s begrudgingly abdicated his cosplay throne to Harley Quinn.

Senor Deadpoolito, pushing the Merc with a Mouth’s chimichanga worship to its extreme logical conclusion.

Carnagepool lurking the show floor with Toxin, offspring of normal Carnage.

Our escalator view of a Deadpool reigning on the dance floor.

An almost subliminal Deadpool undercover with a trio of Spider-Men.

Another Deadpool was one of six Marvel Bunnies, who I trust are no relation to DC’s own Hoppy the Marvel Bunny.

…and the rest:

We geezers here at MCC always run across one or more costumes representing characters that are better known to the kids these days but strangers to us. If you recognize Wolverine’s new friend, who’s really not Storm, please feel free to educate us in the comment section. We have a long-standing policy of appreciating lessons about new universes.

Another X-Man changing up partners: Gambit with SNL’s super-awkward Mary Katherine Gallagher.

Tony Stark with his favorite partner: booze. (He also had a light-up arc reactor under his shirt, which of course blinked at the wrong moment.)

A more heroic duo: first-appearance Iron Man and WWII reject Steve Rogers.

Old friends Cap and Thor teaming up with Loki.

Doctor Octopus and the Punisher: a good-looking match made in nowhere ever.

Elektra needs no partner and will stab you for asking. Unless you’re Matt Murdock in doting pushover mode.

Cable would like you to meet his favorite partners: THESE GUNS. (Seriously, though, this is the best Cable cosplay I’ve ever seen.)

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

Part 1: Our Jazz Hands Gallery
Part 3: Marvel Comics Cosplay!
Part 4: Star Wars and SF Cosplay!
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 6-7: [coming soon]

It’s time to watch the panels! It’s time to stroll the aisles! It’s time to meet the actors at Wizard World in style!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time of year again! Anne and I spent this weekend at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we generally had a blast surrounded by fellow fans of comics and genre TV/movies even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after three days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things.

Tonight’s episode: the miniseries finale! The panels we saw! The comics-related pros I met! Some light whining, but not too much! And more!

Days before we stepped foot inside Illinois, Wizard World Chicago made headlines in advance with the disconcerting news that a gun dealership had purchased booth space inside Hall A. Some time later, follow-up reports claimed the folks at DS Arms would only be selling prop armaments, nothing real or explosive or requiring licenses or against the show’s own no-actual-weapons policy. I anticipated a modicum of protest drama upon arrival, maybe even the opportunity to take photos like a real comics journalist. I’m not sure if I was relieved or disappointed when the Chicago Tribune reported that WWC booted them from the premises shortly after opening on Thursday. My chance to take photos of a real live controversy evaporated.

(Anyone who’s attending Dragon*Con next weekend will have the chance to see some of their weapons and volunteers on site as part of an armory exhibit. Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has confirmed DS Arms won’t have an official vendor booth, but they’ll have a presence in other, less overtly labeled ways.)

Our three-day Wizard World Chicago weekend had its occasional snags, none of them related to gunpowder but at least one of them involving destructive forces: a severe thunderstorm that, combined with the eternal Chicago road construction, brought traffic to a standstill on the last leg of our usual three-hour drive to Rosemont on Friday.

I-90 is never my favorite stretch of road on a sunny day, let alone when other drivers have valid reasons for going a fraction of the speed limit.

To forestall another potential disaster, before heading over to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center we first ate lunch at the McDonald’s down the street so we could avoid con food for the rest of the day. We’d also been forewarned that on Thursday the bridge connecting the main parking garage to the convention center had been closed off as a security decision, forcing all attendees to enter through the same ground-level doors and submit to bag searches and handheld metal detectors. Fortunately a quick online check-in told us WWC and the center had reversed that inconvenience and reopened all the skywalks, but staffed them with separate security teams. Given the increasingly disheartening headlines we’ve been seeing throughout 2016 regarding tragedies at public gatherings, it was hard to complain. And to their credit, their searches were pretty much the opposite of invasive.

(Almost to a fault. I wasn’t told to empty my pockets, so whenever the detectors got a ping from my car keys, instead of asking me to empty them, they just asked me what was in my pockets and trusted my answer. I guess it’s nice to know I have such a reassuring demeanor and no compelling reason to sneak a tiny handgun inside.)

Artists Alley was among our first stops on Friday. In my mind its artisans and dealers broke down roughly as follows:

(Margin of error ±15%.)

Longtime MCC readers will note the majority of this list doesn’t match my shopping patterns. I stopped at so few tables on Friday afternoon that I insisted on a second walkthrough on Sunday before we left, just in case we’d missed something awesome. I made sure to include the two farthest rows that were squashed against each other next to a pair of forgotten bathrooms, all of them forming a sort of forlorn, abandoned colony. The encore didn’t make a wide difference.

Regardless, the following creators successfully sold me new reading materials that I look forward to consuming in the future:

Jai Nitz, writer and co-creator of the most recent version of DC Comics’ El Diablo, later loosely adapted for the screen in Suicide Squad. The original miniseries sold about eight or nine copies, but was collected in a trade anyway for the movie fans.

Greg Weisman, best known as a TV producer on past series such as Disney’s Gargoyles, Young Justice, and Star Wars Rebels. I remember his comics work as far back as DC’s post-Crisis Captain Atom and thought his recent Kanan series was the most initially interesting among Marvel’s Star Wars launch titles.

We met Trevor Mueller at previous cons, but this time I made a point of picking up print copies of his Harvey Award-nominated all-ages webcomic Albert the Alien.

Pictured at right is Dr. Travis Langley, a psychology professor at Henderson State University who also writes books examining the inner workings of the various fictional characters everyone loves. His most recent book, Game of Thrones Psychology: The Mind is Dark and Full of Terrors, was selling impressively a the show. Also on hand but not pictured was his son Alex, an author in his own right with works published in a geek-humor vein.

Not pictured:

* Russell Lissau, one of the few regulars who now recognizes us on sight because we keep meeting again and again at these Chicago shows. His self-published Omega Comics are available both in print and digitally through comiXology.

* Steve Horton, whose creator-owned works include Amala’s Blade at Dark Horse Comics and the now-in-progress science fiction saga Satellite Falling at IDW. Featuring art by Steve Thompson, the latter was unquestionably the best-looking comic I saw at the show.

That’s regrettably, virtually it (save a few trivial tidbits and the ending photo) for our Wizard World Chicago 2016 experience as it related to the medium of comic books and/or graphic storytelling. Of the comics-related panels on the schedule, most were tutorials for aspiring writers or artists, while several others focused on diversity in the medium and/or the fandom. I get the reasons for their existence and presumable popularity, but we attended none of these.

Early Friday, we made time for one autograph over in the actors’ section in Hall G: William Sadler, whom you’ve seen in things. He’s been the President of the United States of America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Iron Man 3), the Grim Reaper (Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), an ex-military mass murderer (Die Hard 2), a greedy fireman turned treasure hunter (I was among the few who paid to see 1992’s Trespass in theaters), a future covert-ops manipulator (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), a loving father killed off in the pilot (Hawaii Five-O), and more more more.

Of all the things, my wife decided to bring up his brief recurring role on Roseanne. He cheerfully remembered the character!

We also attended his Friday afternoon Q&A, which was enjoyable except for the fifteen or twenty minutes of excruciating annoyance when some bottom-feeder pulled a fire alarm in the conference center that rang and rang and rang and rang and rang AND RANG AND RANG AND RANG AND RANG AND RANG till someone finally showed up to shut it off.

There was also that awkward moment when one fan cosplayer approached the microphone in the middle of the room and, while asking his question, thought it was a smart idea to raise his prop gun and point it at Sadler on stage. Sadler recognized it for what it was and quickly tossed in a word of assurance to the WWC security guys who were visibly tensing up at that exact awkward moment.

“Hi, I’m Bill Sadler! You may remember me from such films as ALL OF THEM.”

Otherwise, interesting panel with a cheerful guest, though he had to pause a moment when someone named Julie called his phone while he was talking. Random sample Q&A tidbits:

* Childhood likes include old Fantastic Four comics and the TV show Combat
* A wartime trench scene from the Tales from the Crypt pilot had to be abandoned for a while because someone thought it was a smart idea to construct it entirely from fresh, genuine, authentically pungent farm manure
* Thinks Kinsey is among his most underrated films and heaped praise upon director Bill Condon
* Was once a standup comic; knew music before he became an actor, well enough to write the Bogus Journey “Reaper Rap” himself as well as a couple of songs for the UPN series Roswell, in which he was the town sheriff
* Next appearance will be in an episode of the upcoming Epix series Berlin Station

The next panel in the same room had been completely off my radar till we saw it listed on the sign outside: a special screening of Amazon’s pilot for a proposed reboot of The Tick. I was a fan of the original New England Comics version way back when and was excited to learn creator Ben Edlund would be hosting the screening and doing a short Q&A afterward with a couple of the show’s stars.

About that pilot: the new Tick is Peter Serafinowicz, best known as Simon Pegg’s stodgy, short-lived roommate in Shaun of the Dead, or as Andy’s immature British royalty pal Eddie from two episodes of Parks & Rec. His Tick voice is a spot-on reproduction of Townsend Coleman’s animated version, and, more importantly, he has the jaw for it. The new version is set against a grim-‘n’-gritty backdrop not unlike the DC Cinematic Universe, where the criminals are merciless and the violence is disturbing and not-comedic, but Our Hero drops cluelessly yet valiantly into action along with the all-new Arthur (Griffin Newman from HBO’s Vinyl), reimagined as a jittery nebbish, a super-hero fan with a tragic past, who needs medicine and psychoanalysis and maybe isn’t ready to wear a super-suit and fight crime in his condition, but ends up having to anyway because “NO” isn’t in the Tick’s vocabulary.

Edlund mentioned the pilot would be the darkest episode of all, with future misadventures (should it go to series) getting lighter as it goes. As directed by celebrated cinematographer Wally Pfister (not remotely celebrated for his directorial debut Transcendence), the pilot looks expensive and shadowy and disturbing in one or two parts, but we in the crowd laughed at most of the right parts, which speaks to the skills of screenwriter Edlund, whose post-comics Hollywood work you may have run into in such shows as Firefly, Angel, NBC’s Revolution, and Gotham (I’ll never forget Bullock shouting “WHAT’S ALTRUISM?”). I’m not an Amazon Prime customer, but I’d totally buy this on DVD someday if they make more.

After the credits rolled, Edlund introduced his two guests: young Griffin Newman, starstruck and happy just to be working; and — thoroughly unannounced by Wizard World or any other source in advance — Academy Award Nominee Jackie Earle Haley.

Rorschach strolls in, calm and smiling while dozens of audience jaws hit the floor hard enough to break teeth.

Most of us didn’t recognize Haley onscreen in his single scene as The Terror, the big villain behind all the evil shenanigans in the City. He was hidden under a heavy helmet and a layer or two of evil makeup, but wins the entire episode in a flashback with young Arthur involving the ol’ quarter-behind-the-ear trick and some tasty ice cream. Even if we had recognized him incognito, none of us could’ve predicted his equally brief and memorable appearance at the show.

“Hi, I’m Jackie Earle Haley! You might remember me from such films, but then I’d have to kill you.”

A select few audience members who had special cards under their seats had the surprise pleasure of attending an autograph signing with the trio afterward. We cursed our cardless seats and hoped at least to meet Edlund later in the weekend. We’d heard a rumor that he would have an Artists Alley table, but the number we were given corresponded to a support column between tables. We checked the column a few times over the next two days, but never once saw him hanging around it.

After that unexpected pleasure came our John Barrowman photo op, swift departure, dinner over at MB Financial Park so they’d validate our parking (Adobe Gila’s, fast service, dishes around $10 each, would eat there again), and check-in at our usual hotel a mile down the road. Anne and I aren’t party people, don’t drink, never get invited to do things after-hours at cons, and appreciate a decent hotel with lower prices and free parking.

* * * * *

As with last year, we chipped in a few extra bucks for VIP badges, which allowed us a half-hour early entry on Saturday. This advantage would’ve been more useful for any Saturday morning appointments or high-profile guests. We’d had one planned, but my wife was crushed to receive word that Kate Mulgrew had canceled at the last possible second, not even an hour after she had tweeted her followers about her imminent arrival in Chicago, unfortunately due to a sudden change in Orange is the New Black filming schedules. As the former head of Star Trek: Voyager, she’s the only major Trek series captain that my wife hasn’t met yet, and this isn’t the first time she’s stood her up at a con. We weren’t happy, but we were in no position to order her to show up. Wizard World dutifully refunded Anne’s prepaid photo-op ticket, and that’s all that could be done.

Most of our afternoon itinerary remained a logjam to come, but Mulgrew’s withdrawal freed up our Saturday morning more than we needed it to be. We were tempted to substitute a panel instead, a one-hour clubhouse for unrepentant DC movie fans who loved Batman vs. Superman and will defend it to the death by any means necessary possibly including repugnant ones, but I wasn’t sure if our silent, undercover, ironic presence would be welcome. I doubt I could’ve kept a straight face, so it’s just as well.

Instead we wandered the halls for a while, well before most of the guests or dealers had shown up. Membership has its privileges, I suppose.

Getting Michael J. Fox as a guest was a huge deal for Wizard World. He was at the top of our list of Actors We Couldn’t Possibly Afford to Meet. One-percenter fans on unlimited budgets had the snazziest opportunity of all: a group photo op with Fox and his Back to the Future costars Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd for around nine hundred bucks. The photos we’ve seen online do look cool.

Or you could meet this guy. The number of disgruntled customers who’ve shared their bad experiences with us over the years is saddening and not really enticing us to add him to our want list.

We ran out of time and energy on Friday before we could peruse the dealers and exhibitors in the main section of Hall A, so they were high on our to-do list. I bought even less from them, though I’d like to give special thanks to One Stop Comics for being the first retailer ever to carry a copy of Nexus: Into the Past, which none of our local shops ordered and was nowhere to be found at our last several cons, not even the one where creators Mike Baron and Steve Rude were guests. I was elated to cross that off the high end of my graphic novel want list.

Two displays that stood out along the way:

One of a few fun “how many heads do you recognize” floor mats by artist Terry Huddleston. I scored slightly better than Anne did in the video game section, but a not-pictured anime gallery had us both feeling ignorant.

Beth Zwolski Tobias, a.k.a. Chalk Girl, spent the weekend making elaborate chalk art live while onlookers watched and bemoaned how they can barely piece two stick figures together. Her official site has time-lapse videos of her WWC weekend works, along with shots of many other past pieces including one of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which means now you’re required by internet law to go check out her stuff.

Rather than walk a mile or two to the nearest professional restaurant, for lunch we settled on the Expoteria, a secret cafeteria whose entrance is hidden in the back wall of Hall A, easy to overlook, and closer to edible than their other grub stands. The two of us bought literally the last chicken tenders on hand, Anne receiving a full order of four tenders while I settled for chicken scrapple from the bottom of the pan that added up to 2¾ tenders but cost me full price anyway. Sincere apologies to fans in line behind me who had to settle instead for cafeteria “beef” burgers, overpriced lunchmeat sandwiches, or grilled chicken that looked like damp linoleum shards.

Saturday’s main event was the Back to the Future panel starring aforementioned superstars Fox, Thompson, and Lloyd, held in an upstairs ballroom that was packed near its capacity of 2200 by the time it started fifteen minutes late. Anne’s Christopher Lloyd VIP pass got her a cushy seat in the front section, while I was in the eighth row from the back, possibly in another ZIP code. My view was terrible, but the overweight fans on either side of me insisted on taking two seats apiece, leaving a half-seat of bonus elbow room on either side of me. I’m no size-zero specimen myself, so I refused to complain about this relative luxury. Sincere apologies to any fans who were turned away at the door and would’ve dearly loved having those two seats. If it had been up to me, they’d have been all yours.

Imagine the hijinks if WWC had somehow lured Crispin Glover back into the limelight.

All three seemed happy to be there, though Lloyd is a bit more reserved when not in character. Fox’s well-known case of Parkinson’s was noticeable only in the beginning syllables of some answers, which might take a few tries before launching ahead unimpeded. Even then, he just sounded mildly nervous, just as many folks might in front of a crowd of 2200.

Before the Q&A began, the moderator introduced a prerecorded segment from original BTTF screenwriter Bob Gale, greeting us with a two-question FAQ regarding the commonest topics in all of BTTF fandom.

“IIII AAAAM OOOOZ!”

Gale’s decrees were: (1) there will not be a BTTF 4 as long as Gale, director Robert Zemeckis, and any other directly interested parties are still alive; (2) there will not be a BTTF reboot as long as Gale, Zemeckis, and any other directly interested parties are still alive. Once the Q&A began, the moderator shot down any fans who tried in vain to ask theoretical questions about sequels or reboots anyway. A few fans who love redundant questions and/or who have knee-jerk allergies to wanton displays of authority may have been upset, but the “don’t ask about sequels or reboots” rule had been set forth from the get-go. In light of the concurrent headlines regarding moderator malfeasance at the same weekend’s MidAmeriCon II, Anne and I were surprised yet appreciative to see a rare instance of a panel moderator actually moderating so people can see what moderation looks like and why panel moderators are a necessary convention role.

Random sample Q&A tidbits:

* After Fox famously replaced original star Eric Stoltz and became the one true Marty McFly, Thompson appreciated that what they’d filmed prior to recasting be scrapped and reshot.
* Thompson still has her red wig from BTTF 2, which she stole after filming wrapped. Fox wishes he could’ve nabbed the guitar.
* Some light speculation ensued on how Marty and Doc first met, since they’re friends from the beginning. (No one mentioned it at the panel, but a recent comics miniseries from IDW had a short story answering that very question, co-authored by Gale. Worth checking out.)
* To one or two plot-nitpicking questions, the moderator recommended the fan consult with social media, where such topics have been debated to death and don’t directly concern the actors themselves.
* Fox loved the Enchantment Under the Sea guitar solo scene and studied hard with his teacher/consultant/whoever to approximate the movements and styles of specific famous guitarists for each section.
* Although the moderator stepped in on the question of “Who would you cast in a reboot?” the actors answered anyway. Should Zemeckis and Gale be assassinated and such a thing be greenlit, Fox thought the new Marty should be female; Thompson suggested Zoey Deutch as the new Lorraine, and Lloyd answered simply, “I would be happy to audition again.”
* The bugs Lloyd ate in one of the Addams Family movies weren’t real.

Exiting the ballroom at the same time as 2200 other fans was a time-consuming event in itself, riding the sluggish wave from the upper-floor conference rooms to the lower level across the main lobby and back to the actor booth areas and back up to the spacious photo-op area for our scheduled appointments with Rosario Dawson and the Daredevil trio.

Bonus cosplay! Kindasorta. To us it’s just an ordinary walk through a crowded convention.

And then we had to do an about-face and return to the upper-floor conference rooms to make use of my VIP badge for a special event: a solo musical performance by Christian Kane, costar of TNT’s Leverage and The Librarians.

The audience was given a thirty-second window to take photos before he began, then ordered by Kane’s right-hand man to stow all gadgets and enjoy the show the old-fashioned way — by sitting still, watching and listening.

Full disclosure: before this weekend, I had no idea Kane was a musician. Or that he has a loyal following, the self-styled Kaniacs, who love his music, have their own site, know all the words from the country-rock songs he’s recorded with his band, and knew said songs well enough to shout out the chords to him whenever he asked for reminders. Several of them sported official Kaniacs T-shirts. There were maybe two or three of us guys in a crowd of dozens of extremely excited women. One fan was lucky enough to be invited onstage with Kane and play guitar for one song while Kane sang. Mood lighting was in full effect. A cash bar was in the back, not unlike what we’d seen in multiple places around the show floor.

I, uh, I just liked him on Angel and Leverage. I tried not to feel like an intruder. Anne felt even more out of place sans Kane VIP badge, but she at least knows him from Leverage, and was allowed in as my plus-one. We each enjoyed the 45-minute gig in our own ways. At the end, the audience was gathered for group photos that Kane’s people should be sharing online in the future. (No sign of it yet as of this writing. Updates as they occur.)

Kane was honest about which songs he could or couldn’t perform solo on the spot. You can check out audience fave “House Rules” on YouTube, or choose from several mp3s on his official site.

After our evening as honorary Kaniacs, we had energy enough for one more panel: the guys from YouTube’s own Screen Junkies staging an all-new edition of “Movie Fights Live”, in which four of their movie-loving reps (including Epic Voice Guy Jon Bailey, whom we met at Indy Pop Con back in June) would debate movie questions — some typical, some stupid — with a quartet of fans from the audience.

Bailey is second from right. At far right is frequent channel host Hal Rudnick. The one in the redder shirt is Dan Murrell, whom I now consider the Smart One because I thought he did the finest job overall despite being so utterly robbed that I’m convinced the results were totally heinously fixed.

Sample debate question. Points should’ve been counted off just for misspelling “Shyamalan”.

I’m not recapping because I know they were filming and I’m assuming they’ll post it online on some future Thursday. (No sign of it yet as of this writing. Updates as they occur.) It was way more fun than I expected, though the greatest achievement in panel entertainment that entire weekend had to be watching Dan Murrell squirm when the terms of the cruel final question forced him to formulate a credible defense of the entire Twilight series. If Screen Junkies is a paying gig, Dan deserves a Christmas bonus for taking that bullet in the line of duty.

They had a meet-‘n’-greet afterward, but we were too tired to go on. Wearied departure led us to another parking-validation dinner over at MB Financial Park (Five Roses Pub, slow service, just-okay burgers, no urge to revisit) and returning to our hotel, where the Wi-Fi was running at free-AOL-disc speeds and leaving me no choice but to get some sleep.

* * * * *

We arrived at 8:30 a.m. Sunday, knowing the entire day would be the hardest — virtually nothing but lines, lines, lines. We steeled ourselves for a lot of standing, waiting, rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, sitting on bare concrete as needed, and draining our phone batters for amusement. Some time was passed and enjoyed in chatting with any other line-mates awake and game enough to return the courtesy. Line chats are always a favorite part of every con when they happen, though they’re not always guaranteed.

(Real talk from a life-long introvert: one photo-op line in particular had me so unengaged and left-out by the others around me, lost as they were in their own worlds and circles, that I got a little sullen over the silence and had trouble psyching myself up in time for jazz hands.)

Our early-VIP entry came in handier on Sunday than on Saturday because Anne still needed Christopher Lloyd’s autograph as part of her VIP experience. We were first in line at 9:30 for his 11:00 signing.

She packed this shirt specifically for her Kate Mulgrew photo op, but when that fell apart she postponed it till the day she got to meet the Klingon commander Kruge from Star Trek III.

Lloyd was twenty minutes late, so we kept our adulation short yet peppy. From there we made a beeline to Christian Kane’s autograph line, where I was second VIP up. All the other VIPs were attending his 11:00 Q&A, which I’d missed while waiting in line with Anne. I could’ve gone, but the Saturday evening shindig was satisfying enough for me. Also, CHRISTOPHER LLOYD.

Kane’s signing was scheduled at noon, immediately after his Q&A, which was on the opposite end of the convention center. He ran fifteen minutes late, which really isn’t bad for a Wizard World guest, all things considered. Again I kept it peppy and short, and added his signature to my Buffy/Angel collection.

From there we made another beeline to the line for Kane’s 12:45 photo op. If you look at all the schedules throughout the weekend, several actors were overextended like that, slated to pop here and there and everywhere with not much breathing space or travel time to keep traversing the length of the con back and forth. We weren’t there for the major X-Files reunion or the various Walking Dead guests or super-special guest Carrie Fisher (our Fisher story, in case you missed it), so I can only speculate how well they met their various appointments and demands.

To his credit, Kane was only eight minutes late to the photo op. I also couldn’t speculate on how things went with his autograph line either before or after, and I’d hate to ask. By the time I finished there, I’d now spent 4½ straight hours in lines and was miles away from “peppy”, the weight of the long weekend bearing down on me at last.

Lunch was overpriced convention hot dogs, because by then who cared. We returned to a few booths for last-minute purchases, did that one last walk through Artists Alley, did our 3:30 photo-op with Christopher Lloyd that was totally worth it, and fled the premises at the approximate walking speed of an elderly grandparent. We made one last, lengthy, unenthusiastic, parking-validation walk to MB Financial Park, where we bought a pair of three-dollar ice cream cones at the Sugar Factory so we wouldn’t have to shell out fifteen bucks for parking. Seriously, folks: unless the long walk is an issue, there’s no reason to pay fifteen bucks a day for Wizard World Chicago parking instead of cheap daily snacks at the Sugar Factory. Which, incidentally, gave me just the energy I needed to drive us out of Illinois alive.

Also, in between all the moments outlined above, we took cosplay photos wherever possible for You, The Viewers at Home, as shared in previous chapters. All a part of the service, a word here which means “giving people reasons to come here ever at all”. If you’re still reading down here around the 5000-word mark: hello! Thanks for being here and giving us moments of your time. There’s a 90% chance you’re just my wife, but that’s okay by me. You and I had fun, and that’s what matters, whether those around us get it or not. You’re the reason I share, write, and do things like this.

Well, that and the comics. Granted, there’s an entire semantics discussion to be had about an entertainment convention still calling itself a “Comic Con” even though the comics are a scant fraction of the total experience, in much the same way that only a scant fraction of today’s “comic books” are intentionally comical. The major publishers haven’t shown up in years. Not even the street-cred indies like Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, or Drawn & Quarterly have any representation. A handful of Big Two contributors and a whole lot of self-starters make the most of their time for the fans who really, sincerely appreciate their presence. I can’t donate to every artist in attendance, but I buy what I buy, based on the options provided and on my finicky criteria shaped by 37 years of comic collecting.

Between the comics and the actors, regardless of flaws, Wizard World Chicago keeps giving us good reasons to keep going. It’s funny that way, and so are we.

A smaller buy pile than usual for a comic con, but hopefully rich with literary nutrients.

The End. Again, thanks for reading. See you next year, hopefully!

Other chapters in this MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Our Jazz Hands Gallery
Part 2: DC Comics Cosplay!
Part 3: Marvel Comics Cosplay!
Part 4: Star Wars and SF Cosplay!
Part 5: Last Call for Cosplay!
Part 6: Objects of Affection

Whenever a comic shop closes its doors, Marvel kills off another Angel.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in July 2014 I expressed hopes and well wishes for the Android’s Dungeon, a new comic book shop that had opened in Avon, Indiana, in a heavily commercial area in otherwise comics-less Hendricks County. The owners were a nice young couple; the selection was diverse; the perks were kind. All signs pointed to potential success.

On August 31st, last Wednesday, the Android’s Dungeon observed one last New Comics Day before closing its doors for good.

Ironic sign pairings make sad things sadder.

It’s no secret that comic shops are one of the hardest small businesses to open nowadays. Between the fierce competition from other entertainment media and the advent of digital comics, the local comic shop isn’t an automatic draw for super-hero geeks anymore. Some fans press on nonetheless and cherish that dream of passing on a love of reading to others around them, of proselytizing for this wondrous medium, of building a new community focused on a single shared passion.

In my initial visits over their first few months, I saw the Dungeoneers implementing several fun ideas beyond merely ringing the cash register — a reading club, monthly prize drawings, free comic bags-and-boards with every purchase, in-store local artist signings, and more. Their first location was miles away from other Indy shops, which meant their objective wasn’t necessarily to poach clientele from existing shops, but rather to create and nurture a new fan base in their surrounding area. The crowds we saw were promising.

I had one concern early on: they ordered a lot of new singles every week. A lot. Like, three or four times as many copies as I’d see at my regular shop. Some of their new-comic stacks were so tall on the shelves, you’d need a weekly crowd the size of a Manhattan shop’s to break even. I have no idea how they calculated their initial orders, so for all I know maybe they did need all of those at first. They had more cover variants than any other shop around, all sold on the racks for cover price, same as the regular editions. That also differs from other shops’ strategies, but it’s certainly an option.

After the end of Year One, they were forced to relocate when their aging storefront proved more ramshackle than they’d realized, and their landlords turned somewhere between uncooperative and evil. As I recall from their old Facebook posts, the search for another Hendricks County location wasn’t easy and didn’t offer many viable alternatives. With much fanfare they eventually moved from Avon five miles south to Plainfield, from a decades-old hole-in-the-wall strip mall to a younger, fancier “lifestyle center” (read: outdoor shopping mall). They virtually quadrupled their square footage, and presumably their overhead, giving them more floor space than any other Indiana comic shop I’ve ever seen. The all-new all-different Android’s Dungeon would never be one of those decrepit, musty, 1980s shops where the back-issue boxes create a labyrinth that makes walking around the shop next to impossible. Of all their new perks, unlimited elbow room was among the most noticeable.

Meanwhile behind the scenes, things were falling apart.

Or so we found out a few months ago when Facebook deigned to show me one of their posts, which is a thing Facebook loathes doing for small businesses nowadays. (Or, y’know, for bloggers and other internet users who have a Facebook page that no one ever actually sees because their algorithms are miserable and miserly. LOUD COUGHING.) In the post in question, one owner invited followers to come in that weekend and “make me an offer on anything in the store”.

My stomach sank when I read that. They wasted no time in deleting their Facebook page since then, but I stopped what I was doing and perused their timeline for a bit, noticing signs of growing despondency over a confluence of problems. Large sums of money had been spent on pre-ordering comics for more than a few clients who never bothered to show up and pay for them, culminating in a recent declaration that all pull lists had been indefinitely suspended until and unless folks showed up, renewed their commitment, and paid for what they said they’d buy. Ordering a variety of products from different vendors besides just Diamond Distributors took a toll in keeping up with varying payment schedules. Worse still, at some point they’d hired another guy to assist with day-to-day operations who reportedly drove clients away and was ultimately more trouble than he was worth.

I don’t have screen shots of any of this, only my sympathetic memories of what I read in that one sitting. I shared one of their posts with my own Facebook friends — using my personal account rather than MCC’s so other humans might stand a greater than 5% chance of seeing it. But a large portion of my FB Friends list aren’t locals and couldn’t do much besides sigh. I took small comfort in the response I got from a fraction of the rest, but that’s not saying much. I make no secret that I’m kind of terrible at networking.

I wanted to make a point of driving out there sometime to spend some cash as a sign of support, but if you’ve been following MCC already, you should be well aware July and August weren’t docile, lifeless months for us. We’ve had a lot going on, and I regret I didn’t make the time till this Labor Day Weekend, when I discovered their current terminated status.

Part of me feels like part of the problem because I wasn’t there all the time, but I already have a regular comic shop where I’m on a first-name basis with the staff, they’ve got my peculiar wants covered, and their location is of utmost convenience in a way that no Hendricks County store will ever match. As I said, I came in a few times and donated to the cause by buying stuff, but I have neither the money nor the reading time to provide ongoing support for two different shops. Regardless, I feel sorry for their loss and can’t imagine what they’re going through right now as their hard-fought dream has come to an end.

I doubt it’ll make anyone involved feel remotely better, but if you’ll mote from my previous entry linked above, the following paragraph…

Curiously, the Android’s Dungeon isn’t the only new shop to open in central Indiana this year. I’m aware of two other newcomers some forty-odd minutes away from us. At a recent event I heard a sales pitch from one store owner who made sure I knew up front that he doesn’t order shelf copies of smaller titles. I didn’t have the heart to tell them those are about 85% of my monthly reading list. I know little else about the other new shop except that their name bugs me.

…an online spot-check tonight tells me the other two shops I mentioned both closed within a year. Kudos to the Dungeon for outlasting their combined life spans. Two years may not be a good run, but at least they ran for all they were worth.

The last sign of Dungeon life; a lone, life-size Boba Fett acting as art curator for an appreciative audience of just me.

Jay Garrick and I prepare to travel to another, better Earth if only we can achieve the proper vibrational frequency through jazz hands!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s convention time yet again! This weekend my wife Anne and I have driven two hours southeast of Indianapolis to attend a show we’ve never done before, the seventh annual Cincinnati Comic Expo. In the past she and I have talked about trying cons in other Midwest cities, but the Expo is our first time venturing out to Ohio for one. In addition to proximity and complete lack of schedule conflict with anything else we had going on, CCE’s guest list includes a pair of actors we missed at previous cons who represented glaring holes in one of her themed autograph collections. With her birthday coming up in a few weeks, which usually means a one-day road trip somewhere, we agreed this would count as her early celebration.

Part One was our complete collection of cosplay photos. I regret we didn’t meet enough imaginative fans to fill five more galleries, but the truth is we accomplished so many of our goals on Friday that by 12:30 Saturday we’d checked off all the major items on our con to-do list and saw no point in trying to prolong the magic. Despite the reduced number of hours on the premises, we had a ball and would highly recommend the event to other fans.

Pictured above: Teddy Sears, a.k.a. Jay Garrick from The CW’s The Flash, my favorite show on the air, preparing to start its third season in October. I loved Sears’ performance as the beloved Flash of an alternate Earth who shows a shocking amount of weakness through the middle of the season, only to reveal a darker side toward the end that would be spoilers if you’re waiting for it to hit Netflix. He’ll next be seen in Fox’s upcoming 24: Legacy but would love to return to DC’s TV universe if time and story permitted. Very friendly guy who let me rattle on more than most actors normally do.

He was our main reason for sticking around Saturday, and was a little late like several other actors, but it was interesting to see who the early birds were on the guest list.

Officially we weren’t at Cincy Comic Expo for me alone. Anne wanted to meet two people in particular, Star Wars actors that we could’ve met years ago if circumstances hadn’t worked against us. Gentleman #1: David Prowse, a.k.a. the man inside the Darth Vader suit for the original trilogy. He was a guest at Wizard World Chicago 1999, our first large-scale convention and our very first road trip together, but we were too overwhelmed by scope and too poor at the time to meet any of that show’s big Hollywood names.

Fun trivia: Prowse was a bodybuilder and trainer who helped Christopher Reeve get into shape for Superman: The Movie. Prowse pushed him so hard on day 1 that Reeve threw up later. Possibly the most sinister act Lord Vader ever committed was making Superman vomit.

Very special Star Wars guest #2: the one and only Billy Dee Williams, a.k.a. Lando Calrissian. He was previously a guest at 2002’s Star Wars Celebration II in Indianapolis, but by the time we’d escaped the 2½-hour line for Kenny Baker, we had autograph tickets to spare but just couldn’t bear the thought of another hours-long major-league wait. Here in 2016, we’ve now compensated for our underdeveloped stamina of fourteen years ago.

The suave, esteemed Mr. Williams made us feel crassly underdressed for the occasion.

Although Star Wars was a focal point for CCE this year, some guests had credits in other, differently legendary universes. Very few veterans of the world of Batman ’66 are still with us today, but one was in the house: Lee Meriwether — best known to us Gen-Xers as costar of Barnaby Jones reruns and one-time Catwoman in the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman movie.

Extraordinarily sweet and gracious, and had her daughter along as her table manager, which we could tell even before someone asked.

We couldn’t greet every actor on the premises, but we’d met a few of them elsewhere…

MCC readers may remember the great John Barrowman from our Wizard World Chicago 2016 experience. Here he prepares to meet fans face-to-face for hours and hours with nary a fluctuation in energy levels.

I added Adam Baldwin’s signature to my Firefly collection at Wizard World Chicago 2015.

I stopped watching Gotham partway into season 2, but bonus points are owed to anyone who remembers that time he was in an episode of The Office. More about him in a sec…

Naturally the con had more than just actors on the scene. Their Guest of Honor was the Stan Lee. Cincinnati thought so highly of him that Mayor John Cranley issued an official proclamation that Friday, September 23, 2016, would hereby be Stan Lee Day. I got the chance to meet him at Wizard World Chicago 2012 and would recommend the fleeting brush-with-greatness to anyone who hasn’t met him yet. Be warned: at age 93 Stan is winding down his convention circuit days and probably won’t be doing these shows much longer. He’s scheduled to return next spring for C2E2 2017, which their site currently touts as his final C2E2 appearance ever. Beyond that…I wouldn’t recommend procrastinating if you can help it.

I did make a point of saying hi to two longtime comics creators. First up: classic Marvel editor Larry Hama, who was a staffer for decades, renowned for his 13-year run as writer on their GI Joe series, and an early advocate for encouraging more than just white guys to join the field.

Currently he’s doing layouts for DC’s Deathstroke the Terminator, written by his former editorial protegé Christopher Priest. It was supposed to be a one-issue gig, but they keep needing him and as of this weekend he was working on issue #4. So far it’s my favorite DC Rebirth title.

Also in the house: artist Mark Bright, whose extensive resumé includes Power Man & Iron Fist, Iron Man (including Obadiah Stane’s final arc), Green Lantern, and a vastly underrated Falcon miniseries from back in the day. With the aforementioned Christopher Priest he co-created Quantum & Woody, one of my favorite ’90s titles; with the late Dwayne McDuffie, he launched Icon, my favorite Milestone Media title that really needs to be reprinted in full someday soon. In his time, Bright has drawn a lot of comics that rose to the tops of my reading piles.

He was a little late to his Saturday signing because he wanted to stop and say hi to Larry Hama first. 100% understandable. He was super excited to meet Billy Dee this weekend, too.

Other creators had lines of varying lengths, a couple of whom I regret missing. Arguably the biggest name in the house was controversial ’90s superstar Rob Liefeld — co-conspirator on Cable, Deadpool, and the original X-Force; founding member of Image Comics; and one-time star of a jeans commercial. He was the only artist with a booth over in the actors’ section. Superfans had the privilege of paying $150.00 for the Rob Liefeld Experience VIP admission package, which included lots of swag all covered in Rob Liefeld art, looking a bit like this enlarged New Mutants cover.

We were, shall we say, not there for the Rob Liefeld Experience.

I bought a few items for fun, but the important part was Anne enjoying the heck out of her early birthday shindig. And much enjoyment was had with the variety of displays and props provided courtesy of the 501st Legion and other local fan groups with fantastic ideas for taking the convention experience to a wilder level.

Anne climbing the nearest skyscraper Batman ’66 style, hoping the next celebrity to peek their head out the next window will be either Charo or Kate Mulgrew.

Anne tries to save herself by summoning her lightsaber hilt before the Wampa can shamble over and Jedisplain to her how telekinesis actually works.

Preorder your Action Anne figure today! Accessories include a Bible, a replica of our dog Lucky, a stack of 8×10 hard plastic photo protectors, and a giant cookie.

Watto and the Jawas organize a swap meet, and Anne was there! Bargains found: zero.

Not everything was about her. Midday Friday, we experienced a bit of awkwardness when we tried to grab a seat at a table near the concession stands and rest for a few minutes, only to find we’d accidentally wandered into the Steve Jackson Games playtesting area. We own more than our share of board games but aren’t regular tabletop aficionados. Before I could sit down all the way, a very nice volunteer scrambled over and began to ask us which game we wanted to try. Rather than risk standing up some more, I grabbed the first game I saw standing nearby, and that’s how we wound up spending twenty minutes on a demo of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Board Game.

All things considered, I wouldn’t call it non-non-heinous.

The object: drive your time machine around the board and be the first to collect all the famous historical figures from the first movie, using the most bizarre movement methodology I’ve seen in a board game in years. I took to it more quickly than she did, so I tried not to nitpick when she moved incorrectly at least three times. The volunteer caught on and joined me in polite silence on that subject until our time was up and we had to go keep an appointment. As a thank-you for stopping by, the volunteer showered us with freebies — two Munchkin bookmarks, two free cards for two different Munchkin games that I have no use for, and a complete dice game called Trophy Buck that comes in a camouflaged pouch that would fit well on many Rob Liefeld costumes. She also gave us tickets for a prize drawing scheduled at 6 p.m.

I came away empty-handed, but milady won herself a stuffed, Fourth of July themed, Chibi-headed Cthulhu. Not really her thing. At all.

I like to think someday Chibithulhu will be bigger than Beanie Babies. Collectors strongly encouraged to send me your four-figure auction bids for this soon-to-be-classic collectors’ item right away. If no one bids, we feed it to the dog, as is the custom for unwanted stuffed animal prizes in our household.

To be sure, Cincy had other nifty random objects of fandom here and there around the show floor, many of them with Anne on the other side of the camera rather than playing MCC Lovely Assistant.

Probably retrieved from a local theater after several months of continuous use.

The Death Star Trench Run was a scale model of that classic scene in which the whiny dust-bowl bumpkin uses spirit-telekinesis to win a space carnival game with space torpedoes. At last, fans could have a turn replicating this feat.

The doors to the Mines of Moria. I think the Elvish runes above the door read “SPEAK LOTR FAN BUT DO NOT LEAN ON PROP”.

The famed door to the abode of Sherlock Holmes. The “B” probably stands for “Benny”.

With the American Presidential election six weeks away, the T-shirt makers at My Geekery have far better suggestions than literally anyone who threw their hat in the ring for real this year.

For $20 you could sit in this familiar-looking semi and pretend you’re Shia LaBeouf. You have fun with that.

Another high point of Cincy: this was the first convention we’ve ever attended at which I genuinely got excited about the food choices. For C2E2, Chicago’s McCormick Place makes a mean barbecue sandwich, but the Duke Energy Convention Center has them beat. Local restaurant Tom & Chee sponsors the con’s kid zone, has a catering truck on display, and has a booth selling a selection of their offbeat grilled cheese sandwiches. We have a Tom & Chee twenty minutes from our house, but I had no idea they brought scrumptious victuals with them.

My solid-A Friday dinner: their Grilled Cheese Donut (simple as it sounds, but TO DIE FOR), and the BBQ & Bacon topped with cheese, crumbled bacon, and BBQ potato chips.

We stayed over Friday night at the Hyatt across the street, one of the nicest we’ve ever seen. We got a nice discount thanks to the points I’ve saved up from our Wizard World Chicago stays as well as from some of our annual road trips.

Insider tip: if you drive into town, you can pay $30 for the Hyatt’s valet parking, or park for 24 hours for $15 in the third-party garage across the street. The entrance is down on 4th Street, just west of Elm. This is the view of the Hyatt lobby when you exit the garage skywalk.

Anne and I rarely stay at the hotels nearest to our conventions, partly to save money and partly to avoid loud parties. This show reminded us of one of the fun perks of said hotels: accidental brushes with greatness. When we left the con Friday to go check in, David Prowse was in the lobby on his motor scooter, chatting with fans. After we boarded the elevator to head up to our room, we were joined by David Mazouz with his head down, plus a motherly figure of some sort. Anne recognized and nodded at him, but otherwise kept it low-key. We don’t like to bother the actors when they’re “off the clock”, so to speak. They need breathing space just as much as we do.

Speaking of space…

Then there was the incident in which I came thiiiis close to ruining the convention for thousands of fans.

Early Saturday morning, we packed our bags and prepared to check out before returning to the con. I’m carrying a laptop bag, my conventioning carryall, and a large gym bag filled with all our laundry and the books I’d bought on Friday, including that weighty hardcover you see in the Larry Hama photo. It was heavy and kind of killing me. I expected my chronic back pain to kick in any second.

We and another older, non-geek couple wait patiently for an elevator to meet us at the ninth floor. The door opens. Four or five people are already inside, lined around the walls but leaving a good gap in the middle.

Anne’s in front of us four. Her eyes widen and she hesitates. A fairly muscled gentleman invites us aboard. She goes in first and I follow. I do an about-face toward the door and begin to step backward and to my right to make room for the other couple to join us. I know there’s someone scrunching into the corner behind me, so I’m trying not to back up too quickly.

Anne’s eyes grow to Powerpuff Girls size. She grabs the gym bag strap and yanks me forward. Hard. I presume I’m threatening the life of the corner dweller without realizing it. For a guy my size, I’m constantly trying to stay overly conscious of how much space I’m taking up in crowded areas, but I guessed by her reaction that I was about to miss the mark and injure someone.

The friendly muscle-guy says to me, “It’s okay.” I relax a tad, but keep myself locked in the same approved neutral position. Anne’s eyes contract only slightly.

The elevator lets us off at the main lobby with no further stops. The couple from our floor exits, then the two of us, then everyone else aboard.

As we’re walking to the front desk, she says to me in her sustained state of astonishment, “Do you know who that was?”

I was out of sight-line when we got on, then had my back to the guy in the corner for the whole ride. I confessed I didn’t get a good look at him.

“Stan. LEE.”

Now I have Powerpuff Girl eyes. And a slack jaw, and the sound of the world’s loudest needle-scratch clearing all other thoughts from my stunned brain.

I nearly snap my neck whipping around to look. Stan the Man and his friendly handler are walking away in the other direction, toward the hotel restaurant for breakfast before the mythmaker has to clock back in and go meet several thousand more fans over the next two days.

…and that’s the story of how my wife saved Stan Lee’s life and mine. If word had gotten out that Stan had to cancel his Saturday and Sunday appearances because some clumsy schmuck put him in the hospital, I doubt those thousands of fans would’ve let me leave town alive.

…

…and on that note of incredulity and relief, we conclude our Cincinnati Comic Expo 2016 experience. Look for future entries to cover what else we did in Cincinnati over that same weekend in a few future entries here on MCC.

Special thanks to the Duke Energy Convention Center for trumping both the Indiana Convention Center and Rosemont’s Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in one critical area: they leave the cel signals alone and make free live-tweeting possible for fans like me instead of being greed-heads about it. Sincerely appreciated.

On the other hand, I do have one gripe about the Expo: their official Twitter account tried encouraging folks to live-tweet using the hashtag #CCE16. This acronym, which is also in use by another unrelated organization with an event coming up next month, went largely unheeded and outnumbered by folks using the more character-consumptive but fine-tuned #CincinnatiComicExpo instead. As a result, nearly all my #CCE16 hashtagging was a waste of time and I was largely exclaiming into a void occupied by a handful of awesome folks that I’d hug individually if I could. You can read more about my big corporate-hashtagging pet peeve in a previous MCC entry, “Dear Event Promoters: Please Don’t Make Us Pick Your Twitter Hashtag for You“.

On that note, thank you for stopping by and reading. We’ll see you next con.

Will we attend again? Time will tell. If they can bring in Kate Mulgrew next year, I guarantee Anne will be there bright and early and banging on the doors till they let us in. Trust.

“I’m sorry, young lady, but you’ve exceeded your three-minute screen time maximum. Please go fetch the CG monsters from their trailers and then go join the other children on the bench.”

Quite a few commentators have dismissed the big-screen adaptation of the first volume in Ransom Riggs’ bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children young-adult series as “Tim Burton’s X-Men”. In comics we’ve learned to accept the coexistence of dozens of super-teams among the numerous universes over the past century, many of which aren’t superfluous and forgettable. Meanwhile in movies, someone gathers a few paranormals and no one can think of any other basis for comparison beyond the X-Men. Y’all do know “school for kids with powers” isn’t a rare pop culture concept anymore, right? Besides, I called dibs on the joke four years ago and beat the rush. See below.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I wrote this section four years ago after I read the first novel and learned that Burton had optioned the rights:

[Its most distinguishing feature is] the unusual creative conceit behind it: Riggs amassed numerous bizarre, disturbing, or just plain head-scratching yesteryear photos of haunting-looking children and developed a narrative to string them together. Granted, anyone with bad vacation photos could muster at least a short story out of their own useless outtakes, but the photos in question elevate the project several levels above that.

On an overly reductive level, it’s a WWII-set X-Men vs. Groundhog Day. Jacob Portman is a present-day 16-year-old misfit who finagles his way to an obscure island near Wales to investigate his sketchy family history after his grandfather dies under violent circumstances. A trail of mystery and oddities leads Jacob into a place outside of time where a most unusual headmistress presides over a coterie of kids with impossible powers and features, here called “peculiars” instead of “mutants” — living in secret inside an endlessly repeating day for their own protection. There are super-powers, magical feats, disgusting things, poetic moments, terrifying evils, an open ending that begs for further journeys, and that mad, mad picture collection. I was left satisfied and ready for more.

As adapted by Burton and screenwriter Jane Goldman (two X-Men movies and Stardust, among others), the basic framework remains in place. Mostly.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The plum role of the seemingly powerless Jacob fell to Asa Butterfield (Ender’s Game, Hugo), who’s grown seven feet taller since my wife and I watched him a few weeks ago in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas on Netflix. His useless birdwatcher dad is The IT Crowd‘s Chris O’Dowd; his barely-in-the-picture mom is Kim Dickens from Fear the Walking Dead. Dear old Grandpa Abe is Terence Stamp, playing a rare kind soul for once.

Miss Peregrine herself is Eva Green from the recently, suddenly concluded Penny Dreadful (my son’s a huge fan). Most of the kids are unknowns, though at least one has previous credits from a thing I recognize — super-strong Bronwyn is li’l Pixie Davies from AMC’s Humans. For value-added deep-cut trivia, the brief glimpses of her brother Victor are embodied by Louis Davison, son of Peter, the Fifth Doctor.

Jacob’s therapist has been changed from an “olive-skinned” male in the book (I still don’t get what that means) to Mom‘s Allison Janney onscreen. Late in the game, the Dame Judi Dench shows up as another “ymbryne” like Miss Peregrine — i.e., a time-stopping werebird headmistress. Rupert Everett (My Best Friend’s Wedding) is another birdwatcher competing for Dad’s finds.

The main cast also includes the following nonwhite people:

1. Samuel L. Jackson as the scenery-chewing bad guy.

I wouldn’t have expected much in 1943 Wales anyway, but I’m sure somewhere out there is a thinkpiece written by someone who watched the film three times just to scrutinize the background extras in the early scenes set in Florida, or in any of the later spoiler scenes (including one set in Japan, for all that’s worth). Not really my specialty.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? Being different is okay. Dressing impeccably is a plus. Just because you don’t understand what someone is saying doesn’t mean they’re demented. There’s a bit of contrast between the family you’re born into versus the “family” that truly gets you, but it’s pretty awesome when they’re one and the same.

Otherwise, the gimmick’s the thing. In the book, the mysterious vintage photos were a creative writing exercise and not much more. The movie nods to them in an early scene but otherwise is a straightforward kids’-adventure story of good-weird vs. bad-weird.

Nitpicking? THEY CHANGED STUFF FROM THE BOOK AAAAAUUUUGH. Sorry, still working that out of my system. Normally I’m fine with adaptations deviating from source material, but there were so many changes that my brain wouldn’t stop fixating on them. A few of the children have changed ages. Pyrokinetic Emma has swapped powers with the permanently floating Olive, possibly to avoid obvious comparisons of the most prominent peculiar to either Firestarter or the Human Torch. Horace’s prophecies have been given a literally cinematic modification. One sweet would-be coupling from the book has swapped out one boy for another. Miss Peregrine is decades younger than I imagined, but…well, this is Hollywood.

The most egregious change comes when the last 20 minutes toss out the book altogether. The lighthouse is gone, at least two characters have their fates tinkered with, and the book’s 19th-century photo-plate aesthetic is ditched in favor of Pee-Wee/Beetlejuice rainbow pop-art spectacle. Halloween atmospherics disappear from the climax as Our Heroes convene for a wild-‘n’-wacky carnival showdown. It’s a jarring shift in gears, particularly for anyone who thought Burton would be a perfect match here. It’s worth noting Miss Peregrine is a rare instance of him adapting source material that wasn’t a beloved staple from his own childhood. This might explain the plot deviation late in the game toward an arena more to his liking, though I confess I had secretly hoped all the 1943 sequences would be shot in Ed Wood black-and-white with extra-thick shadows lurking in every corner.

At the same time, characters and sets seemed oddly straightforward. With past films and ensembles (Batman, Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, to name a fraction) we’ve grown accustomed to the copious flourishes bearing his obvious hand in the concept art process, but here he largely sticks to their original appearances from Riggs’ lucky photo finds, even as they go through entirely different motions in brighter colors. A couple of exceptions: the clown twins receive a sufficiently ghastly tweak, and the mutation that was transferred from Olive to Emma receives a vigorous upgrade that infers levitation is basically an extension of Airbender power.

One crucial subplot barely hinted at is Emma’s angst about her role as Jacob’s potential love interest, what with her being chronologically decades older than him, not to mention being kindly Grandpa Zod’s ex-girlfriend. The extreme May-December dynamic might have been considered tough to tackle in a general-audience film, but avoiding any acknowledgment of it so they stand a chance of kissing guilt-free later seems tacky.

Though the monsters doing Jackson’s bidding are among the most inventive computer graphics on display, Jackson himself turns in one of his most perfunctory performances to date — hidden behind creepy contacts, fake monster teeth, and a Hammer-horror woodenness that might’ve worked better as an Ed Wood homage. I would’ve expected that from a child actor or two, but not him.

One nitpick of minor note: only in a Tim Burton cinematic universe would a sunken ship contain skeletons still sitting with perfect posture at the dinner tables where they died as they slowly sank into the depths. I’d expect that sort of stylish underwater tomb in a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

(I haven’t decided if it counts as good or bad, but Jackson fans may appreciate the movie’s big out-of-nowhere Deep Blue Sea moment, even though he’s not around to wink at us when it happens.)

So what’s to like? I’m ready for a spinoff or at least a few internet shorts starring Bronwyn the silent, super-strong scene-stealer. And age aside, Eva Green rules the roost as the titular mentor, all business and precision with a fixed predatory gaze and the unshakeable confidence of a leader who knows exactly what will happen every second of the day in every square foot of her island because she’s clearly lived through that same day countless times with an exhaustive determination and an attention to detail that rivals Phil Connors’ but minus the smirk. Part of me wishes we were viewing events through her lenses while she saves the day front and center.

When Miss P and the awkwardly heroic Jacob are sorting through exposition and managing their shorter followers, their combined professionalism guides the audience through a suitable if eventually distorted tour of Riggs’ unique world. If you’ve never read a word of the original prose, at the very least Burton has brought to life a convenient visual intro to the intriguing cast. Personally I’d recommend hopping aboard the novels before Riggs reaches #17 or so. The first three do form a nice trilogy with just enough closure while resetting the stage for future adventures in a new direction. Those I plan to keep following regardless of whether or not Peregrine’s posse returns for any big-screen sequels.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children end credits. I thought it might be keen if Riggs’ memorable photo collection were to pop up while the names scroll, but all we get is a few recreations with the actors. On the other hand, fans will be either amused or let down to know that Dylan and Worm’s Welsh teen beatbox-rap not only made it into the film, but is listed as an actual song alongside artists such as Florence + the Machine and Nina Simone. Too bad they couldn’t join Team Peregrine, but they’re the wrong kind of peculiar.

Well, four if you count The Flash, but they’re hardly an objective source on that.

It’s that time again! At long last my regular super-hero shows are seeing their season premieres on The CW this week and next — The Flash this past Tuesday, which I live-tweeted per personal standard procedure…

…followed by the relocated Supergirl this coming Monday, then Legends of Tomorrow the following Thursday. I don’t watch Arrow yet except for crossovers, but I can tell how Ollie and his aggravating pals are doing whenever other Twitter users start griping and throwing their phones at their TVs.

In the spirit of the proceedings, our local CW affiliate here in Indianapolis, WISH-TV channel 8, declared “Superhero Week” and has been featuring stories connected to the wonderful world of comics, possibly for the sake of hyping their own shows. Normally I’d toss them a Like in the appropriate social-media point of contact and leave it at that, but two of their segments spotlighted high achievers in the field of comics excellence that we previously covered here on Midlife Crisis Crossover. A third segment had a more personal connection to us.

Gathered together from the cosmic reaches of the universe, here in this great Hall of Heroes, are the most powerful collections of good ever assembled!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last May for my birthday weekend, we visited the Hall of Heroes up north in Elkhart, Indiana — one longtime super-hero fan’s toy, comic, and prop collections turned into a fun eye-candy museum. This week WISH-TV paid a visit and took a scenic video tour with owner Allen Stewart. Frankly, I’m not sure our humble photos can compete with a video tour. Video isn’t something we do here at MCC because it never occurs to us to try and I can imagine scores of things that would go wrong if we did.

* * * * *

I don’t read many webcomics because I’m sometimes a stodgy fussbudget about some aspects of new media, but I’m a big proponent of print collections.

Also previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: at three different conventions this year we met Lee Cherolis and Ed Cho, Hoosier creators of the fantasy webcomic Little Guardians, whose official site contains the complete saga to date and offers extra tidbits a-plenty. WISH-TV visited their creative space, stepped back and gave them room to talk about the series, their creative process, and the fulfillment of designing a universe that readers love seeing explored.

* * * * *

To learn more about comics, be sure to visit your local library, stake out the 741.5-741.59 section, check out everything you find, and be prepared to fight other patrons for all the really good graphic novels and comic strip reprints.

Then there was the time WISH-TV drew connections between comics and reading, and the difficulties some youngsters can have in finding the right literary niche that speaks to them and opens their mind to the power of the written word, with or without pictures. They visited a local high school and chatted at length with one student who struggled for years with books and schoolwork alike, but who’s made tremendous strides in recent years thanks in no small part to finding a medium and format that resonated like no other.

Full disclosure: the student in that video segment is our nephew. As you can imagine, the story has been bandied about our Friends lists quite a bit the past few days.

Fuller disclosure as a grumpy but forgiving fan: I do recommend checking out the video on their site and skipping the accompanying transcript, which isn’t the best it could be. The story’s cumulative inelegant minutiae needed a heavy-handed red pen taken to some parts, and this entry very nearly took the form of a nostalgic diatribe called “Pow! Zap! Media Never Stops Making Batman ’66 Jokes When It Rediscovers Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Every Five Years”. My wife recommended heading in a different direction, and so here we are with a case made for the joys of reading wherever it’s waiting to be discovered, tinged with unabashed family pride.

And if any of these stories can pique a viewer’s interest in reading in general and/or graphic storytelling in particular, then Superhero Week wins on principle despite my urge to nitpick.

“By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth!” says no one in this movie ever. 0/10, huge letdown, not sure why they even bothered.

In my comic-collecting childhood, I thought Dr. Strange was okay. He’s had occasional memorable stories from talented writers and artists such as Roger Stern, Peter B. Gillis, Michael Golden, Marshall Rogers, Paul Smith, Chris Warner, Chris Claremont, Gene Colan, Brian K. Vaughan, Mark Waid, and so on. The current run by Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo isn’t bad and looks stupendous. The original stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were okay, but never left the same impression on me that their three-year Amazing Spider-Man collaboration did. Doc has never exactly been an all-time Top 5 hero for me. I bought his series on and off, skipping entire years and runs. I don’t mind him, but I didn’t have to have a movie about him.

It’s a good thing Marvel didn’t ask me for my opinion before arranging for Benedict Cumberbatch and director Scott Derrickson to turn Doctor Strange into such a profound panoply of prismatic panoramas. I mean, I still cling to hope of one day buying opening-day passes for Squirrel Girl: The Motion Picture or maybe a Mary Jane solo movie, but I’m okay with the Master of the Mystic Arts going first. I guess.

Short version for the unfamiliar: The origin has been fully preserved: Dr. Stephen Strange is one of the country’s top surgeons, with a planet-sized ego and the standard occupational rage if you dare call him anything but “Doctor”, until a fateful car accident shatters both his specifically talented hands, effectively ending his precious career. Rather than settling for living off a disability insurance claim or suing his sportscar manufacturer on fraudulent grounds, Strange uses up his wealth undertaking a fruitless quest to undo the damage and get his old job back.

When all of the modern world’s possibilities lead to dead ends, he finds himself led to a spiritual retreat in the Himalayas, where he switches career tracks through the guidance of The Ancient One, who’s like an ancestor of Yoda replete with vast powers and bizarre, oblique methods in place of straightforward classroom lessons. In the comics, the Ancient One was a stereotypical wizened Asian who could’ve been selling Mogwai on the side and looking forward to someday meeting Kurt Russell. Here the character is now written and overtly labeled as a non-Asian woman, who’s played by a relatively restrained Tilda Swinton. Frankly, she’s done weirder.

School’s over for the Sorcerer Supreme’s apprentice when evil rears its ugly head in the form of Kaecilius, a murderous, single-minded wizard who wants power and immortality in the classic comic-book villain traditions. Hannibal‘s Mads Mikkelsen seems overqualified to play a glorified Death-Eater, but he does get one smashing speech about why he thinks he’s not really Evil and why Strange should be careful who he trusts.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: As in the original origin from Strange Tales #115, the Ancient One has another pupil named Mordo. Unlike in that story, here he’s black and not prepared to betray his sensei within minutes of Strange’s enrollment. Chiwetel Ejiofor becomes Our Hero’s serious-minded peer and ally, and enjoys his first chance for all-out martial-arts action since Serenity. Strange’s stereotypical manservant Wong (Benedict Wong from Interstellar) has been upgraded to an older, gruffer peer in charge of the Ancient One Academy library.

The supporting cast includes Michael Stuhlbarg (star of the Coen Bros’ overlooked A Serious Man) as a surgeon who’s okay, not great in his field; and Law & Order‘s Benjamin Bratt as a former student. The Kaecilius henchman who lasts the longest is Scott Adkins, who last appeared in the Marvel universe as the silent, transmogrified Deadpool near the end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The mandatory Stan Lee cameo is a bus passenger reading up on some Aldous Huxley.

Also, Academy Award Nominee Rachel McAdams is the Concerned Female Friend, subbing for Rosario Dawson as team medic.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? Lessons taught here include:

* This superficial, visible life is not the only world around.
* Egotism and murder are bad.
* Friends are necessary.
* With great power comes great responsibility. (WELL, IT DOES.)
* Martial arts can’t solve every conflict. Harsh negotiations are also an option.
* Some people think it’s fun guessing what year a pop song was released. (My son was apparently unaware of this.)

Later in the film, much discussion is had as to whether breaking rules is a cardinal sin or a necessary evil. Strange, as you’d expect from a Marvel hero, believes sometimes compromises are the only way through, regardless of potential side effects in the space-time continuum. Mordo lives by-the-book and gets offended at any idea otherwise, embracing a strictly black-and-white worldview and becoming the film’s living embodiment of creator Steve Ditko.

Can you spot the hero in this actual scene from the movie, a.k.a. my new wallpaper?

Beyond the life lessons, Doctor Strange is a visual extravaganza that remixes the cityscape deconstructions of Inception, Dark City, and The Matrix into a fluid, topsy-turvy battleground of tilting precipices, fractal patterns, Lego swapping, and Escher fever dreams, using all of Lower Manhattan as its raw materials. Forays into other dimensions and expressions of space-time yield still more kaleidoscopic results. (This might be mind-blowing in 3-D assuming they filmed it that way rather than upconverting from 2-D. I wouldn’t know.)

Nitpicking? The sorcerers’ duels of the old comics — expressed in a combination of four-color hand-lasers and mystic doggerel recitations — are reimagined for a 21st-century super-hero audience as magical kung-fu, with weapons made from eldritch energy and wire stunts intentionally defying reality. Magic takes on other forms in select instances, but mostly it’s used as a fancy way to punch, kick, and stab. Cumberbatch brings Strange’s hand-waving to the big screen in full force, but I was disappointed that his trademark bloated incantations were among the few elements left behind.

The “plot” is basic super-hero origin framework. That trait is largely inescapable whenever a new super-hero series is launched. If you’re insisting on something radically different, maybe avoid the first film in every super-hero series ever? Hey, Arrival opens next week and is reportedly the greatest thing since the invention of bread, so there’s an option. It even has super-hero actors in it and stuff.

Many thinkpieces using the word “problematic” have been written over the past year about the “whitewashing” of the Ancient One, i.e. the casting of one minority with a different minority. I feel as a white guy that there’s no way I can successfully continue this paragraph without someone wanting to set me on fire, so I’m just noting it for the record in case you missed all the outrage. I would only add that, in a better timeline in which he lived to this day, the Ancient One could’ve been a fantastic role for a 76-year-old Bruce Lee.

If you’re from a family that’s not too keen on witchcraft in your entertainment and even skipped the Harry Potter series for that exact reason, it’s worth noting the film studiously avoids wands, cauldrons, pentagrams, and any overtly occult symbols, in case you’re conflicted about your up-to-now unabashed Marvel movie fandom. They still have spells and spellbooks, so…it’s your call to make.

So what’s to like? I’m a sucker for hyperverbal characters and will show up nearly anytime Cumberbatch wants to play another one. Strange is no mere rehash of Sherlock with his stentorian American accent, evolving as he does from acerbic rich diva to ennobled hero with the weight of the universe on his shoulders. The cast matches him as much as they’re allowed to within their comparatively fewer scenes, each of them a powerhouse in their own rights in previous great films. The star power lured into this cast almost seems grossly unfair to all the other movies it tromped at the box office this weekend.

The climactic battle sequence in Hong Kong at first threatens to give us yet another generic end-of-movie light show, of the kind that helped kill Suicide Squad‘s remaining momentum. Instead, Strange and the filmmakers twist a few knobs, turn reality in a different direction, and deliver something I’ve never seen done in a big-budget action blockbuster before. And then they one-up it as matters shift elsewhere and Marvel’s visual effects guys just go nuts. That sensation of being genuinely surprised and thrilled by an expensive popcorn flick is rarer for me nowadays than it was in my youth,

Before the movie began, my son and I had been discussing ideas and names that we suspected they’d leave out and should therefore be in the sequel. In between the high-caliber performances and eye-popping imagery, somehow they found time to throw in nearly everything on our wish list. And I was delighted that they kept Our Hero’s home base, the mansion known as his Sanctum Sanctorum, right there on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village where it’s supposed to be. Really, the entire mid-movie wizard-on-wizard Manhattan melee did me the nice favor of bringing an awful lot of our New York City vacation photos to life. That’s not the only reason Doctor Strange may now be one of my Top Five Marvel Movies, but for me it’s certainly compelling.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there are indeed two scenes during and after the Doctor Strange end credits, along with a PSA buried near the end. For those who fled the theater prematurely and really want to know without seeing it a second time…

…

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

…

[and really you should bail out, because the final scene is entirely consequential and essential and makes no sense until after you’ve seen the whole thing]

…

…the mid-credits scene sees Our Hero hosting a meeting with Thor (Chris Hemsworth!) because he’s concerned that the Norse god has brought his brother Loki (Sir Not Appearing in This Picture) to New York, which concerns our heroic magical gatekeeper. Thor enjoys his magically refilling beer mug and mentions their quest to locate a missing Allfather Odin. Doc reasons that if finding Odin will get Loki off his lawn that much faster, then perhaps he’d better join them in Thor: Ragnarok, in theaters November 3, 2017. Plug plug plug plug plug.

For the sake of role-modeling issues, near the end there’s a short message cautioning viewers about the dangers of driving while using a phone, just as we see Doc do to his regret. Short version: DON’T BE A DOC.

Then there’s the far more impressive scene after the end credits, a harbinger of darker times ahead. A much spookier Mordo pays a visit to the house of Benjamin Bratt, whose magically reanimated limbs qualify him as a wizard on a minor technicality. Mordo’s sick and tired of all these magic-users doing whatever they want with their talents without caring deeply enough about rules or responsibilities or the Greater Good. With a new plan in mind, he lifts a hand and sucks all the magic out of Bratt’s body, leaving him a crippled, frightened wreck on the floor.

Mordo, with an intense resolve, tells Bratt what he believes is the real danger to humanity that’s his mission to solve:

“Too many sorcerers.”

To be continued…someday in the Marvel Cinematic Universe!

Always forward. Never backward.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manhattan nighttime even makes mere souvenir shopping look cooler.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year from 1999 to 2015 my wife Anne and I took a road trip to a different part of the United States and visited attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. With my son’s senior year in college imminent and next summer likely to be one of major upheaval for him (Lord willing), the summer of 2016 seemed like a good time to get the old trio back together again for one last family vacation before he heads off into adulthood and forgets we’re still here. In honor of one of our all-time favorite vacations to date, we scheduled our long-awaited return to New York City…

After our Wicked matinee and dinner, my wife and son were wiped out and done sightseeing for Day Five. I had a bit of energy left and one more errand I wanted to run. Anne was a little uneasy letting me go traipsing alone through the streets of New York City, but I promised I wouldn’t be out all night. My destination was an easy half-mile walk, and gave me an excuse for one last stroll through the electric scenery of Times Square.

Mind you, we weren’t done entirely with NYC yet. Day Six would once again take us far from the hotel, using the subway station at the end of our block to bypass all the usual scenery. On Day Seven our early flight out of LaGuardia left us only a limited window for photography, none of it around the hotel. But I knew I wouldn’t have many more chances to marvel at the lights, glare at the gargantuan ads, and bask in the buzz of those busy Manhattan crowds.

Every New York City vacation slideshow should have at least one standard-issue Times Square shot or else you’re not allowed to come back.

If you don’t like the ads that showed up in your photo, wait thirty seconds and another, even less enticing product might appear.

The possibility of seeing the Rockettes live at Radio City Music Hall came up early in our vacation planning, but never made it past our itinerary’s quarter-final eliminations. Maybe another time.

Even the cartoon mascots aren’t allowed to leave without taking pics of each other. It’s good that they’re nice to each other because I imagine their swollen heads make selfies difficult.

Commuters and visitors vie for elbow room. Some stand around and gape; others have seen it all before and hurry to brush past it all.

Not even the restricted streets of Times Square are immune to the ubiquitous inconvenience of road construction.

With less than two days left in New York, little hints of everyday life began creeping into our vacation routine. We’d resumed checking emails and social media updates, flipping channels on the hotel TV, and missing our dog Lucky, no doubt running laps around his kennel. As for me, this was a Wednesday, and every Wednesday is New Comic Day. The nearest shop to our hotel was famous Midtown Comics, the same place we visited on our 2011 trip.

Entrance is off 40th and 7th; head up the stairs to the second floor for the main shop; the third floor holds most of their back issues and metric tons of non-print merchandise.

For the historical record, and because I still have my note to myself, my must-buys that week included Vision #9, Descender #13, Power Man & Iron Fist #6, and New Super-Man #1, one of the few DC Rebirth titles I’m touching with a ten-foot pole. From their archives I found an issue of Angel & Faith I’d missed, and was thrilled to find a copy of Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club hardcover that had been on my want list since before its release four months prior. If I lived here, I’d shop here at least weekly, even though they have the longest comic shop lines I’ve ever seen since “The Death of Superman”.

Curiously, I recognized my cashier as the same guy who waited on me in 2011. I debated the merits of mentioning this trivia to him, but kept quiet because I couldn’t decide if it would be too weird or too meaningless to him. I also didn’t have the heart to tell him I never did track down Brad. Regardless, he spent the intervening years becoming a published author and had copies of his most recent work on sale. That was a neat surprise.

Fun third-floor decor.

After paper-bagging my purchase, he offered me a plastic bag as well. I thought it was a kind yet redundant gesture. I figured out why when I exited the shop and walked into the first and only rainstorm of our entire week. The drops weren’t heavy, but they dogged me the entire half-mile back to the hotel. That’s what I get for daring to have my own solo adventure, I suppose.

Our Hero photographed on Day Three by his wife, little realizing the ads would morph at the last second and make me look like a perv. THANKS, NEW YORK.

To be continued!

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued!

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

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

Once more: onward!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel Comics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DC Comics / Vertigo / Young Animal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Horse Comics:

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

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

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

Image Comics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other publishers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Series and miniseries that were canceled or ended as planned:

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

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

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

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

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

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway. The creators we met and photographed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creators met but not photographed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthony Daniels, costar of The Phantom Menace!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’d forgotten to eat lunch. At all.

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

We’d forgotten where we parked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Enjoy!

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

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

My Little Ponypool, or possibly WeirdSlumberPartyPool.

Westboropool thinks your favorite heroes are stupid and unholy.

Linkpool says Westboropool can cram it.

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

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

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

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

Angel from X-Men: Apocalypse.

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

Black Panther, soon to be a major motion picture.

Aquaman, soon to be a major motion picture.

Doctor Strange, already a major motion picture.

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

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

Aquaman and Superboy straight outta the early ’90s.

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

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

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

My five personal faves from this section:

Squirrel Girl! Squirrel Girl! SQUIRREL GIRL!

Squirrel Girls! Squirrel Girls! SQUIRREL GIRLS!

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

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

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

To be continued! Other chapters in this miniseries:

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

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

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be concluded! Other chapters in this miniseries:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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