Spidey and the Vulture, both older than they’ll appear in the next film. Art by Paolo Siqueira, Frank D’Armata, and one of the four credited inkers.

On May 6th my wife and I had the pleasure of once again observing Free Comic Book Day, the least fake holiday of them all. Readers of multiple demographics, thankfully including lots of youngsters, flocked to our local stores and had the opportunity to enjoy samplers from all the major comic companies and dozens of indie publishers. This year’s assortment saw a metric ton of all-ages comics far outnumbering the adults-only options, served up by a plethora of publishers great and small, hopefully many of whom will still be around a year from now.

I never grab copies of everything, and this year I restrained myself a bit more than usual. Sometimes reviewing comics can be fun, but I wasn’t in the mood to read that many kids’ comics in a row. Also left behind were a few books based on cartoons and movies, reminders that some publishers see comics more as a second-tier merchandising stream than as a literary medium unto itself.

The fifteen comics in my FCBD 2017 reading pile came out as follows, ranked from Totally Not For Me to I Would Pay Monies For More, complicated by the fact that several of these contain two or more stories. I considered concocting some sort of system involving grade-weighting and averages that would even up the scores, but ultimately I’ve decided to base everything on subjective non-math and internal whims instead. As most listicles are.

15. Keyser Söze: Scorched Earth (Red 5 Comics) — Story #1: the walking plot twist from The Usual Suspects is back! And this time, he’s a mysterious crime lord lurking around alleys, spooking other bad guys who are too stupid to notice or smell the gigantic gasoline spill they’re all standing in, and then using still more gasoline to paint his name on a brick wall. Yep, that’s our cagey Keyser, master schemer and preposterous poser in a world of one-note slack-jawed tackle dummies. Story #2: chapter one of “The Rift”, in which a 2017 mom and son in Kansas happen across the crash landing of a time-tossed WWII flying ace. It’s labeled “Presented by Jeremy Renner”, a phrase which here means “blatant movie pitch on paper”. It’s kind of an intriguing start, even though it irks me when big Hollywood names try cashing in on comics cachet like that, especially considering how rarely it’s worked.

14. I Hate Image (Image Comics) — I don’t read Skottie Young’s I Hate Fairyland, but it seems to be about a little girl who butchers and slaughters her way through a cutesy sparkly happy dimension and…that’s it? The whole joke? Here she traipses and terrorizes through sundry Image books like Walking Dead, Saga, Trees, Chew, Paper Girls, and more. A few riffs were funny; mostly it’s just meet-maim-move-on, over and over and over again.

Buffy helps a young reader get started. Art by Yishan Li, Rod Espinosa, and Tony Galvan.

13. Buffy: The High School Years (Dark Horse Comics) — I collect Dark Horse’s regular Buffy series, but I haven’t been following the graphic novels aimed at younger readers. This is firmly of the latter, introducing all the basic Buffy elements of vampires, stakes, strong female role-modeling, and Xander on standby, plus the added bonus of a comic shop setting for the occasion. It’s not aimed for my age group, but that’s perfectly as it should be. Behind it is another annual installment of Plants vs. Zombies, which has been stumping me for I don’t even remember how many Free Comic Book Days in a row now. I still have no idea why they’re fighting, or whether the plant characters have backstories, or whether this is a video game or expanded webcomic or what. I assume somewhere out there is a fan base who loves these whatevers to pieces.

12. Bongo Free-for-All 2017! (Bongo Comics) — We stopped watching new episodes of The Simpsons years ago, but I keep picking up their annual FCBD compilation out of habit. Two nonstarters about wheelie backpacks and snot are followed with an amusing tale of Homer and Bart pulling an all-nighter before church and, of all things, a Rod and Todd Flanders underground mini-adventure from classic Batman writer Mike W. Barr, with clever gags and a heartwarming ending of the kind that the show used to do in those distant early seasons of yore. Man, those were the days.

11. Star Trek: the Next Generation: Mirror Broken (IDW Publishing) — Sooner or later every version of Trek must visit the Mirror Universe (can’t wait to see Evil Chris Pine someday), and now it’s time for Picard’s crew to flip their scripts. This prelude stars Lieutenant Barclay (played in several episodes by Dwight Schultz from The A-Team), still an engineer, but less anxiety-prone and more conniving, working his way up the ranks of the Evil Enterprise while Evil Picard strokes his white goatee and Evil Deanna Troi lounges around in a Greek goddess robe. Everything’s grim and gritty, and Barclay fans may squirm in their seats, but presumably that’ll course-correct once the main storyline begins and Our Heroes put them to shame. Presumably.

10. Captain Canuck: Year One (Chapterhouse) — He’s bigger up north than here in the U.S., but Cap is one of those FCBD stalwarts who visits us once a year on the holiday like a Santa who just brings the one present and has much rockier muscles. In addition to returning writer Kalman Andrasofsky, Cap’s creative cred is bolstered with a name you wouldn’t expect: Canada’s own Jay Baruchel, costar of many an R-rated sex comedy and the voice of Hiccup from the How to Train Your Dragon films, credited as co-writer rather than “presenter” (he also pens a lengthy, affectionate intro). Part one of three delves into new hero backstory involving the Afghanistan battlefront, some sharp twists ‘n’ turns, reams of research into wartime jargon, and solid art from New 52 survivor Marcus To. I’m no Canuckophile or whatever his fans might be called, but this is several cuts above the usual Hollywood vanity-project level, setting aside the major drawback that Cap’s costume is absent everywhere except on the cover.

Filling out the back pages is the wildly incongruous Die Kitty Die, from the minds of Archie Comics veterans Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz, in which Josie the Teenage Witch deals with a bunch of Harvey Comics pastiches mixing it up at her beach house party. A few jabs at the comics industry are right on target, but I’d think the subsection of comics fans who want adult imitation Archie products isn’t terribly large. And why this is paired with all that Afghanistan war zone seriousness in the front half, I have no idea.

9. Secret Empire #1 (Marvel) — Story #1 to me was disposable on arrival, the kickoff to the summer blockbuster crossover event that should wrap up the much-reviled Hydra Steve saga once and for all so we as a fandom can move past this fiasco. I don’t like crossovers anymore and nothing about this muddy excerpt convinced me I’m missing out on essential happenings. Story #2, on the other hand, is a treasure: a sneak preview of the forthcoming Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man relaunch written by Chip Zdarsky, whose off-kilter wits are the perfect fuel for sassy Spidey sarcasm. Along for the ride are the old Vulture with a refreshed arsenal and an all-new, younger Trapster who makes them both feel like geezers. I’d love to see tons more of this if every issue came with a zero-crossover guarantee. In all, this FCBD one-shot would’ve ranked nearer the top of the list if it had just been the Spec Spidey tale, no Captain Nazi, and lots of screen shots of Zdarsky’s Twitter feed.

8. Underdog (American Mythology) — The mighty mutt is back with perfect timing! He’s flying, punching, winning, and rhyming! There’s something old, something new, both aimed at kids of differing ages. Here in the now, Shoeshine Boy finds he can’t change to Underdog because some fiend has sabotaged all the phone booths in town, which means kiddie readers will have to ask Mom or Dad what a phone booth is. As intermission, Commander McBragg tests their vocabulary and ends with a suitably groan-worthy pun. For a coda, a 1970 Gold Key Comics reprint shows off the comedy stylings of underrated writer Steve Skeates (Aquaman; Crazy Magazine; Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham), who could pun with the best of ’em, though I’m not sure it was necessary or desirable to preserve the original comic’s flat, primitive coloring. In general, everything about this seems tailored more to nostalgic adults than to today’s kids, most of whom probably haven’t even seen the Jason Lee live-action flop that’s about to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Then again, maybe one shouldn’t underestimate the timeless appeal of a flying, talking dog.

7. BOOM! Studios Summer Blast (BOOM! Studios) — Three comics in one, leading off with a new David Petersen Mouse Guard tale, which is always a good bet. Closing out the issue is “Coady and the Creepies”, sort of a next-gen Josie and the Pussycats but snarkier. A header proclaiming “Lumberjanes Proudly Presents” had me raising my bat a bit unfairly high from the start. Most oddly appealing to me was Sam Sykes and Selina Espiritu’s “Brave Chef Brianna”, about a young human lady opening her own restaurant for humans in a city full of monsters and apparently only one other human, who may not be enough of a clientele by himself to meet her profit projections. I’m guessing every issue won’t be just twenty pages of her weeping at empty tables and filling out loan applications to keep her poorly researched dream alive.

Of course Star-Lord brought his tunes. Art by Aaron Kuder and Ive Svorcina.

6. All New Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel) — The #1 movie in America thinks you should also buy comics with the Guardians in them. In the hands of Deadpool writer Gerry Duggan and ex-DC Comics artist Aaron Kuder, our antiheroes are as rascally as ever, pulling off a heist with equal parts klutziness and panache, while a new Big Bad waits in the wings. Drax has an odd personality crisis that’s not explained for new readers, but anyone who liked the movie should be disappointed here only in the lack of Gamora beyond a few talking heads.

But wait! There’s more! If you really really like transmedia tie-ins, also enclosed is a preview of Marvel’s next Defenders do-over, which naturally stars the Netflix quartet and not any previous actual versions of the Defenders. Since this is Marvel’s comic universe and not TV, both Iron Fist and a returning Diamondback are 300% more tolerable here, so for that alone it wins.

5. The Tick (New England Comics) — I never see that thick-skulled avenger of wrongdoings on store shelves except on FCBD, though it’d be cool if that upcoming Amazon series were to change that. Lead story: Our Hero, who knows nothing about himself, throws his first birthday party and of course decides the main event should be a super-villain battle because that’s exactly what he does for fun. Backup story: a super-powered Election Day send-up whose goofy spoofery of all sides is closer to fair-and-balanced than most comedians and news channels. He may be over thirty years old, but that big brave bug still has some life in him.

4. Doctor Who: Four Doctors (Titan Comic) — Twelve and Bill, our current Doctor and companion, host a framing sequence that retrofits a new/old friend into stories starring Nine, Ten, and Eleven, all of which add up to a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting an entire civilization forget its history, even if they thought it was too terrible to preserve. Writer Alex Paknadel nails both Capaldi and Mackie’s voices exactly right, down to the part where I keep chuckling a lot at their zingers and near-instant chemistry.

3. Guy Delisle: Hostage (Drawn + Quarterly) — I had high hopes for the talent behind the 2014 book A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting and wasn’t let down. DeLisle shifts from everyday humor to real-life drama in this excerpt from the recently released hardcover graphic novel, based on the true story of a Doctors Without Borders admin who spent three months as a captive in isolation. The FCBD sample lists none of those details that I found by cheating (i.e., reading the Amazon blurb), instead giving us a portion of the story when it’s just him, his oppressive handcuffs, and fleeting glimpses of his graceless hosts. As an added bonus, there’s an excerpt from Poppies of Iraq, Brigitte Findakly’s forthcoming memoir about her childhood in Iraq and subsequent move to France, brought to life by French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim as what could be the next Persepolis. Both these books are going on the want list.

2. Catalyst Prime: The Event (Lion Forge) — Christoper Priest, one of my all-time favorite writers, who’s so awesome that he’s even got me collecting a DC Rebirth title, helps jump-start a new super-hero world with a one-shot involving a team of astronauts, a catastrophic meteor storm that strikes Earth, and a conspiracy beneath it all orchestrated by one of the least guilty-looking characters. Priest’s writing (abetted here by co-writer/editor Joseph P. Illidge) demands a reader pay attention, assemble their own clues, leap from points A to B with no hand-holding, and watch in shock as complicated ulterior motives are revealed, extracted slowly and judiciously like blocks from a Jenga tower. The first four pages are a jumble of super-team flash-forwards that will surely make more sense one year and fifteen comics from now, but everything else points straightforwardly to a new universe worth watching if any of our local comic shops order Lion Forge’s future titles. Fingers crossed really hard on this.

Not all ’90s comics fans followed the beat of the same drum, but a lot of them started with it. From Ed Piskor’s autobiographical Mudfish.

1. World’s Greatest Cartoonists (Fantagraphics) — The great-granddaddy of the indie scene commissioned all-new shorts from a killer lineup of longtime idiosyncratic cartoonists. Personal favorites here include Dash Shaw (about a pair watching one of The Hobbit chapters at the theater in HFR 3-D and suffering the consequences), Noah Van Sciver (about a bar debate between a Bukowski fan and a Bukowski superfan), Jason (I’m a big fan of his Hey Wait…), Hip-Hop Family Tree‘s Ed Piskor, and a wacky short from Anya Davidson that’s about Free Comic Book Day and about the obviousness of making her story about Free Comic Book Day. Some vignettes are in black-and-white; some are purely figurative; one is inspired by Muhammad’s first revelation; and one features the death of Pepe the Frog. Proof positive there’s so, so much more to comics than super-heroes, horror, R-rated sci-fi, and toy licenses.

…and that’s the free reading pile that was. See you next year, economy and hobby livelihood willing!

I am Groot, I am Groot. I am Groot; I am Groot I am Groot I am Groot I am Groot…I am Groot. I am Groot!

If it’s Marvel, that means it’s time for summer blockbuster extravaganza movie-going season again! And what more appropriate way to kick off than a sequel. Thankfully Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is not one of those Marvel sequels that makes fans regret their obsession with seeing every Marvel movie ever. Better still, the series proves there’s no such thing as a useless character. If an angry space raccoon, an Ent with no vocabulary, and three remnants from Marvel’s 1970s sci-fi era can strike a chord in today’s world, any character can if a talented filmmaker is allowed to try hard enough.

Short version for the unfamiliar: All of Our Heroes are back! Chris Pratt IS Star-Lord, the feisty orphan armed with a gun, a jetpack, and all the tunes his late mom left him. Dave Bautista IS Drax, the simpleminded strongman whose conversational tone is permanently stuck on “literally” mode. Bradley Cooper IS the voice of Rocket Raccoon, the second-cutest and the least honorable among our thieves. Vin Diesel IS the voice of Baby Groot, who is Groot and also is Groot. Zoe Saldana IS Gamora, the female. Together they’re still traipsing around the universe, taking odd jobs for money and goods, sometimes indulging in petty side thefts when no one’s watching Rocket closely enough.

Their new life together sees interruptions from two directions. On one side, their old foes Yondu and Nebula (Michael Rooker and Karen Gillan) are back and in their faces. Yondu needs their help escaping a mutiny by his own soldiers; as a sort of reward later, he opens up about his seemingly abusive foster-parenting relationship with Star-Lord and reveals there was more than meets the eye. Meanwhile, Nebula just wants to punch her sister Gamora to death for the part she played in their nightmarish upbringing. While they all sort out their feels, Star-Lord runs into a shocking surprise: his father’s alive and very much wants to reconnect. Kurt Russell is his deadbeat dad Ego, a living planet who occasionally takes on a seemingly super-cool humanoid form and, well, when a planet and a woman love each other very much, sometimes the result is Chris Pratt.

So now it’s time for a father/son reunion, and Dad wants his son to inherit the family business, and all the super-powers it entails. One little problem: as we learned from roughly three hundred episodes of Star Trek, whenever an immensely powerful alien wants to be extra nice to you, there’s nearly always a terrible reason why.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Gilmore Girls‘ Sean Gunn returns from the first movie as Yondu’s sidekick Kraglin, who gets a lot more to do this time. Laura Craddock (Da Vinci’s Demons) reprises Star-Lord’s mom for some new flashbacks.

Pom Klementieff (from Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake) joins the cast as Mantis, a super-empath who doesn’t do much except act as Ego’s sleep therapist and as a spoiler of everyone’s secret crushes. Elizabeth Debicki (Hugh Laurie’s moll from The Night Manager) is the leader of a gold-skinned alien race with a justifiable grudge against Our Heroes. Numerous aliens attack throughout the film in various settings, including but not limited to Tommy Flanagan from Sons of Anarchy.

Aging comic book fans who remember the original Guardians of the Galaxy — which counted among its members none of the film’s main characters — may be wowed by their brief appearances here as a team of older, more experienced brigands renamed the Ravagers. Their screen time is minimal, but their old-school hero names are bestowed upon the likes of Ving Rhames, Michelle Yeoh, Smallville‘s Michael Rosenbaum buried under several layers of CG, and the Sylvester Stallone.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? Family ties are the key theme — not only discovering them, but making the crucial decisions as to whether to strengthen or sever them. The Guardians basically became a family of sorts by the end of the first film…but are your best friends and coworkers more important than blood relations?

For Star-Lord, he’s overwhelmed by getting the chance to play catch with the dad he never knew. But when he peeks behind the curtain and sees how his dad really is, he’s faced with a dilemma: keep accepting Dad unconditionally just because they’re related, or do the right thing?

Gamora’s childhood was far more dysfunctional. She and her sister Nebula had to grow up living with the sinister conqueror Thanos, who one day will presumably demonstrate to moviegoers that he is indeed a super-villain who can do something besides lurk in dark corners. “Abusive” doesn’t begin to describe the horrors perpetrated in a household overseen by a wannabe intergalactic dictator. Nebula blames Gamora for much of the agonies she’s suffered, and now she’s out for revenge. Gamora naturally has to defend herself, but can she reconcile what she did in her youth out of self-preservation in any way that Nebula can understand? Is it remotely possible for them to forgive? Should sisterhood still mean anything to them?

Their odder teammates are no help. Drax finds new friendship in Mantis, largely because both have a habit of saying what they feel, even when it’s other people’s feelings they’re feeling. Rocket devotes so much head space to thievery and profit that he doesn’t dwell on his own existence as a lab creation without parents, but he can’t deny that his teammates are the closest thing he’s ever had to a real family, though it would be great if he’d stop sabotaging things for them. Groot is, as you’d expect, Groot.

Beyond the contemplation of family and their roles in the universe, otherwise GotG Vol. 2 is s once again Firefly on a much grander budget and with far louder explosions, plus monsters.

Nitpicking? The junior-high crassness of the first half-hour’s team repartee pretty much seals the deal on their PG-13 rating, just in case murdering alien bad guys wasn’t enough. If you were thinking about introducing your kindly grandparents to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this isn’t the place to start.

The older I get, the less I’m enamored of the all-CG super-duels, in which everything from the backgrounds to all the characters are head-to-toe 3-D animation without an ounce of practical flesh or substance to them. Regardless of whether or not the rendering is painstakingly realistic, even if it’s really pretty and shiny, the very knowledge that we’ve shifted from live-action to pure animation is as jarring as the cartoon flight scenes in the old Kirk Alyn Superman shorts.

So what’s to like? If you liked the first Guardians, you’ll love the second. All the recurring players do what they did before, but times five. Chris Pratt is more comfortable in heroic mode, still quipping on occasion but stopping on a dime when it’s obviously time for justice. Saldana and Gillan make the most of a rare film opportunity for sisters to work through childhood rage — sometimes during the boldest, loudest sequences; sometimes just by talking it out. The highlights of their emotional arcs tie everything together tightly when the final act comes around and it’s time for big bad summer blockbuster explosions.

Writer/director James Gunn keeps the plotting streamlined and the subplots minimal yet integral, leaving no time for filler and apparently, thankfully not under orders to cram in eighty-seven extra comics characters that the marketing department can turn into new toys. Seeing Guardians Vol. 1 first is strongly recommended, but otherwise you won’t need stacks of index cards to track any villain’s ludicrous convolutions. It’s space opera at its most straightforward and its most heartfelt and its funniest (discounting the lines that made me cringe).

I continue looking forward to Marvel’s future endeavors, with the Guardians as well as with the rest of Marvel’s vast IP catalog. Knowing that any four-color character can be made to work on the big screen, even a sixth-string loser like Taserface, I expect — nay, insist — that Marvel find directors and writers who can shepherd A-plus performances from bottom-of-the-pile personalities like Spider-Ham, the Fabulous Frog-Man, Stilt-Man, Irving Forbush, Street Poet Ray, and Mr. Fantastic.

How about those end credits? First, bonus points to Gunn & Co. for kicking off the end credits with Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”, my favorite of all the film’s oldies. It’s extremely rare for a soundtrack to include songs I genuinely like, so I’m bowled over whenever I happen to catch one.

But to answer the question we live to hear asked here on MCC: yes, the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 end credits nearly contain more scenes than names. Depending on how you define “credits”, those scenes are, prefaced with a courtesy spoiler alert, interspersed throughout the credits in between inserts of dancing and goofing around by assorted characters, some of whom aren’t even in the film. Those five actual scenes, then:

* Yondu’s sidekick Kraglin practices with the magic arrow he’s inherited, but so far doing clumsily.

* Stallone honors his old pal Yondu one last time in the company of the other Ravagers. Hopefully they’ll return?

* Elizabeth Debicki’s alien queen announces her next big plan: the creation of a new lifeform named Adam. This would almost certainly be Adam Warlock, yet another refugee hero from Marvel’s old sci-fi section.

* Enough time passes after the film’s events that Baby Groot is now Teen Groot, misbehaving and annoyed with the uncool adults.

* Several of the Watchers, an ancient race whose job is to record the goings-on of all lifeforms throughout the universe, gather to hear tales told by their most non-conforming member: Stan Lee in his mandatory cameo, revealing that his appearances in all those other Marvel films were, in fact, him doing his job as a Watcher. Mind = blown.

Local Theater to Captain Underpants Fans: DROP DEAD

The summer action blockbuster spectacular 75 years and multiple generations in the making has arrived at last, narrowly seeing the light of day before the end of the universe despite numerous prognosticators to the contrary! Wonder Woman is here and she’s brought the hopes and dreams of zillions of fans with her, from comics to Lynda Carter to animation to brightening Dawn of Justice to decades of products bearing her heroic image even in sadder times when she had no screen projects to promote. If you can name her five best stories, or if you drew inspiration merely from the bold visage of an unstoppable warrior woman unlike any of the super-dudes outnumbering her, either way director Patty Jenkins bids you welcome, because Wonder Woman is here for you.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Once upon a time there was a distant island named Themyscira populated entirely by the Amazons, a legendary all-women’s society existent since the era of Greek gods, living in peace apart from the rest of the planet but staying honed and prepared daily in case of intruders. Connie Nielsen from Gladiator ruled them as the royal Queen Martha Hippolyta. Wary of the evils that lay beyond their boundaries, she governed Themyscira as a virtual Paradise Island in hopes that her daughter Princess Diana (Gal Gadot, 14/10 awesomely heroic) would never need to learn to fight, to risk wounds or dirt. Diana obeyed her overprotective mom and never touched a weapon and grew up spoiled rotten and played a lot of video games until she died of high cholesterol. Wait, no, she learned fighting skills behind Mom’s back anyway.

The queen’s isolationist ideal is shattered when the nastiness of World War I rushes past their defenses, threatens their complacency, ruins their day, and opens Diana’s eyes to a world contaminated by man’s inhumanity to man. Representing for the benevolent side of the very real struggle is Steve Trevor (Chris Pine, more than just reprising Captain Kirk), a soldier and spy aiming to do the right thing and shut down the War to End All Wars in its final days. One problem: lingering madmen with sinister plans to prolong the war and tilt the scales back in their favor with a chilling new weapon of mass destruction, bent on proving wide-scale slaughter could be achieved well before the advent of the nuclear option.

Thus does Princess Diana find her calling, rise to the occasion, steal every unique weapon not nailed down, and insist her new friend Steve guide her toward Evil so she can stab it dead. Will this man, a coterie of misfit mercenaries, and this young woman of considerable wonder be up to the task?

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Frequent film foe Danny Huston oversees Operation Not Agent Orange in the guise of General Erich Ludendorff, an actual figure from true WWI history, though his rendition here in many ways is as accurate as Quentin Tarantino’s treatment of Hitler. Elena Anaya (one of Dracula’s wives from Van Helsing) is his chief scientist Dr. Poison, which sums up her and her work altogether.

On the side of good, Lucy Davis (Dawn from the original The Office) is longtime comics cast member Etta Candy, promoted from scrappy sidekick to home-base liaison, who deserved triple screen time. David Thewlis (Professor Lupin!) is the British official who facilitates Our Heroes’ top-secret day-saving mission. Trevor’s eccentric recruits include Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting) and Saïd Taghmaoui (Breaker from the first GI Joe movie).

Meanwhile among the Amazons, Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup! Claire Underwood! Jenny!) is Antiope, the gruff senior trainer who teaches Diana everything she knows about combat and who thinks the Queen is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? Lessons learned from Wonder Woman include but aren’t limited to:

* Love: generally good. A driving force for Diana.

* War is bad but often necessary in a world tainted by sinners who don’t get that.

* Peace is good. Anyone who says different has weapons for sale.

* Isolationism is selfish, the moral equivalent of standing still and watching Uncle Ben die times millions.

* Themyscira is not an American territory and it follows that Wonder Woman at her root is not American. Their veneration of the Greek pantheon is also a bit of a clue. WW has worn red-white-‘n’-blue on past costumes, but they were almost always leavened with generous amounts of non-American yellow/gold. Regardless: she’s not Ms. America. You’re thinking of the really earnest guy with the shield over at the other company.

* It’s unwise trying to shelter your kids from all pain and evil. Hiding them in your community’s plastic bubble is not a permanent solution. Sooner or later they’ll be exposed to the contagion that is Others and eventually negative emotions will occur. If you leave them unable to muster up even a minimal self-defense, they’ll be wrecked and you’ll be partly to blame. Conquering fear beats the safety of cowardice in any serious mature playbook.

* Demonstrating gender equality through actions, positions, teamwork, and mutual accomplishment rings more true and makes a more convincing case than paying it lip service or forcing characters to deliver ten-minute speeches about it to teach unschooled viewers the lessons they missed. The dynamic duo of Diana and Trevor excels at showing-not-telling.

* Men circa the 1910s: not yet grasping that last one.

Nitpicking? The first 30-40 minutes of the film felt very familiar to me. A uniquely talented, naive, optimistic outsider deeply rooted in seemingly mythical belief departs their faraway magical homeland on a mission borne of love. A boat carries them thousands of miles to reach our “normal” harsh realm, where they prefer their own weird clothes to ours. Their eyes grow wide with whimsy and awe at each new sight, after each silly mistake, and whenever they sample a sugary treat that overwhelms their senses. Everyone scoffs at their actions and words until they realize the central myth is real. Once everyone around them is convinced, then they can all work together in harmony for the sake of the world in general and the people they love in particular. Broadly speaking, they’ve partly remade Elf.

Each act has its own series of dynamic set pieces. Act Two is the most stunning, an extended skirmish that leads from the trenches of Paths of Glory to a war-ravaged small town that needs someone to stand up and say “Enough.” Act Three has your mandatory final boss battle, which contains several unforgettable images (and Gadot at her finest) but tosses in a fake new superpower or two like it’s Superman II and ultimately concludes in the same sort of vague, razed wasteland that ended Dawn of Justice. Act One is all about Amazons being Amazons, whose combat bylaws state that no single action can be performed unless it’s either amplified through Zack Snyder speed-ramping or prefaced with a 270-degree midair spin. I’m reminded of the typical Robert Rodriguez shoot-’em-up in which no one merely picks up guns and fires; they have to grab them, toss them in the air, catch them, and then they can open fire. Cool visual effects are cooler when you don’t notice how much time they’re wasting on superfluous dance moves.

If your primary objective as a viewer is the hope of catching salacious shots of Gal Gadot or any other Amazons frolicking in the buff, this film is not intended for you. At all. But one scene will be sheer bliss for anyone who has the phrase “Chris Pine nude” bookmarked in their search browser. In this area the film presents a spot of imbalance to add to the small stack that’s leaning against 100+ years of Hollywood nekkid-chicks imbalance.

So what’s to like? Moving the setting back to WWI seemed an odd choice at first for a character who didn’t exist back then, but ultimately it works out. The Diana of this period is innocent and still learning the ropes of heroism, but the wartime backdrop provides an opportunity for her to demonstrate the warrior spirit that differentiates her from Batman and Superman, by which I mean Wonder Woman kills. But it’s wartime and therefore part-‘n’-parcel of the unfortunate experience, if not ingrained in her heritage. If we get to Justice League and she’s stabbing bank robbers through the heart, some rethinking will need to be done.

But through the chaos and the sunny times alike, Gal Gadot is the absolute best reason to watch. She often smiles. That word again: SMILES! Honest! Remember when Christopher Reeve used to do that and all the best generations stood up and cheered for it? Gal Gadot is the new Christopher Reeve. In the early scenes even li’l kiddo Diana is a role model to behold as she keenly watches the adults carry on with their training. She stands firm and tries duplicating their exercises — striking the air with her tiny arms, punching and elbowing with such emphatic determination that I admired her steel nerves in the making and died from cuteness overload.

Despite my minor quibbles, Wonder Woman is a valiant return to the bygone age of the hopeful super-hero film, soaring into our hearts on the wings of composer Rupert Gregson-Williams’s volume-11 string section and martial-metal battle hymns, all while Jenkins and screenwriter Allen Heinberg guide Gadot and Pine through fighting the good fight, doing a little dance, and reminding a jaded 21st-century audience that truly Good Guys done well aren’t remotely boring. And they’re what the self-absorbed, spiteful, misguided little kids inside us need now more than ever.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Wonder Woman end credits, though comics fans will appreciate the Special Thanks section that leads off with the names of several writers and artists who’ve steered Diana’s fortunes throughout her past fifty years of DC Comics: Robert Kanigher (’60s and ’70s) Len Wein and Ross Andru (those swingin’ ’70s); George Perez with Greg Potter (post-Crisis ’80s, a.k.a. “my” version of WW); Phil Jimenez (Perez’ successor); William Messner-Loebs and Mike Deodato Jr. (’90s); Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang (New 52); and Greg Rucka (early 2000s and the recent “Rebirth”).

I remember quite a few other regular WW contributors from my lifetime (Byrne, Simone, Busiek, Robbins, Newell, Houser, any number of additional artists…), but they’re omitted in favor of Special Thanks for three additional gents: DC VP Jim Lee, who drew Diana a few times in Justice League and who is a DC VP; and James Bonny and Tony Daniel, creators of the sword she uses in the film. If you’re a longtime comics reader whose favorite WW arc was the work of someone not listed above, I’m afraid they’re just not as important as the big shiny stabby thing. Dreadful sorry.

But on the brighter side, Lynda Carter absolutely gets acknowledged. Anyone who knows anything about Wonder Woman knows better than to snub her.

That time two Dynamic Duos met at Awesome Con Indy 2014.

Saturday morning, Anne and I were at a major event waiting to meet TV’s Dean Cain when news broke that the Adam West had passed away at 88 from leukemia. At first we didn’t believe it. Whether we’re in a small town or a big city, whether we’re among fellow geeks or ordinary folks, that’s the kind of allegation we don’t accept at face value.

“To the phones!” I half-jokingly shouted as we both clicked to our most trusted sources for confirmation. Alas, it was true. The moment was depressing yet sublimely absurd — here we are in line for Superman only to have someone tell us Batman is dead.

My relationship to the incomparable Adam West mirrored much of my Gen-X comics-collecting peers. As a kid, Batman ’66 reruns were among my first exposure to super-heroes, and quite probably a chief contributor to my first lessons about the differences between right and wrong, between good and evil, and between gentlemanly manners and hotheaded teenagers. Sometimes I laughed, but more often than not, West’s version of the Caped Crusader told me this is what super-heroing was all about — truth, justice, keeping calm, creative problem-solving, and civility toward others, even those you’re arresting.

I’d been reading comics since at least age 6, and the series’ hokey patter wasn’t that much of a stretch from average Marvel and DC fare of the day. My favorite Batman, as rendered by the dynamic Jim Aparo (likewise RIP), was grimmer and smiled less than Adam West, but I had no problem reconciling the two as valid interpretations, except I didn’t put it in those terms. I liked this Batman and that Batman.

As a teen, Batman ’66 was the WORST. Age 14 was the all-new, all-daring, “comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” era of Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, in which an elderly, unsmiling Bruce Wayne had aged into a bitter, rueful, uncompromising piledriver of a vigilante thanks to horrible events and choices in his life. As a junior high outcast who yearned to be taken seriously, I gravitated toward these dark new worlds where no one and nothing were laughing matters. Adam West’s shining role model and his silly sound effects were the exact opposite of what I now valued and were therefore reclassified Uncool. Batman reruns and the fans who loved them were ruining comics! Yeah, I had some sound effects for them: BOO! HISS! BLECH! EXPLETIVE!

As an adult, I wish I could slap my teen self around a bit. I wish this rather often, not just when reflecting on Batman. The misbegotten offspring that followed Maus, Watchmen, and Dark Knight and reveled in pessimism or nihilism (thereby missing the point of any of those three) are no longer my thing. Those heroic old-school values are cool to me again. I’m in a better position to appreciate Adam West’s deceptively straight-faced performance and the multiple levels on which it works. And I no longer care about the opinions of anyone who thinks Batman reruns and the fans who love them today are bad for comics or for grim-‘n’-gritty films.

In a roundabout way, my life as an Adam West fan hasn’t been too far removed from the standard father/son life cycle: revered him as a kid; rejected him as a too-cool teen; eventually realized why he was right all along after I grew up.

I’m sorrowful tonight but glad I had the chance to meet Adam West and Burt Ward once back in 2014 at a convention here in Indianapolis. Anne had already had the pleasure of getting his autograph and exchanging kind words with him at a previous Wizard World Chicago (I’d been in other lines and missed that opportunity because sometimes I’m dense), but she didn’t get a photo with him. So we figured this hometown show would be a great chance for both of us to say hi, get a photo op, and, better yet, see if they’d do jazz hands with us. Longtime MCC readers are well aware this is our thing, and 2014 was the year we launched this ongoing permutation in our fandom expression.

The line was late in the day, rather long, and ushered along rapidly once it began. As we reached the booth, we could tell Batman and Robin were mostly hanging out motionlessly while fans posed around them. Not a problem for us — we realize older actors aren’t as mobile or excitable as they used to be and can’t exactly do acrobatics on cue in their advanced years. We figured we’d let them have their dignity while we filled in the margins around them with jazz hands and goofiness.

We proceeded to exactly that, standing to either side and doing our thing. Adam West side-eyed us, realized what we were doing, and chuckled. The photographer snapped our photo, we were ushered out, and history was made in a way that no bitter young fan-dudes could ever take away from us.

We had made Adam West laugh.

More than the cost of the photo op, that split-second moment of off-kilter entertainment was the closest I ever got to repaying him in kind for what he’d done and meant for me and countless others, even during those phases when we were all too stubborn and “cool” to acknowledge it. May he rest in peace, secure in the knowledge that his legacy lives on, and treated in Heaven to sound effects so amazingly transcendentally empowering that we just can’t even imagine.

Superman posing with local military at the conclusion of a special ceremony inducting “honorary citizens” of Metropolis.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: on June 9th and 10th my wife Anne and I attended the 39th annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis, IL, a grand bash in honor of the Man of Steel in particular and all the super-heroes who owe their existence and livelihoods to him in general.

Our sixth visit to the town that adopted Superman once again felt like a sort of homecoming. Illinois even extended us the courtesy of raising their interstate speed limits and clearing out nearly all their road construction projects for the occasion so we somehow managed a record-setting four-hour drive time from Indianapolis. Numerous entrepreneurs brought fine wares and skills for the occasion, including a bevy of new businesses that took over previously abandoned storefronts and boosted occupancy rates along the main straightaway. Best of all, we enjoyed several mini-reunions with fellow fans we recognized (and vice versa) from past years’ autograph lines. The Celebration is like no other convention, and Metropolis is no mere sterile convention center.

The Superman sights begin well before you reach the center of town. The first gas station off I-24 knows its clientele and decorates accordingly, including a pair of cardboard standees outside that once stood near the Super Museum. All four staffers in the adjacent Quiznos were likewise garbed in their favorite Superman shirts and/or souvenir shirts from previous Superman Celebrations.

John Byrne’s Superman presents the gas station men’s room! Anne tells me the ladies’ was of course presented by Wonder Woman.

Superman: The Animated Toilet Paper.

Each day we parked just south of the festivities, where dozens of city blocks provide copious free parallel parking. A few dozen angled spaces allow limited convenience next to the town hall and the Chamber of Commerce, but we found our own sweet spot not far away that avoided that tight competition. Our short walk had a few points of interest along the way, particularly for Superman fans who know the old TV show’s catchphrase regarding “a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way!”

I wouldn’t be surprised if this secret squirrel knew the Adventures of Superman opening by heart too.

Many a merchant supports the party in their own way. You say you like characters? Well, insurance agents have characters too!

Show of hands, who wants a Flo selfie? She’s arguably cuter than a gecko!

Before diving in and throwing all our money at the food stands, first we had to stop by the Metropolis Chamber of Commerce to pick up our swag bags. This was a new thing for us and them.

Superman merchandise and artifacts to scope out while we waited. Tons of super-hero clothing for sale all over the place, as you’d imagine.

Once upon a time, the time-honored Superman Celebration procedure was that pretty much all events were free and all attendees were entitled to free celebrity autographs. Getting autograph session tickets meant camping out overnight in front of the Chamber of Commerce, or at least arriving in town for hours before sunrise to wait in line to score those memorable ultimate freebies, but it’s what we and everyone else got used to doing. Everyone was happy and everything was awesome.

This year nearly all the events stayed as free as ever, but thanks to the Midwest convention explosion of the past few years, the words “free” and “autograph” don’t like appearing in the same sentence anymore. We’d heard talk last year that they’d eventually have no choice but to change things up for the Celebration to remain a fiscally feasible fete. As a couple who’s been doing the convention scene for some time now, to us this scuttlebutt was neither surprising nor heartbreaking, except in the sense that it represents Change and a departure from The Way Things Used to Be.

For big fans who want to keep coming but absolutely cannot afford market prices, one limited free-autograph session was still offered for old times’ sake, at the end of Saturday during an extremely narrow window on a select few kinds of items. I hope that session went well and without stampede or bloodshed. Unfortunately now that events of this nature are a gigantic commodity, Metropolis has no choice but to keep up with the times or else run the risk of being left behind. Very, very few citizens want to see what a Superman Celebration without a single actor guest would look like.

So this year the Celebration launched its own VIP program. As an incentive for superfans and out-of-towners to give money to the city and thereby support the Celebration in particular and one feisty small town in general, the showrunners invented a tiered system — basically like crowdfunding without Kickstarter — whereby fans could buy memberships up front in exchange for guaranteed autograph session placement and other perks, depending on the tier selected. We couldn’t afford uppermost tiers, but guaranteed autograph access was a strong temptation. We loved the idea of sleeping in till a reasonable hour Saturday morning instead of getting up before the rooster, waiting on a cold sidewalk with only Hardee’s biscuits for nourishment, and watching the sun and temperatures rise on us. This new sponsorship program would net us the equivalent of a theme park Fast Pass, and for much, much cheaper than a Wizard World Chicago VIP badge. Brilliant, frankly. We were in.

Our bag contained badges (non-laminated cardstock, alas) that doubled as our autograph session passes, Superman Celebration lanyards, sponsor-exclusive souvenir T-shirts, and a few extra cost-effective frivolities. Now we were on our way and ready to stroll Market Street, see the sights old and new, feast on festival foods, praise the cosplayers, and celebrate good ol’ whatshisname from Krypton.

Though it was the last place we visited on Saturday, mention must be made of the best, most underrated attraction: Artists Alley and Writers Way, housed at the far north and requiring some dedication to track down in its out-of-the-way, not-so-air-conditioned HQ. Over half the room was filled with comics fans clamoring to meet special guests Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, collaborators on DC’s bestselling Harley Quinn series. We left them to their enjoyment and moved on to go say hi to familiar faces and special guests alike.

Chief among the former was writer Brian K. Morris, an awesome friend of this blog and lively supporting character at more than a few previous cons, including this one and this one. He writes novels and publishes comics and you may read things from him right exactly here, please and thank you. Also on hand was fellow writer and radio personality Sean Dulaney, his C2E2 2015 tablemate, who likewise brought comics and has a site and whatnot. And to the left of their tables was artist Trevor Hawkins, who drew one of Dulaney’s covers as well as cover and illustrations for Morris’ latest old-school superhero novel, The Original Skyman Battles the Master of Steam.

Also greeted that weekend: Gwenda Bond, author of an ongoing Lois Lane YA novel series in which a brave 16-year-old future journalist is already getting on-the-job training while negotiating school, pursuing Truth, chatting online with an MMORPG cohort she knows only by his username “SmallvilleGuy”, and dwelling on that one bizarre time an anonymous flying man saved her life. As of tonight I’m eighty pages into the second book Double Down and rather enjoying myself. The third, Triple Threat, was just released in May.

Bond also had the privilege of judging their “Superdog Show” contest and tweeting pics of so many good doggos, including a dead ringer for Krypto.

I was especially thrilled to meet longtime comics writer John Ostrander. You might know him best as the co-creator of both Suicide Squad as we know it and the Jedi Quinlan Vos from the Star Wars Expanded Universe. (His original hard-boiled comics take was immeasurably superior to the Clone Wars surfer-dude version.) His creator-owned Grimjack series was among my first discoveries when I finally transitioned from buying my comics at drugstores to indulging in the joy of comic shops. He’s written numerous series over the years, including Martian Manhunter, Firestorm, The Spectre, Manhunter, The Kents (a Superman-related Western!), many a Star Wars project, several things for Marvel and other publishers, and more more more. If I had to highlight my favorite aspect among Ostrander’s works, it was that he wasn’t afraid to mess with the status quo, put his characters through radical change, and watch the drama unfurl and the scenery explode and the sparks burn everything to the ground. But in, y’know, entertaining ways.

For fun he’s currently a regular columnist at ComicMix.

In between the autograph lines and the actor Q&As and the A-plus snacks, Anne and I enjoyed the visions and vexations that awaited us all around town, all in the name of the Man of Tomorrow and every superhero who ever came after him.

Mandatory shot of the world-famous Super Museum, a must-see at least once for any super-hero fan’s bucket list.

Newspaper box decorated by local kids, presumably with the blessing of grown-ups.

Fans flock to Metropolis from all over America and often from other countries. This year we had the pleasure to mingle with folks from Nashville, Georgia, California, LSU, and probably more. Squint and you can find our names!

Another staple each year is “SuperCon”, which here is a phrase meaning “geek flea market”. A bunch of collectors and dealers share a space for the weekend and fill it with back issues, memorabilia, and clever craftwork for sale.

Downtown Metropolis has murals here and there, including this one that I don’t believe we’ve showcased before. We firmly believe art makes any town better.

You’re never bored looking at the front lawn of Americana Hollywood, a south-side museum packed with toys and other licensed merchandising shaped like countless stars and characters. It’s open so rarely that Google lists it as Permanently Closed. We visited once on our second or third time in town, but I’m not sure I still have that write-up handy…

We passed by Americana Hollywood on our way to our Saturday morning autograph/photo-op session and stopped for a quick pose with a ton of kryptonite. That’s Anne sporting the exclusive sponsors’ T-shirt.

This year’s Celebration was bittersweet for those who remember Noel Neill, a.k.a. Lois Lane from The Adventures of Superman. Ms. Neill was a gracious presence in Metropolis for several years but passed away last July at age 95. This Lois statue, which we’ve photographed twice before, was erected in her honor in 2010 on the north end of Market Street as if to balance Superman’s presence on the other end.

The surrounding temporary bouncy-house setups were either jarring or appropriately zesty, depending on how you look at it.

Between this set of photos and our first three chapters, you get the idea: tremendous fun was had, Superman was cheered, sunburns were inflicted. I could write more about what we did with our Saturday afternoon away from the Celebration, but that’s best left as a separate entry unto itself. Part of me also wants to spend several hundred words lamenting those pervasive empty storefronts around town, particularly south of 5th Avenue and dotting the landscape all the way from the Superman statue to the riverside casino, but that thinkpiece is likewise best kept in reserve for some other moment.

As for this moment, we’re glad we had the opportunity to drop in once more, and we look forward to future visits, which we imagine there’ll be for as long as they keep luring us back. The new additions to my reading pile, along with our new jazz-hands photos and other newly treasured fandom moments, will have to tide us over till then.

Three cheers for new reading material!

And soon the negative side effects will have faded, such as the nasty sunburn along my receding hairline, which is peeling and bugging me as we speak. Or the part where, after I tucked my lanyard and cardstock badge inside my shirt during our photo ops, I forgot all about it till hours later when I discovered that my nonstop sweating had glued the badge to my chest.

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The End. Thanks for reading! Other chapters in this special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: All-Stars! (photos with our special guests!)
Part 2: Cosplay!
Part 3: Festival Food!

One last Superman statue shot for good luck before we’re up, up and away…

Window painting at our local theater. Yes, it has been a while.

If Marvel had simply decided twenty years sooner that Spider-Man films should be made once every three years, and that a different young British actor should play him every time, perhaps fans wouldn’t have fussed about Spider-Man: Homecoming coming so soon after Amazing Spider-Man 2. We’d be used to the rotating lead spot by now. Granted, this would’ve caused seismic shifts in our entertainment timeline — imagine if Spidey had been played years ago by a younger Daniel Radcliffe and left a weird hole in the Harry Potter franchise. Ah, what might have been.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Whereas the Batman films took a tag-team approach but kept the basic history intact for the four Burton/Schumacher films, this time director Jon Watts has tossed Andrew Garfield’s alternate Earth and instead sworn allegiance to the even younger Spidey of the broadly titled but not-so-all-inclusive Marvel Cinematic Universe. Following the events of Captain America: Civil War, a plucky teen Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is giddy about the prospect of moving beyond his humdrum life as a Queens student and graduating to the Avengers as a real grown-up superhero even though he isn’t yet. His expectations far outstrip any and all signs he receives from his mentor Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr, more of a mature statesman here than he was in any of his three solo films) and his de facto Watcher, the increasingly irritable Happy Hogan (a returning Jon Favreau, who has more screen time than Downey). But Peter holds out hope that the international heroic life will soon be his, even as he’s slacking at his day-to-day requirements at his STEM-tastic magnet school.

The opportunity to save the day and win the big Avengers audition in his mind arrives in the form of Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton, righteously menacing), a NYC construction company owner enraged that the United States government — in the form of a new department called Damage Control — has gotten into the post-superhuman fight-scene cleanup biz and effectively declared a monopoly on his small business’ biggest profit sector. Sick of being undercut and pushed around by The MAN, Toomes takes his crew to the dark side and expands from scavenging sci-fi super-clutter into rigging new super-villain tools out of it. From this new sideline market is born the Vulture, Spidey’s first costumed nemesis from the original Stan Lee/Steve Ditko days and retroactive spawn of thousands of Birdman jokes among movie fans. Can li’l Spidey hold his own against an opponent three times his age, stay out of trouble in school, and convince Stark that he deserves to be in all the Avengers movies from now on?

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Marisa Tomei returns from Civil War as Petey’s Aunt May — younger, less fragile, and more potty-mouthed than Comics Version 1.0 ever was. Peter’s classmates include Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel‘s Lobby Boy) as a mostly impotent rendition of class bully Flash Thompson, Disney Channel star Zendaya as “woke” comic relief, and Abraham Attah (Beasts of No Nation) underused as an academic teammate. Teachers include comedian Hannibal Buress and Silicon Valley‘s Martin Starr.

Team Vulture also includes B-list Spidey villain the Shocker, whose power gauntlets are filled first by Logan Marshalll-Green (Prometheus), then by Bokeem Woodbine. Tyne Daly, costar of TV’s Cagney & Lacey, is the head of Damage Control. Gwyneth Paltrow returns for a scene as Pepper Potts. Kenneth Choi, previously Jimmy Morita of the WWII Howling Commandos in Captain America: The First Avenger, apparently continues his bloodline as a descendant who’s now Peter’s principal.

Cameos include Donald Glover (Atlanta! Community! Kid Lando!) as an obscure character, pre-costume; one very special Avenger, in one of the funniest moments in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to date; and of course Stan Lee, this time as as a friendly neighborhood kind of guy.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? This version of Peter has definitely learned the lesson of “With great power comes great responsibility” from Uncle Ben’s offscreen death (thankfully not reenacted for the 87th time), but has yet to realize that learning how to handle great responsibility requires a lot of life lessons. Being really earnest and eager is nice, but it’s not enough. Wisdom needs to be accrued, morals and ethics need to be cultivated, advice needs to be heard, constructive criticisms need to be accepted, mistakes need to be corrected or better yet avoided, and “doing what feels right” needs to be understood as the often flawed logic of far too many millions of human failures, a phrase etched right between “I meant well” and “That wasn’t supposed to happen” in the Hell’s Road asphalt.

As with any film where the upfront good guys are teens, naturally there are moments where the adults don’t listen when the teens know something they don’t. The adults are later regretful and apologetic and appreciative of Peter’s efforts, which is fine. And yet, some of his worst mistakes turn into outright disasters — literally, in the case of the alarming Staten Island Ferry sequence — when the teens don’t listen to the adults.

Meanwhile on the dark side, Keaton convincingly leans into the role of a self-made working-class average Joe infuriated by a system that invades his turf, takes away his livelihood, and effectively tells him his own government doesn’t care about him. His salvaging tactics may have been questionable in the first place, but in his mind he’s the little guy striking back because he’s sick of being disrespected by The MAN. Pretty much any side of any debate can recall a time when they were in his shoes, though most folks don’t use that position as an excuse to rationalize evil, which is what his blue-collar crusade becomes even before the bodies start piling up.

Keaton also demonstrates how recruiting multiple comic-book super-villains for your big-screen movie works much better if one them is clearly in charge — no equal partnerships, no 50/50 screen time just to mollify disparate A-list actors whose roles otherwise have nothing else in common. Vulture isn’t the only known face in the crowd (beyond his toady the Shocker, three other Spidey-foes have small parts), but putting Keaton front and center allows a more cohesive narrative than blatant cash-grab compromises just for the sake of adding more marquee names or selling extra action figures. I doubt I’m the only one who thinks Sandman/Venom and Goblin/Electro were the worst super-villain team-ups since Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy.

Nitpicking? As an old man who grew up with Spider-Man as a moral role model and as one of the senior heroes in Marvel Comics, I continue to struggle with the notion of a baby-faced Spidey being pushed around by heroes who were created years after him but in the prevailing continuity are now his elders, pulling rank and disciplining him for his youthful judgment lapses even though they owe their entire merchandisable existence to the successful precedent he set. The problem saw its worst manifestation in the “Ultimate Marvel” imprint, where at times Our Hero found himself getting stepfather-figure lectures from third-stringers like Iron Fist and Moon Knight. The genesis of the MCU, complicated by Marvel’s issues with various rights holders over the years, have necessitated an organic divergence in its heroes’ development and pecking order, but I yearn for the days when Iron Man might nag Spidey merely as a professional peer, not as a cranky gym coach more than twice Peter’s age.

As a fan of the original Damage Control, as created by Dwayne McDuffie and Ernie Colon (years before McDuffie went on to become one of the best comics/animation writers in my lifetime), I was disappointed to see their often tongue-in-cheek, brilliant idea for an independent super-business reimagined here as a symbol of uncaring government overreach. Frankly, it was a fun comics concept I never would’ve expected to go grim-‘n’-gritty.

Also, I’m not sure if it was my aging eyes or poor lighting setup in our theater, but every nighttime fight scene was rendered into indiscernible murk, all loud noises and fractured light show. The final midair showdown between Spidey and Vulture sounded like Air Force One but lost any climactic power for me because it reminded me of how drive-in theater screens look when you watch them from the wrong parking lot.

So what’s to like? As it turns out, the character scenes out number the nighttime fight scenes 10-to-1, so only a small portion of Spider-Man: Homecoming was wasted on me. When Downey and Favreau aren’t shaming Peter and making him feel three inches tall, all his best scenes are with his classmates, trying to survive in the trenches of high school, one that feels realistically multi-culti and bustling and saddled with obsolete mandatory films, where the escape hatches include crappy parties, heavily supervised field trips, and intense hobbying. Tom Holland, who previously awed me as a heroic teen under extreme duress in J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, bears the awkwardness, frustration, angst, and excitable verve of a kid who knows he’s meant for better things but can’t get to them till he transcends his current trappings first. Along for the ride is his best pal Ned (Jacob Batalon), who stumbles into his secret early on (as already blown in the trailers) and dreams of being his computer-savvy sidekick, with ultimately competent results (maybe a bit too advanced-hacker, but hey, science magnet school!). Their solid partnership, despite its emotional ups and downs, gives Spidey a good-buddy vibe that sees him through the bad guys’ shenanigans and the usual Parker girl trouble, providing Holland with someone to bounce off of in a way that neither Andrew Garfield nor Tobey Maguire ever really had in their stints.

I do wish Holland had kept up the quipping per the old Spidey traditions instead of becoming all Serious Business once the Vulture’s backstory begins to take on a more terrifying dimension. Otherwise, part of me wishes the Spider-Man series had started this way in the first place. Whereas Sam Raimi realized the Lee/Ditko era to the fullest possible extent but struggled visibly with this third film’s contractually bound weaknesses; and whereas Marc Webb possibly leaped too quickly from the great yet small (500) Days of Summer into the hollow world of big-studio toyeticism; here, Jon Watts seems to have benefited from working under the more creatively conducive aegis of Marvel Studios rather than under the stodgy Sony regime. The defining aesthetics of all the best old Spidey comics feels right here, from teen snark to loner angst to off-the-wall single-shtick baddies. I wish it hadn’t taken them this many tries, and here’s hoping we don’t have to endure five more young British false starts to get to the next decent Spidey-flick.

Special shout-out to Homecoming for skipping clichéd Manhattan tourism and taking us into the heart of NYC’s other boroughs. We haven’t done the Staten Island Ferry ourselves, but we walked around Queens for a day on our 2016 vacation and I got a kick out of seeing it brought to life here. I think I even recognized our subway station in one shot.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: Spider-Man: Homecoming has one scene early into the end credits, and one bonus bit at the very 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]

…

…first scene: Adrian Toomes goes to prison and has a brief chat with his old pal Mac Gargan (Michael Mando from Better Caul Saul), who in the comics would become the green-garbed menace called the Scorpion. Gargan says some guys are putting together a team, kind of like the Avengers Initiative but seedy and without A-listers. Toomes, who now knows Peter’s secret identity and yet is incredibly not dead or comatose at the end, declines the offer and walks on, smiling, without spilling what he knows, leaving Gargan and us mystified as to what he plans to do next.

Second scene: one last public service announcement from our old pal Captain America (America’s sweetheart Chris Evans) commending viewers who believe in the virtue of patience, even in futile situations such as waiting till after a movie’s end credits only to find nothing but value-subtracting disappointment. Pretty big trash talk for a war criminal, CAP.

That magical moment when Our Heroes meet but aren’t sure they can take orders from the Stupendous Scarfman.

Let the record show The Defenders is an exceedingly rare event, by which I mean it’s a Netflix series I finished watching within a week of release. Normally it takes me six to eight weeks to catch up with the cool kids. Don’t ask which of my work days suffered most from accomplishing that.

It helps that season 1 is only eight episodes, much more tightly edited, averaging 45-50 minutes each — a more concise spectacle than the padding and plodding that frequently dragged the other series to the 60- to 65-minute mark for indulgent purposes. I hadn’t planned to bulldoze my way through like this, but we have a convention this weekend where we know fans will be chatting about this brand new show to pass the time in the long lines. I’d rather not have to keep cutting them off with yelps of “AHHH! SPOILERS!” while stuffing my head into my carryall so I can’t hear them.

Additional motivation struck me when episode 3 — the one where all four main characters have their first rendezvous — turned out to be such an addictive, headlong rush of comic-book excitement in the mighty Marvel manner, despite the mandatory but middling Hallway Fight. Differently impressive was part 4, directed by ace TV veteran Phil Abraham (The Sopranos, Mad Men), basically a bottle episode in which Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist finally share moments, snipe, posture, threaten to walk, connect, and subtly weave all the threads and tones from their respective, disparate corners of the Marvel Netflix Universe into a coherent tapestry over a sumptuous if mostly ignored Chinese dinner. The characters’ flaws were laid bare with self-aware candor, the overlaps between their shows were extricated, dumplings were shared, and both humor and personal drama each found their entry points.

Results after those episodes were, uh, a bit more varied. The short version: generally a wild ride, but not without its sudden bumps and occasional missing pieces of track.

Fair warning: major spoilers lie beyond not only for The Defenders but for the preceding shows as well. If you haven’t watched those other five seasons first, parts of this show will be incomprehensible. That’s a disappointment to anyone who prefers self-contained stories to these interlocking continuities that marketing departments love to pieces nowadays, but that’s how the super-hero game is played on screens nowadays, for better or worse.

…

…so, random spoiler-tastic thoughts while watching:

* First half of the season was better than the second half. I didn’t mind that Our Heroes needed time to emerge from their various parts of Manhattan and stumble across sufficient coincidences, but I grew numb later on when tricky conversations gave way to lots of gussied-up tracking shots filled with grunting tumblers all doing the same four or five kinds of somersaults over and over. This season also would’ve been at least a full episode shorter if certain characters hadn’t fallen back into their old ways of making stupid choices for the sake of killing time. I’m looking in particular at YOU, White Angsty Martial Arts Guys.

* Speaking of Iron Fist: by and large, Finn Jones seemed more at ease here as billionaire brawler Danny Rand, better contained by the other pros around him and obviously given more time for fight rehearsals. My relief gave way to eye-rolling when episode 6 opened with him suddenly deciding the time for reasonable planning was over in favor of charging at the bad guys like a rhino with a dunce cap covering its eyes. This lapse back into his previous Idiot Plot proclivities of course had to happen so all the heroes would have an excuse to start fighting each other, because Hollywood has decided that’s a thing that real heroes always do now. The level-headed planning sessions were nice while they lasted. Contrasting episodes 3 and 6 show exactly what’s wrong with his character: the showrunners decided that to fill their changing needs he’s both a naive optimist and an inconsolable hothead, two character types that don’t fit well together. The former would better fill the missing emotional gap in their team lineup; the latter, a redundancy Daredevil’s already got covered.

* Speaking of ol’ Horn-Head: as with his two previous seasons, I love Charlie Cox’s take on Matt Murdock whenever he’s lawyering up, using his sensory powers to astonish others, or trying to get down to Serious Hero Business. But mention the name “Elektra” in a sentence and his brain turns into a living Goofy movie. Once the elevator began its descent into the Midland Capital pit, I knew where he and Elektra would end up, up to and including “dying”. Admittedly I was shocked to see the final scene pulled straight from “Born Again”, one of the definitive Daredevil stories. Now if only Elektra will stay dead or at least on permanent overseas vacation, maybe the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen can get back to being the hero his city needs and his viewers want instead of the lovesick simp with a weakness for obviously lost causes. (“Sure, she keeps murdering people in increasingly hideous ways and maybe ought to be arrested, but no seriously you guys I can change her!” Oh, Matt.)

* Luke Cage continues to be my favorite. It did my heart well seeing him taking up Pop’s role-model mantle and trying to live up to his reputation as Harlem’s eminent guardian. I loved seeing him lecture his teammates for their missteps, and I loved that he at least tried to save one misguided youth through nonviolent means. The scene in which Cage bears the tragic burden of consoling an anguished mother in a moment of unimaginable grief wounded my heart and brought more dramatic gravitas to bear than any twenty scenes about evil superninjas.

* Speaking of the Hand: I want Madame Gao to reign in every Marvel Netflix series ever, but I resent and reject the notion of her acting as anyone else’s toady. Sigourney Weaver has made many awesome things possible over the decades, but I didn’t buy her as Gao’s superior for one minute. I guess Alexandra was a fine role tailor-made for any stately actress who didn’t feel like moving around much and just likes glaring a lot. She brought some tender nuance to her later moments whenever her illness won rounds against her, but she was given precisely zero means of showing why she was the Big bad beyond her penchant for random ancient history trivia. Of the other three leaders of the Hand: I was all grumpy sighs at Bakuto’s return and waited patiently for Colleen Wing’s eventual final battle against her longtime gaslighter so he could go away again, because resurrected villains cheapen death in drama. Sowande I could take or leave, based on the few glimmers we were allowed of the African warrior’s combat techniques that were probably outlined in a very fascinating yet mostly unused show bible. And I really, really wanted to see more of Yutaka Takeuchi, the Japanese huntsman with lethally reserved composure and a creepy working knowledge of bear innards. Initially promising, but ultimately treated as just another disposable henchman.

* Jessica Jones is…well, still Jessica Jones. Hers was the only Marvel Netflix show I didn’t cover in its own post because I didn’t feel qualified. It’s not that I’m a guy, and it’s not just because I found myself frequently squeamish throughout the Purple Man’s horrifying exploitations of everyone within his reach. It’s because, as a kid raised in a family where women were the only role models and the men were all either absent or terrible, I have an absurdly tough time connecting with stories in which the main characters are constantly angry women who revel in their sins and loathe everyone around them. Call it alien to me, I guess. No doubt I have psychological barriers on the subject, so I recused myself from writing feature-length thoughts on her show. Here, she was outnumbered by dudes who wouldn’t stop trying to convince her to play better with others. In general they got their desired results, and lucky for them they didn’t tell her to smile while doing it. She ended up anchoring the team whenever the bros turned dumb and engaged in too much chest-thumping, echoed the audience’s disbelief at some of the more outlandish developments, and did actual detective work in her capacity as a super-detective who detects. She’s already doing better than several Batman films in that regard, so there’s that. But now I feel guilty about cheering her on for calming down, drinking slightly less, and…y’know, for behaving better. I feel like this line of thought is leading to me setting myself on fire just so I don’t have to see how this paragraph ends. Now I know what it’s like to write a Monty Python sketch.

* Stick is still a big jerk and I correctly predicted he wouldn’t live through this season. At the same time, I can’t believe he read my mind. During the heated debate over whether Iron Fist should either fight all the Hand himself or surrender to them, it had occurred to me that no one had submitted the dark suggestion of thwarting the Hand’s scheme by murdering their supposed Keymaster. Problem solved, the door to the Mines of Moria stays locked, no more magic dragon bone meal for anybody. Sure enough, about half an hour later, I watched Stick try stealing my Plan C.

* Remember that time Trish Walker was training to become a skilled fighter so she wouldn’t have to run from danger? And maybe she could eventually become the super-heroine Hellcat like she is in the comics? Well, Trish apparently doesn’t remember and someone should remind her. Ironically, out of all the characters we’ve met in all five series, Hellcat is the only one who was ever a full-time actual Defender from the original 152-issue comics run. It was a shame to see Trish taking two steps back.

* I also regret that Misty Knight was kept on the outside for so many episodes, trapped in the thankless role of Police Hindrance. In the comics she and Colleen are a detective duo who call themselves the Daughters of the Dragon, close friends with Power Man and Iron Fist, but that possible future seems far, far away in this alternate Earth. Also, knowing about her trademark cybernetic arm, I knew exactly what was coming the minute Misty walked into a room full of sword-fighting. Can’t wait to see what kind of cutting-edge Stark-tech Danny ends up buying for her cool new limb.

* Has anyone out there attempted an in-depth study on the physics of magic shockwaves? I feel like Madame Gao’s use of super-telekinesis offense was consistent with other applications in pop culture, but I don’t buy Iron Fist’s super-air-punching upgrade with a thirty-foot range. I mean, that trick where he punched Elektra’s sword and that sent her entire body flying without touching her? Are we sure about this?

* Is destroying an entire skyscraper really just that easy? Seriously? You can just get a map from a qualified demolition authority, drop C4 blocks on the X’s, accidentally set the timer and run away? And this is all possible without a single shred of collateral damage or incidental massacre across all surrounding blocks? Are there YouTube videos how-to guides for this? Because I feel like there shouldn’t be and the entire endeavor was ludicrous. As if that weren’t laughable enough, the pat finale denouement in which the police simply decided not to file a report on this billion-dollar catastrophe is mind-boggling. I’m surprised they didn’t just throw a happy beach-blanket dance party at the end while they were at it.

* Not that I’m opposed to all aspects of the contrived ultimate fatality of their entire organization. I hope we’re now officially done with the Hand forever and they don’t live on to become repetitive Ninja Hydra. Well, okay, one exception: Madame Gao can return whenever she wants, but no Hand revivals allowed. With everything around her ruined and nowhere else to go, maybe she can reform and join the Daughters of the Dragon. There’s no rule in the DotD guidebook that says “There can be only two.” While I’m thinking about it, y’know who else should join? The amazing colossal Claire. I can’t believe she survived the season, so obviously she also deserves to ride along with this potentially mind-blowing new super-team, superpowers or not. Jessica can come too if she wants, though she might not, which is cool. Either way, here’s the best idea yet: these formidable ladies should get together, ditch the “Daughters of the Dragon” label, rename themselves the Defenders, and go on to take over season 2 without letting the guys in at all. I’d make time to watch that within a single week.

(P.S.: Yes, there’s a bonus after The Defenders end credits — a teaser trailer for Jon Bernthal in The Punisher, your next entry in the Marvel Netflix Universe. Sure, you could watch it online, but that’s cheating.)

I’m so old, I remember when the Tick wasn’t an Amazon Prime superstar, and creator Ben Edlund was still writing and drawing his adventures.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time once more! This weekend my wife and I made another journey up to Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we found much enjoyment and new purchases alongside peers and aficionados of comics and genre entertainment. Friday night left us near death by the end of our day, after a few miles’ worth of walking up and down the aisles and hallways, with breaks to go stand in lines of varying lengths and value. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

…and what we nearly always do is lead off a new convention miniseries with the mandatory cosplay galleries. We captured whoever we could while wandering the show floor Friday and Saturday in between the long lines and longer waits. (For a few reasons we skipped Sunday this year.) I have no idea how many chapters this particular experience will run, but the first three will represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costumes that were in the house. Because I always feel the need to divide cosplayers into arbitrary categories, our first set spotlights the stars of screen and page from the world of Marvel, DC Comics, and other publishers out there, as well as from their movie and TV adaptations. Gentle reminder: there are more than two comics publishers out there. Enjoy!

This Joker with a pitch-perfect Mark Hamill voice kept us company when security wouldn’t let anyone pass through the Skybridge before 10:30 a.m. on Friday.

Groot police lineup.

If you thought Thawne, Zoom, or Savitar were creepy speedsters, wait’ll you get a load of this Flash.

Differently creepy but also accurate: Joker from Batman: The Killing Joke.

Jessica Jones and her spunky sidekick Daredevil.

Spawn , for the remaining Todd McFarlane fans out there.

Raven from the Teen Titans.

Doctor Octopus and Bane lead a support group for popular comics villains who’ve only appeared in one movie sequel each.

Lady Deadpool! Somehow, incredibly, the only Deadpool variant we got all weekend.

Batman Beyond, preparing to soar through the Stephens Center lobby. Good luck with that.

According to our limited anecdotal statistics, this year female Negans outnumbered male Negans 2-to-1.

The all-new all-different Vulture from Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Revolutionary War Captain America, guaranteed 100% Nazi-free.

Drax + Mantis! Fun story: we didn’t realized till we got closer that they were familiar folks. Anne first met them in Burt Reynolds’ photo-op line at WWC 2015, where they hung out together and had a blast. And they get jazz hands. Awesome folks, awesome costumes.

To be continued! Other chapters in this special miniseries:

Prologue: Two Notes from Wizard World Chicago 2017

Part 2: Animation Cosplay!

Part 3: Last Call for Cosplay

Part 4: Objects of Affection

Part 5: Who We Met and What We Did

[Edited 9/1/17 to fix one caption error resulting from apparent brain cell loss.]

So you say you like comic books? Not just like them, but LIKE-like them? Have we got a show for you!

Last Saturday my wife Anne and I had the pleasure of attending the third annual Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, an enlightening expo in the heart of Ohio for hardcore fans of comic books, graphic novels, the Graphic Storytelling Medium, and whatever other labels my fellow fans slap on their favorite hobby. You’d think Anne and I had our fill of cons after all the shows we’ve been doing this year. We can honestly say we’ve officially reached burnout, but CXC isn’t your ordinary average “comic con”. CXC has no Hollywood actors. No celebrities. No cosplay. No photo-op booths. No gaming. No eBay toy dealers. No Funco Pops. No comic shops selling Marvel Ultimate trades by the pound as horse feed. No lengthy list of famous guest cancellations due to filming or showrunner malfeasance. And no sugar gliders.

What does that leave, you may ask before you close your browser tab in disappointment? Comics. CXC puts the “comic” back in “comic con” and then runs the “con” part through an intense filtration process to produce the purest possible form of the original sense of the phrase. CXC is the perfect show for the comics fan who’s disappointed by the increasingly mixed bag that the average Artists Alley has become at many large-scale shows. CXC is a bountiful bazaar for the collector who wants to buy something besides prints or self-published novels. CXC is a happy haven for readers who know there’s more to comics than Marvel and DC. CXC is a knowledgeable nexus for the artistic literati above my station, sneering at any comics retailer who thinks stocking some Image Comics by former Marvel writers is all the “diversity” they can handle.

As you might note from the above photo, CXC is also a wondrous shopping opportunity for anyone who loves meeting comic creators face-to-face and buying paper wonders from them in person instead of through Amazon. We attended the first CXC in 2015 when it was held inside a lovely community center that strained to contain it. We missed last year’s gathering, but pinned this year’s on the calendar as soon as I saw the guest list. (This was more my thing than Anne’s, but she enjoyed tagging along and watching me immerse myself in a comics-rich atmosphere. She’s awesome like that and knows I love her more than all the comics in the world, which is why we have Anne-centric activity coming soon on the calendar.)

This year’s CXC marketplace was held at the Columbus Metropolitan Library on the east end of downtown. The surrounding area was deathly quiet on a Saturday, but the library itself was a beautiful facility. Their garage has four floors and parking wasn’t a problem, especially as they surprised us with free parking. Their conference rooms have the most comfortable chairs we’ve ever sat in for a comics panel — padded, wheeled, reclining bliss. They have a coffee shop and those 21st-century water fountains that feature a separate faucet for refilling our water bottles.

And there’s that architecture and decor…

The Columbus Metropolitan Library reminds me of our downtown library back home in Indianapolis, but ours has never hosted this sort of festival.

Ours does not have an art fountain out front.

One of the decorative quotes in the elevator lobbies.

A preserved facade in the main lobby.

The stairs leading to the main event on the second floor.

One of the best perks: CXC is free. No admission costs. No VIP badges. No online Ticketmaster-style fees or upcharges. The only costs are for your own food and travel expenses, plus all the books, comics, mini-comics, and other related purchases you can carry. If you lose self-control, the convenient parking made it easy to leave the show floor, go back to the car, drop stuff off, and return inside for Round 2.

With nearly 100 creators in the house, temptations abounded. We arrived shortly after CXC opened at 11:00 and kept tripping over a series of helpful, smiling volunteers on our way toward the free-wheeling festival of funnybooks.

The view from the third floor. Beyond the photos stood more and more tables.

Among the comparatively larger publishers participating were the folks at Fantagraphics Books, patron saints of non-super-hero comics for over forty years. Their 26-volume The Complete Peanuts set is a highlight in my personal library.

Along with their comics, some artists brought stickers, bookmarks, mugs, buttons, and so so and so on. Crystal Gonzalez brought her comics to life as stuffed characters.

I was game for meeting new faces and hearing new voices, but two names in particular were on my Must List. More obscure of the two: Matt Feazell! Back in the ’80s he was a fine purveyor of stick-figure mini-comics starring his characters Cynicalman, Antisocialman, and a few others without “man” in their name. Readers of Scott McCloud’s sci-fi series Zot! were treated to his hilarious one-page lo-fi tales beginning with #11, including the mid-numbered #14½ in which Feazell took over an entire issue with nothing but stick figures. His eyes popped a little when he saw I’d brought my copy of his 1987 The Amazing Cynicalman reprint volume.

Matt Feazell:
the man, the myth, the snappy dresser.

Fun historical footnote: decades after the original, his 2013 Indiegogo campaign for The Amazing Cynicalman Vol. 2 saw its rewards delivered to my mailbox at lightning speed, faster than any Kickstarter I ever knew.

My very, very first stop of the day had to be at the table of Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer. The delightful duo has written for various animated projects including Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Yo Gabba Gabba, and DC’s Metal Men shorts from a few years ago.

The happy creative couple.

Long before their TV years, as a teen I was a fan of Dorkin’s first creator-owned work, the late-’80s black-and-white Slave Labor Graphics series Pirate Corp$!, which was a rogues-on-a-galaxy-run deal kind of like Joss Whedon’s Firefly but a decade sooner, with fewer Wild West planets and with more aliens, cursing, and ska bands. Dorkin later struck a chord in comic shops with Milk & Cheese, in which a pair of outraged living dairy products would vent their murderous fury at annoying people, places or things. In more recent years he’s done more mature and differenly entertaining comics fare like the all-ages adventure Calla Cthulhu (again, with Sarah) and the Buffy-meets-Watership Down canine demon-fighters of Beasts of Burden, painted by Jill Thompson. My all-time favorite of his was “The Eltingville Club”, whose complete 2015 hardcover collection I previously summarized like so:

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.

The first Eltingville story I ever read left me breathless and in happy tears from too much painful laughter. As the stories accumulated, I began to appreciate them more as a intense cautionary tale of how not to be a comics fan. Dorkin was never one to suffer pretension or charades back in the day, but the Eltingville stories turned inward to an extent and threatened to bite the heads off any readers who ruin hobbies for others with a complete lack of self-awareness and decency, years before such toxic misbehavior became de rigueur on message boards and Twitter. It’s not a book for children or delicate readers, but it is a book for adults who never stopped being terrible children and who desperately need an intervention.

That’s why I had to buy cool things from Dorkin and Dyer first before moving on to anyone else, and why I didn’t let con burnout or a three-hour drive stop me from missing another CXC. They were a pleasure to meet and graciously put up with us for many more minutes than they should’ve had to.

Other highlights of our walk around the aisles:

* Once again giving money to Derf Backderf and Dara Naraghi, veterans from CXC 2015
* Swapping Harvey Pekar anecdotes with Jaime Crespo
* Seeing the fascinating ideas the Columbus College of Art & Design implements for its comics-artist track
* Comparing notes on Weezer’s “White Album” with fellow fan Alec Longstreth
* Dustin Harbin recounting his A+ experience meeting CXC 2016 special guest Sergio Aragones (really kicking myself for missing out)
* Reading recommendations from the comic-shop vendors who sold me copies of Mimi Pond’s new book The Customer Is Always Wrong and the latest issue of Adrian Tomine’s consistently impossible-for-me-to-find Optic Nerve. (I’d love to give them credit, but my Square receipt literally says just “The Comic Shop”, someone’s cell number, and nothing else.)

(UPDATED 10/3/2017: I’m now 90% certain it was local heroes Laughing Ogre Comics.)

…and more more more. I wish I could’ve visited every table, one at a time, and bought something from each of them. At one point I did actually find myself stopping at three consecutive tables in a row, which was a fun sensation I don’t have too often. Alas, neither my funds nor my reading time are unlimited. One of the sad parts of adulthood is the lines we have to draw for the sake of moderation.

Shortly before 1:00 we ended our first tour of the aisles and made a relief stop at the car. We exited the library in hopes of catching lunch somewhere not too far away. Our answer and salvation was parked thirty feet from the front door: a food truck! Kinetic Food Truck was on site to save anyone and everyone from the iffy Google Maps results and from the unwanted overtures of the Subway down the street. Diners had their choice of chicken or vegetarian dollops served on either greens or grains with Baja, Caprese, or West Coast sauce-‘n’-veggies. For an extra four bucks I threw in a side of Brussels sprouts, roasted and drizzled with balsamic glaze. I normally hate Brussels sprouts and sincerely appreciate when a chef doesn’t just boil them and serve them plain and inherently disgusting.

12/10 would eat there again and thank them 100 times for simplifying our day.

After a non-comics digression that we’ll cover in a future entry, we finished out the day with two panels. At other Midwest comics events, comic-book panels and Q&As tend to break down into the following standard categories:

1. How to make or break into comics
2. Yay diversity in comics
3. Boo harassment in comics
4. Publishers plugging their latest relaunches and crossovers (C2E2 only)

In addition to one-on-one interviews, the folks at CXC put a lot of thought into their programming lineup. First up at 3 p.m.: “The Other Mainstream: Indy Creators on Non-Indy Books” — anecdotes and horror stories from working with Marvel and/or DC to their own detriment.

Left to right in that fuzzy pic:

* Fantagraphics mainstay cartoonist Peter Bagge (Neat Stuff, Hate), who — during that weird Bill Jemas era — was once allowed to do one of the most subversive and poorly selling Spider-Man stories ever, followed by one of the most suppressed and censored Hulk stories ever.

* Kyle Baker (previously met at Motor City Comic Con), who started as an inker at Marvel as a high school intern, worked his way up to creator-owned wonders like The Cowboy Wally Show and Why I Hate Saturn, only to return to work-for-hire with mixed results. At Marvel, the controversial The Truth: Red, White and Black made fans hate Captain America years before the recent Hydra Steve era made hating Cap cool. The award-winning short story “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter”, starring an invulnerable Superbaby in ostensible danger, so worried the publisher that he ordered an entire anthology’s print run pulped lest it escape into the wild and be misread by the illiterate. The incredibly stupid story of why Baker will never be allowed to work on Plastic Man for the rest of his life is beyond maddening.

* Connor Willumsen, a younger up-‘n’-comer who’s had several paying gigs at Marvel, almost none of which have seen the light of day due to editorial whims, including but not limited to the time he had a story spiked because he refused to draw it in the John Cassaday widescreen style that’s now Marvel’s house standard, and which I’ve been loathing for years because it turns comics into static storyboards and squanders the medium’s potential to the nth degree.

Not pictured: Jeff Smith, creator of the long-running Scholastic bestseller Bone as well as Festival President and Artistic Director of CXC itself. Smith once did a Shazam! miniseries for DC that began as a fun experience but ended with him not feeling much incentive for any follow-up collaborations with them.

Final panel at 4:00 before we had to hit the road: “Comics Memoirs” — a deep-dive work-process roundtable with insight into what it’s like to mine your own life’s story for graphic novel material.

Pictured left to right: moderator Tom Spurgeon, fine comics journalist and Executive Director of CXC itself; Emil Ferris, who at age 55 made her comics debut this year with the critically acclaimed My Favorite Thing is Monsters; Howard Cruse, whose 1995 Stuck Rubber Baby was probably one of the best-selling graphic novels by an “out” gay cartoonist in the 20th century (corrections are welccome on this); the aforementioned Mimi Pond, who once dallied in TV, including writing the very first episode of The Simpsons; and the equally aforementioned Derf, whose true story My Friend Dahmer was recently adapted into an indie film starring a former Disney teen as the titular serial killer who was once Derf’s high school classmate.

Both panels held their share of fascination for me. I didn’t take notes, just listened and absorbed and remained grateful for the opportunities to hear professionals speak at length and in depth. They tried recording both panels despite some technological struggles, in hopes that those could be posted online soon.

After the panel, I insisted we sneak back up to Dorkin and Dyer’s table for just one last purchase, promised that was it and no more, then put my wallet away and let us leave before I could spend again. To an extent it’s probably best for our household budget that not every “comic con” has the kind of stellar comics lineup that CXC offered.

Is this a good time to confess that the very first photo at the top of this entry was only half the stuff I bought?

Here’s the other half of my CXC stack. No, YOU have a comics problem.

And this was just our side of CXC, and just their Saturday. This doesn’t include the Saturday panels we missed, their full slate of Sunday panels, or the Thursday and Friday seminars and activities that were held at other Columbus institutions, or the three (!) consecutive nights of after-parties. CXC is more all-that than one mere comics fan’s writeup can possibly contain.

Thanks for reading! Here’s hoping for more CXC in our future, if Anne will let me after this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smiles, everyone! SMILES!

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

…

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

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

To be Continued!

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

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

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

Presented over this entry and the next is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2017, mostly but not entirely in order of completion. As I whittle down the never-ending stack I’ve been stockpiling for literal decades, my long-term hope before I turn 70 is to get to the point where my reading list is more than, say, 40% new releases every year. That’s a lofty goal, but I can dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued!

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

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

Presented over this entry and the next is my full list of books, graphic novels, and trade collections that I finished reading in 2017, not entirely in order of completion. As I whittle down the never-ending stack I’ve been stockpiling for literal decades, my long-term hope before I turn 70 is to get to the point where my reading list is more than, say, 40% new releases every year. That’s a lofty goal, but I can dream.

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

Once more: onward!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-30-

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel Comics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DC Comics/Vertigo/Young Animal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Comics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other publishers:

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

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

…

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

Quick related subject change:

Series that were canceled or ended as planned:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miniseries completed in 2017:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Wars: Darth Maul – Mostly harmless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For longtime readers? It depends on our conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your move, Benji. Art by Nina Matsumoto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

I see a handful of critics listed on Rotten Tomatoes who might use this as their letter grade…

The Merc with a Mouth is back! And so is Deadpool!

For any regular readers who roll their eyes whenever I have one of my “Old Man Yells at Cloud” moments when it comes to excessive profanity…well, you might wonder what in the world possessed me to go see Deadpool 2 in the first place. Perplexing question, isn’t it? I am large, I contain multitudes, there are comics involved, sometimes I like to go scavenger hunting for priceless curios in landscapes that are basically alien to me, sometimes I do things that aren’t good for me, and there are other logistics involved that are too weird to go into here, even for me.

But every film I see in theaters gets its own MCC entry. I can either write about the #1 movie in America that also happens to have scenes during the end credits, or I can finish an entry for the mostly inert Pacific Rim: Uprising that I’ve been procrastinating for six weeks and counting because I get sleepy every time I return to it, and will surely be of use to lots of moviegoers when I eventually finish it because as of tonight the film is playing in [checks notes] zero theaters, having been officially yanked after May 17th.

…

…so. Some thoughts on Ryan Reynolds’ latest multi-million-dollar paycheck it is, then.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Our Antihero is back and as snarky as ever, trying to put his skill set to arguably better use by taking paychecks only to murder bad guys instead of chasing any old paid target. His satisfying routine experiences a number of interruptions all at once — by an unexpected tragedy that brings all one-liners to a crashing halt; by an attempted friendship with an abused teen mutant calling himself Firefist (Julian Dennison from Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople), who’s on the brink of being bullied into becoming a super-villain; and by the arrival of Cable (Josh Brolin, the busiest man in 2018 cinema), whose convoluted comic-book origin and mutant powers have been stripped away, rendering him a growly cyborg Terminator who’s come back from the future to our present so he can murder the one person who’ll one day ruin his life. In lieu of Sarah Conner, who means nothing to Cable because he doesn’t do pop culture references…his target is Firefist.

Expletives, Easter eggs, in-jokes, and high-caliber action ensue, shepherded by John Wick co-director David Leitch, the two guys who wrote the first Deadpool, and the inimitable Mr. Reynolds himself, who receives producing and co-writing credits, and will be on the next train to Edward Norton Egoville if he’s not careful.

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Several old friends return: Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin as the Concerned Girlfriend; the legally entangled TJ Miller as weaselly sidekick Weasel; Leslie Uggams as bitter roommate Blind Al; Other Space‘s Karan Soni as cab driver Dopinder; and Stefan Kapicic and Brianna Hildebrand as the two affordable X-Men, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead.

Besides big bad Brolin, leading the newcomers is Zazie Beets from Atlanta as Domino the phenomenally lucky assassin. Other recruits to Deadpool’s version of the morally compromised super-team X-Force include Old Spice pitchman Terry Crews, Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise from It), and Lewis Tan, star of the very best Iron Fist fight scene ever. Meanwhile on the side of the badder-than-bad guys, Eddie Marsan (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) is the head of Firefist’s clichéd evil orphanage.

And naturally we have cameos galore — familiar faces from other X-films as well as A-listers hiding in plain sight, easy to miss if you blink. Sadly, no Stan Lee cameo in person this time around, though I understand there was a visual nod I missed.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? Morals of the story include but aren’t limited to:

* Thinking of others instead of yourself is cool, and sacrifice is the boldest, deepest way to express that
* Bullying is bad; child abuse is worse; and then there’s The Worst (implied, mostly, for the sake of added insults)
* Talking trash behind the back of someone who thinks you’re friends is uncool
* We all yearn to belong to something bigger than ourselves, but it works better if we actually bring anything worthwhile to the table
* Murder is wrong unless your victim is more evil than you are
* Any consequences of changes made while time-traveling are not your problem
* Revenge is kinda awesome
* Everyone loves F-bombs
* Yay chimichangas

The first few points are taken rather seriously, often putting the punchlines on pause whenever the grave overtones of a standard X-Men film take over. But director Leitch knows how to jazz up fight scenes and find new moments of violence we haven’t seen 1000 times before. The bloodletting isn’t pretty at times, but that’s what happens when your protagonist carries swords and you’re not watching an old Saturday morning cartoon.

Nitpicking? The language, on other other hand…yes, Super-Chicken, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. I said my piece on the subject years ago, but my experimental review of The Wolf of Wall Street is more fun for me to revisit, as soapboxes go.

What especially kills me is that both Deadpool films have tremendous strengths — their set pieces, their low-key emotional moments, their performances in general, and the majority of their jokes — that don’t need the vulgarities to win, but they have ’em anyway because allegedly everyone in the world loves them, especially Ryan Reynolds, who delights in synthesizing new takes on old profanities conjoined to new words they’re not normally paired with. Eleventy zillion Deadpool fans have voted for them with their dollars, but consumer democracy doesn’t dictate what are or aren’t my favorite things. And this part isn’t.

I gritted my teeth even harder when the villain and henchmen are hinted at being possible child molesters, and OF COURSE they spout Scripture. I mean, at least they try to find a new verse or two that previous cardboard cutout movie perverts haven’t already overused to death, but that’s not getting any more original or impressive. Fortunately Marsan and his dudes barely register a presence or rate any screen time except as cannon fodder.

So what’s to like? Apart from the largely top-notch comic-book fight-‘n’-fight-‘n’-fight, we know what to expect from Reynolds, which means his Deadpool remains solid and reliable for what he is, if not nearly as surprising since this is a sequel. Well, except for that mortifying scene in which we witness the horrors when his mutant regeneration has to deal with a most severe form of human mutilation. I’d say “surprising” describes it well.

Josh Brolin, on the other hand, digs deep to bring gravitas to Cable, a man out of time whose personal tragedies are never far from his mind, whose every grunt and punch is wholly dedicated to righting the wrongs that were inflicted on his loved ones. He’s absolutely not funny, which at times makes him the best possible foil for Deadpool to bounce off of, but at the same time reminds viewers in between their guffaws that his battle has the highest possible stakes. It’s his steely demeanor in the face of Reynolds’ stoogery that keeps Deadpool 2 from fully realizing its low aspirations of being a costumed Police Academy sequel.

I’d award even more points if the movie had had twice as much Zazie Beets. She elevates Atlanta whenever she graces it, and her resigned attitude and clever Final Destination powers bring welcome relief to so much relentless Deadpool chitchat.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there are indeed a few extra scenes during the Deadpool 2 end credits. In fact, anyone who didn’t stay to watch them will really be confused when they sit down someday for Deadpool 3, because at least one of the extra scenes is a major plot development. Surprise!

For those who fled the theater prematurely and really want to know without seeing it a second time because they’re cheap or because they’re a prude like me…

…

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

…

…so Negasonic Teenage Warhead and her new super-girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna) manage to recharge Cable’s used-up time-travel doohickey. Deadpool takes advantage of this discarded toy, travels back in time, and fixes a few things. To wit:

* He saves the life of his girlfriend Vanessa, effectively reversing her “fridging“, which is a thing that tends to bother comics readers more than movie-goers.

* He kills off the ill-conceived mute Deadpool tool that marred the final act of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

* He murders a young Ryan Reynolds before he can begin filming Green Lantern. That, we can agree, is the happiest ending of the year.

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

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Director of The Exorcist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unexplained Superman toy hiding in a skyscraper alcove.

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

DC Comics merchandising potpourri.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“PARDON ME. DO YOU HAVE ANY GREY POUPON?”

Millions of viewers who depend on Marvel movies for all their fantasy escapism needs went home shell-shocked after Avengers: Infinity War slaughtered far, far too many of their favorite heroes and threatened to turn the Marvel Cinematic Universe into just another super-hero realm of perpetual misery like Dawn of Justice or the upcoming, dreadful-looking Titans. Now, in Ant-Man and the Wasp, two heroes who weren’t invited to Thanos’ big coming-out party are here to remind everyone that there’s still hope to be found in this world, along with heroism, teamwork, and happy endings…as long as you don’t stay for the end credits.

Short version for the unfamiliar: Paul Rudd returns as titular super-shrinker Scott Lang, stuck on house arrest after his airport-smashing antics in Captain America: Civil War got him in trouble with multiple governments. He tries to behave for the sake of his cute li’l daughter Cassie (a returning Abby Ryder Fortson), but finds himself tempted back into the illegal super-life when he’s technically kidnapped by previous movie colleague Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly, eager to win her own fight scenes) and her scientist dad, OG Ant-Man Dr. Henry Pym (Michael Douglas). Hope now has her own micro-power-suit and calls herself the Wasp, but she and Dad need Scott’s help even though they can’t stand him.

When last we left Our Hero in the original Ant-Man, the climax of his big fight with Yellowjacket culminated in a side trip to the quantum realm, where everything’s subatomic and kaleidoscopic and wacky and disturbing and looks like old Steve Ditko Dr. Strange comics. Without knowing or realizing it till this movie, Scott’s 30-second fantastic journey into Quantum-Land quantum-linked him through quantum-magic to quantum refugee Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) — Pym’s wife, Hope’s mom, the original Wasp. Janet’s been trapped in quantum limbo for thirty years, and the family believes Scott may be her quantum-ticket to freedom.

One snag, among several: another superhuman needs quantum help, too. A phasing villain nicknamed the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen, also antagonistic in Ready Player One) wants Pym’s quantum technology because she has her own quantum worries: a freak accident in her childhood killed her parents (for which she blames Pym) and gave her quantum powers, but at a price — her increasingly unstable quantum body is about to dissolve into so much quantum dust. Thus Pym’s entire lab — which still shrinks into a handy quantum carryall, per the first film — becomes our quantum MacGuffin and the focus of multiple merry chases.

Can either woman be saved from death by quantumocity? All they know for sure is, everything’s coming up quantum!

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Meanwhile in the background, Scott’s old reformed burglar crew returns with their very own security company that Scott’s supposed to help them launch. Back in the game are rapper T.I., David Dastmalchian (who appeared on The Flash last year as Abra Kadabra), and scene-stealer Michael Pena as Luis, the happy-go-lucky motormouth who should be allowed to narrate all the Marvel movies. Also back are Judy Greer as Cassie’s mom and Bobby Cannavale as Officer Friendly Stepdad.

Newcomers include the Laurence Fishburne as Dr. Bill Foster, an old colleague of Pym’s who got out of the size-changing life after they had a falling-out. (In the comics, Foster was a hero in his own right named Goliath. Well, um, originally “Black Goliath”. Because at the time adjectiveless “Goliath” had already been taken by Hawkeye when he got tired of archery and needed a change of pace. So “Black Goliath” made sense as a second-string hero name in the 1970s. And then time moved on and that’s never mentioned here at all, and probably won’t come up in any sequels. Ever.)

Because every film needs a bad guy who’s just bad for bad’s sake, professional bad-guy actor Walton Goggins (Justified, Hateful Eight, Predators, like a thousand other things) steps in as a black-market tech dealer who also sets his sights on the Pym Lab MacGuffin. As if we didn’t have enough good/bad angles, there’s also an antagonistic good guy in the form of FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park, star of TV’s Fresh Off the Boat), who’s tasked with ensuring Scott doesn’t violate house arrest, which of course gets tricky because it’s hard to chase MacGuffins without leaving the house. It could’ve been worse — in the comics, Jimmy Woo was an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

In smaller roles, Michael Cerveris (the Observer from Fringe) is Ghost’s father in flashback, and indie rock drummer Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Mountain Goats) is one of Goggins’ driving henchmen. Fun music trivia useful only to myself: Cerveris and Wurster have each played with Bob Mould in different eras. As a longtime Mould fan I hereby declare Ant-Man and the Wasp one of the Top 5 Marvel films in world history on very good music principle.

Oh, and Stan Lee cameos as a bystander who loses his car and can’t believe his own eyes. This is too depressingly symbolic of the past several months of his life, so let’s move on.

Meaning or EXPLOSIONS? It’s all about family, and mostly their reunions. Hank and Hope desperately want Janet back from her stint as a three-decade castaway, and have to decide how far they’ll go to get her. Scott has just a few days left on his house arrest and really wants to spend his father/daughter visitations anywhere but home, to say nothing of the job waiting for him with his now-legit crew — a different sort of family, but equally accepting of him despite his frequent questionable choices and idiot mistakes.

Cassie and Luis are willing to wait for Scott to come by his freedom honestly, but he’s torn by the situation at hand. The Pyms need his help now before the quantum clock runs out and Janet is quantum-stranded forever, but he’s hampered by a dumb anti-super-hero law that presumably won’t be abolished till the end of Avengers 4. (The part where he helped trash a German airport doesn’t help.) Some lying becomes necessary, but only to the authorities who enforce the dumb anti-super-hero law. Not once does he lie to Cassie or Luis. So he has a moral compass, but sometimes he holds it too close to trouble magnets.

Meanwhile on the other side, Dr. Foster acts as Ghost’s de facto guardian in lieu of her dead parents. He’s not a bad guy at all, but has to work overtime to keep Ghost somewhere close to the straight-and-narrow path. Her options aren’t as clear-cut to her — instead of growing up in an evil orphanage, her fate was worse: she was raised to become a super-spy and occasional strategic assassin by a secret organization whose name rhymes with “F.I.E.L.D.” It’s Foster’s job, then, to help her overcome her shady past and make choices that won’t condemn her for life, if she can even find a way to keep on living. His presence is especially crucial at one junction when she threatens to step too far over to the Dark Side and turn this into a DC film.

Otherwise…this flick is all about nifty fights, car chases, and otherdimensional quests, all augmented to various degrees by things beginning with “quantum”, which are everywhere. Returning director Peyton Reed and five credited writers (including Rudd himself) have a ball mixing up the usual super-hero set pieces with random shrinking and growing, sometimes to the wrong heights at the worst possible moments. Much slapstick ensues, as do largely seamless visual effects that jazz up the super-heroics with cartoon zing. A chase through the streets of San Francisco sees Our Hero using a flatbed truck as a skateboard, while Wasp turns any and every handheld object — salt shakers, Pez Dispensers — into a humongous weapon.

Nitpicking? It’s not much of a spoiler to confirm that Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet figures prominently into Act Three, but thirty years of quantum solitude and unwritten adventures have turned nearly everything about and around her into so much inexplicable science-magic. Janet has no time for storytelling or explanations, and instead spends her time performing jaw-dropping super-deeds that do whatever the many-cooks screenplay needs her to do to move everyone closer to the happy ending. We can trust all will be explained in due time, but for now a lot of it feels like cheating.

Given that Civil War had a direct, adverse effect that steers much of Ant-Man and the Wasp, which in turn is a direct prequel to next May’s Avengers: Infinity Funeral Services, if Ant-Man is lucky enough to keep headlining more films, it’s an old-fashioned shame to realize years in advance that future generations won’t be able to sit down and enjoy a straight marathon of just Ant-Man movies unless they include the unwieldy crossovers that are 97% not about him or Hope.

So what’s to like? Just as some TV shows like to follow up their heaviest episodes with lighter digressions for contrast and for the sake of the audience’s mental health, so does Ant-Man and the Wasp arrive at the properly scheduled time as an antidote to the carnage of Infinity War and as a perfectly entertaining super-hero romp for younger fans and traditionalists alike. Lilly and Rudd build a stronger chemistry as begrudging repartee slowly gives way to camaraderie. Douglas and Pfeiffer, A-listers from my childhood who’ve never acted together before, both still “got it”. Everyone on hand is fun, really, from Goggins’ occasionally clever ringleader to li’l Cassie (with her own words of wisdom to share with Dad) to that lovable Luis, who at the very least needs his own Marvel sitcom.

Even Scott mocks the overuse of “quantum”, but if you’re cool with grokking Star Trek: The Next Generation science-babble in every other scene and a lack of grim world destruction, Ant-Man and the Wasp is the sort of reassuring, even inspiring explosion-filled costume drama we need right now.

If you turn off the movie as soon as the credits roll.

How about those end credits? One bit of trivia I noticed in there: whereas flashbacks with Douglas and Pfeiffer use makeup and de-aging CG to render them into their respective primes, Fishburne’s younger self is instead played by his son Langston Fishburne, an actor in his own right.

But to answer the burning question that MCC is usually happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene during the Ant-Man and the Wasp end credits, along with a second scene at the very end after the final names have dropped. For those who fled the theater prematurely and who really want to know without seeing it a second time…

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

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…during the credits: Hank, Hope, and Janet prepare to launch Scott back into the subatomic quantum dimension once more in hopes of making more headway into the “quantum healing” magical gobbledygook that Janet used to stabilize Ghost’s body. Scott is launched subatomically forthwith and lobs a few one-liners into his headset mike while he’s floundering around the Quantum Zone, only to grow concerned when Team Shrinkage stops responding.

Back on normal-sized Earth…Hank, Hope, and Janet have vanished. A trail of dust drifts in the air where they once stood.

Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet have struck again. To be continued in Avengers: Infinity Punching or whatever.

Minutes later after the credits have finished: cut to Scott’s house, mostly empty except for one still-embiggened ant whaling away on the hallway drum kit. From the living room TV, the distinct drone of the Emergency Broadcast System pierces the air, but no one is around to heed the signal.

One final black screen assures us, “ANT-MAN AND THE WASP WILL RETURN.” Spoilers, then, for Avengers: Infinity Resurrections.