All those tall trees behind Anne disguise the fact that beyond this ledge it’s a long, long way down.
Eight days and one Cleveland later, we were exhausted and ready to go home, but stopped for one last tourist attraction anyway. Given all our choices along the way through Ohio, what better place for one last collection of outdoor greenery than The Only National Park in Ohio? It was no Green Mountains in Vermont, but then again, what is?
After a long week Anne enjoys the refreshing taste of an orange Creamsicle float. (Nonalcoholic, natch.)
Once we again we’re winding down another travelogue with chapters nowhere near as exciting as the ones in the middle. The very design of our vacations and my insistence on chronological storytelling together mean pretty much every MCC miniseries ends anticlimactically. Not once have we driven 4-to-20 hours out of town and scheduled the biggest and best attraction as the very last thing we do on our way home. If you’ve remained a longtime reader, I trust you understand the nature of the pastime.
Cleveland first appeared in our lives in 2004, when my car broke down on our way home from Niagara Falls. C-Town had a stronger costarring role in our 2013 adventures, replete with stops at a rockin’ museum, a Christmas movie house, an iconic comic-book legend’s house, the second-tallest Presidential burial site we’ve seen to date, and a memorial statue I helped fund. That was a good set of experiences.
This year, Cleveland was an anticlimax again. In some ways it wasn’t their fault. Some ways.
The reading pile, alphabetized by publisher.
It’s that time of year again, but delayed on my part! Saturday, May 6th was the 22nd 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 in rare instances real-world protagonists. 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 comic book movies were shoddier than actual B-movies.
Portrait of the author having brunch with his wife/photographer Anne at Pizza di Tito, an outtake from our Indiana Comic Con 2023 experience.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two of them recently came up for renewal and passed without mention. Let’s kill two birds with one stone here, or at least whiz a pebble past their beaks just to get their attention.
I launched this tiny personal blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there. MCC entries are rarely shared with others in that manner; when it happens, it’s extremely noticeable in our dashboard stats and sincerely appreciated with all my heart.
Last month MCC reached its 11th birthday. As usual the WordPress software congratulated me as an auto-courtesy. Preprogrammed niceties aren’t quite the same as flesh-and-blood acknowledgment, but they help break the silence of what might otherwise have reminded me of that time Peter Brady overdosed on teenage smugness and was flabbergasted when no one attended his birthday party. I think about that episode a lot as I watch site traffic dwindle and wonder if I should bother mentioning my blog anniversaries anymore.
Guardians Origins: Rocket. This time, it’s fursonal.
Just as the Fast and the Furious saga proudly demonstrates found-family pop-culture franchises aren’t just for whitebread folks, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy series has demonstrated they aren’t just for humans, either. Whether you’re a little-league space hero, the daughter of a genocidal madman, a 1950s kaiju, a funny-animal gunslinger, or some other kind of ill-formed misfit who’d never be invited to apply for Avengers membership (okay, maybe the Great Lakes Avengers), these losers gave us hope that we too might find the right motley crew out there who needs us on their team so we can all become all-stars with our own action figures.
It’s Grant Gustin! With The Flash soon coming to a close on The CW, TV’s Barry Allen is finally hitting the Midwest convention circuit.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the ninth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They refrain from calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con.
ICC 2023 was another opportunity to look at walls covered with old comics, meet people who create reading matter, boggle at toy displays, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, and find space to breathe among or away from those cheerfully ever-growing crowds. Although the showrunners reserved less space than they did for last year’s edition — in fact, they moved the show back to the halls where the inaugural edition was held back in 2014 — geek life nevertheless thrived in abundance…
…relatively speaking. The smaller square footage meant noticeably fewer vendors than last year. In hindsight we probably didn’t need weekend passes, but we’d taken advantage of an early February sale that got us in Friday and Saturday (we almost never go on Sundays) for a mere five bucks less than what folks were paying for Saturday-only passes day-of at the door. So we did some stuff, but not as much as usual.
Mando, meet Andy’s room. Andy, Mando. Sheriff Woody, Jessie and Buzz Lightyear a la Mandalore.
It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the ninth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. They refrain from calling themselves “Indiana Comic Con” on paper for tiresome legal reasons that aren’t their fault, but to us they’ll always be Indiana Comic Con.
ICC 2023 was another opportunity to look at walls covered with old comics, meet people who create reading matter, boggle at toy displays, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, and find space to breathe among or away from those cheerfully ever-growing crowds. Although the showrunners reserved less space than they did for last year’s edition — in fact, they moved the show back to the halls where the inaugural edition was held back in 2014 — geek life nevertheless thrived in abundance.
While we recuperate and wait for our feet to forgive us for their punishment, please enjoy this modest collection of cosplayers who brightened the day around the show floor. The jazz-hands photo ops and other obligatory details will be shared in the other chapter. We regret we can only represent a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total cosplay wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun. Enjoy! Corrections welcome for those we misidentified!
Barbies love the taste of Jell-O! One of many pop culture icons to embrace Jell-O corporate synergy throughout the years.
We had several hours of driving to do on Day Seven, but it’s no fun to spend an entire day only driving. After we’d finished having our kind of fun in Utica, our next stop down the road was a four-mile digression off the New York State Thruway with a very special museum that we hoped would entertain us for at least a few minutes. In that sense our timing estimate was pretty accurate. But hey, they say there’s always room…
New York has a cool gold dome like numerous other states, but it’s neither in their capital nor on their capitol.
Fun trivia: billboards have been banned in Vermont since 1968 — one of four states to do so, along with Maine, Alaska and Hawaii. Among other benefits, their lawmakers’ efforts definitely helped improve all those Green Mountains pics we’ve posted throughout this series. Alas, not long after we crossed the border back into the east end of New York State, we found ourselves in the middle of another batch of mountains covered in lush forests from peak to base, but with one (1) great big Denny’s ad in the middle, jutting out like a zit newly erupting on a teenage forehead an hour before prom night.
Moving past that, upstate New York had more sights we actually wanted to see, including a return engagement with a city that got short shrift on one of our previous road trips.
Detail from the mural Batman vs. Griffin by Kathryn Wiegers.
As a comics collector since age 6, I’d love it if every single one of our vacations made time for at least one comics-related stop. Sadly that’s a rare theme among those who start up new tourist attractions that aren’t amusement parks. Once upon a time, our next stop in Vermont used to have deep connections with the wild world of superhero comics. I’d hoped to enjoy evidence of that, but we got the impression the place just isn’t the same anymore. The same, I’m sure, could be said of many places we’ve been, but my hopes were perhaps a bit too high going in.
Because I insisted we make time for it, Rutland ended up as the last city we visited before we left Vermont. It was not our favorite.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 