We’re now two weeks away from this year’s C2E2, the fourth installment of Chicago’s up-‘n’-coming comic-book-’n’-entertainment convention that hopes someday to achieve the size and reach of the San Diego Comic Con if enough of us Midwesterners support it.

Every C2E2 has plenty of activities for the hobby enthusiast: entertainment guests signing autographs; popular comic book creators speaking at panels, holding Q&As, and likewise autographing for fans; aspiring young creators gathering in Artists Alley and hoping to sell you on their own proud efforts; comic-shop owners and SF collectors selling vintage back issues, rare toys, and bargain-box oldies by the pound; booths representing the major comics publishers, including Marvel and DC; and — most noticeable of all — fans attending in costume, resplendent in their creativity and/or audacity.

Part 1 of MCC’s C2E2 2011 retrospective has a much longer intro with more information about the con and its history. As with that two-part miniseries, the following photo collection, to be curated and presented here in three parts, was previously shared elsewhere online last year, two weeks before Midlife Crisis Crossover was born. (Someone should remind me sometime to tell the story of how C2E2 was indirectly responsible for MCC’s creation in the first place…) For the sake of bringing my works under a single, unified creative banner, it’s my pleasure to present to you, the Viewers at Home, this memory parade of our second time at C2E2.

We commence with the wider-appeal characters first to stress that the ‘E’ in “C2E2” stands for “entertainment”. Comics are a major part of the proceedings, but there’re more to most comics fans’ interests than graphic storytelling alone. Exhibit A: the outlandish stylings of Effie Trinket and Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games.

Our Hunger Games heroine, Katniss Everdeen, was a popular costume at each of the major cons we attended last year.

Though he was a comic character first, most folks know Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer from the underappreciated Disney adaptation, starring Academy Award Winner Jennifer Connelly, former spy Timothy Dalton, and the creepy mayoral candidate from AMC’s The Killing as the Rocketeer.

Zuul and the Ghostbusters, just hanging out as if their differences were settled and no streams were ever crossed with explosive, marshmallow-liquefying results.

A cluster of Death Star employees, no doubt happy with their workplace environment and little suspecting that their health insurance will ultimately be a complete waste of money.

A Return of the Jedi Biker Scout hangs out with Colonial Marines from Aliens, swapping stories and complaining about their grisly fates.

Most obscure of this lot is the Shogun of Harlem from the obscure 1985 martial-arts cheesefest Berry Gordy’s the Last Dragon. I saw it in theaters when I was twelve. To this day, I’m still not sure what to think of the movie or the costume. This won the Saturday costume contest, partly for originality and partly because he yelled and overacted a lot onstage. Yelling and overacting are surefire winning moves in many convention costume contests.

Representative ape from Planet of the same. In their alt-future, purple is the new armor.

Three Disney Princesses and one Warrior Princess hang out with one truly lucky Stormtrooper…by which I mean he has slightly better odds of survival than those doomed Death Star henchmen.

To be continued!