Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in adjacent states (or sometimes beyond). She’s been doing them since the early ’90s, and invited me to tag along as our relationship evolved from classmates to coworkers to neighbors to BFFs to husband-and-wife. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Last year we attended the inaugural GalaxyCon Columbus in Ohio’s very own capital, which had arisen from the ashes of the top-notch yet short-lived GalaxyCon Louisville. We were happy the show went over well enough to merit a return engagement, with another lengthy guest list for fans of all media across the pop culture spectrum…

Our final tally across two days: six new jazz-hands photos, four panels, eleven Star Trek-related talents (including one showrunner and one novelist), three Marvel actors, one Academy Award Winner, four comics makers, one former child star, innumerable lines, and more, more, more.

Rains dogged us the entire three-hour drive Friday morning from Indy to Columbus, which slowed us down but didn’t dampen our enthusiasm, especially since all the con’s activities would be fully indoor…well, except lunch. We arrived at our garage of choice around 11:30 when it still had some 530 spaces available and walked a few blocks north for our best meal of the weekend at Brassica, a local fast-casual Mediterranean chain we previously enjoyed on our way to Vermont and before last year’s GalaxyCon.

After Brassica’s welcome infusion of flavors, vitamins, and all four food groups, we returned to the garage to find 440 spaces remaining. We grabbed our con bags, ditched our jackets (the most annoying drawback of doing a wintertime con), and took the blessedly weather-proofed and nicely heated skybridge into the Greater Columbus Convention Center. We joined the registration line at 12:35, which moved swiftly and which at one narrow point required us to step aside and let Walter Koenig quietly walk through. Runner-up for Most Memorable Moment in Line came a few minutes later when the young lady in front of us spilled her latte and we all watched the carpet swallow it whole, leaving nary a trace nor any discoloration. Usually that only happens in B-movie haunted houses, and it’s blood that disappears rather than coffee.

The exhibit hall opened promptly at 2:00 as scheduled. Hundreds of fans were ahead of us in line, but we didn’t care because our first photo op was at 2:30. The subject: Jeffrey Combs! Horror fans know him from such psychologically scarring works as Re-Animator and From Beyond, but Trek fans have seen him inhabiting multiple personalities across the galaxy including but not limited to Quark’s adversary Brunt on Deep Space Nine, the same show’s oft-disposable Dominion middle-manager Weyoun, the Andorian officer Shran on Enterprise, and most recently the incarcerated evil A.I. Agimus on Lower Decks. We previously met him at Starbase Indy 2015, but were on a rushed holiday schedule that weekend and couldn’t stick around for his photo op. Eight years later, we corrected that omission.

Around the corner was the expansive autograph area, with dozens of booths filling five wide aisles and the far south wall, plus a western border-row for wrestlers. Same as we’ve seen at past cons, anime voice actor Christopher Sabat easily had the largest turnout, enough to file for statehood.

Next stop was a request from Anne: Evan Evagora from the main cast of the first season of Star Trek: Picard. As a Romulan orphan who grew into a formidable warrior and accompanied Our Hero on his first adventure post-Nemesis, Elnor was sadly sidelined in season 2; in season 3 he and other castmates were Sir Not Appearing in This Series to make way for the ballyhooed Next Generation reunion tour. We previously met Evagora at last year’s Star Trek: Mission Chicago, but Anne now needed to add him to her Trek autograph collection.

Next row over: Mara Wilson! The former child star rose to fame quickly via Mrs. Doubtfire, Matilda, the ’90s remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and her final kiddie-flick, the Thomas the Tank Engine movie. Her 2016 memoir Where Am I Now? candidly chronicles her original career as well as her mid-puberty fall from Hollywood favor, when she failed to grow up into a studio-approved “hot” actress, kept a level head thanks to a mother who was not a greedy embezzler, and found more personal satisfaction in other artistic endeavors, such as writing that very book. (MCC followers can expect a slightly longer capsule in a future “Reading Stacks” entry.)

Friday autograph lines (apart from North Sabat) were so short that by 2:55 we were already on our third line: Evangeline Lilly! She rose to popularity as the lead actress on ABC’s Lost, rankled the fur of excruciatingly particular Tolkien superfans as the Elven warrior Tauriel in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit expanded-universe trilogy, and most recently has appeared in four Marvel Cinematic Universe movies as Hope van Dyne, a.k.a. the Wasp, who might get a lot more done of it weren’t for her sidekick Ant-Man.

We’d made time to meet Evagora and Wilson first because we’d been informed Lilly wouldn’t be in the house till 3:30, thanks to a tip from a friend named Mark. We met him in Patrick Wilson’s line at HorrorHound Cincinnati 2019, and he’s now an official con volunteer, with all the power that entails. Thus we weren’t among the first couple dozen fans in her line when she arrived at 3:30 sharp, but we were okay with that. We also accepted we’d have to wait for fans with VIP badges to cut in line and meet her first. Mind you, I’m not complaining — it’s all in the game. We’ve bought VIP admissions for a couple of past cons, but we usually don’t need it. To GalaxyCon’s credit, the volunteer managing her line did a steady job of letting VIPs and general-admission folks take turns approaching her table.

At one point while waiting, maybe sixty feet away from us Academy Award Winner Richard Dreyfuss zipped by on a scooter from behind the autograph-area curtains and out the hall’s front door. This action-cameo foreshadowed his much meatier role in the next day’s events.

In addition to acting, Lilly has also written a children’s-book series called The Squickerwonkers. While we waited, one of Lilly’s assistants went up and down the line, handing out free copies of the first three books to each and every fan — not just one book per person, but an entire trilogy apiece. For value-added fun, random copies among them were already autographed. Later we saw him also handing them out to anyone standing near her line, or random loiterers within 200 feet of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d also passed some on to actors at other tables.

We modestly accepted a single trilogy for the both of us, no need for a duplicate set in case our first set catches fire or is burgled by literate underage bandits. As it happened, all three of ours were surprise-autographed. Technically we could’ve immediately left the line and not bothered to pay for a fourth autograph, but I still thought it’d be nifty to have her sign my copy of the extended edition of The Desolation of Smaug so I could shelve it with my autographed Lord of the Rings sets.

(I’m sure they’re fun, quick reads, but I haven’t read them yet. Whenever I think of someone who doesn’t normally write children’s books deciding to write one, my mind drifts back to the Atlanta episode “The Homeliest Little Horse” and the voices in my head bust out laughing. I’ll open them eventually, though I’m probably not covering them in a “Reading Stacks” entry, as they don’t meet the page-count minimum…unless I’m wrong and they’re typeset in single-spaced size-4 font like an almanac.)

We finished our Lilly moment at 4:05 and, apropos of my comics-collecting self, headed straight to Artists Alley, which started the next aisle after the wrestlers. First in my sights was Zoe Thorogood, whom we met at last year’s GalaxyCon and whose OGN The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott was among the best things I read in 2022. (More recently, she just had a nifty horror tale about immortality in a recent issue of Image Comics’ Creepshow anthology, a clever done-in-one pop-single worth hunting down.) I don’t always brake for creators I’ve already met (and we usually don’t retake their picture), but her table was a Priority Alpha stop on my to-do list so I could pick up her latest, the autobiographic It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth.

Next around the corner was Ireland’s own Declan Shalvey, whose distinctive art and designs have graced such series as Moon Knight, Thunderbolts, Injection, Deadpool, and more. His jointly creator-owned Image SF epic Time Before Time released its series finale last week, and he’s currently working on Marvel’s latest Aliens miniseries. I have a T-shirt of his cover to the first issue of his Moon Knight run, which you can kind of see in a pic from our 2015 New Orleans trip. I run into a lot more people nowadays who recognize the imagery whenever I wear it, thanks to the Disney+ series.

A few tables down was artist Liana Kangas, whose work was unknown to me but has graced Archie’s Welcome to Riverdale, IDW’s all-ages Star Wars Adventures line, covers for various IDW series, and a recent Joan Jett and the Blackhearts graphic anthology. (I read one review of the latter, but it didn’t name-check a single artist.)

Another aisle away was a familiar face from our past cons: John Jackson Miller, whose byline popped up a lot in my old Comics Buyer’s Guide subscription before he began writing comics instead of just reporting their sales figures. After his run on Dark Horse’s Knights of the Old Republic became one of my favorite Star Wars comics to date, he branched into a steady career as a novelist for various high-profile IPs. We last saw him at C2E2 last April (well, Anne did — I was at a photo op); recent reads for me include his Strange New Worlds entry The High Country (which will be in a future “Reading Stacks”) and his Picard prequel Rogue Elements, which IMHO is his best yet.)

Lilly’s photo op (i.e., our lead photo) was scheduled at 5:00. Our line began twelve minutes late, which is still better than average. We got in, we jazz-handed, she really got into it, we got out. As we exited the photo booth and headed toward the printers, we once again walked past her freebie-happy book-elf, who’d now relocated and was handing out more Squickerwonkers in case he’d somehow missed anyone. The guy was working really hard to spread the Squickerwonker gospel.

We doubled back to the Trek section of the autograph area for yet another Picard name: Terry Matalas! Best known as showrunner for the show’s third and final season — the aforementioned Next Generation revival (and director of its last two episodes) — he previously ran Syfy’s 12 Monkeys and CBS’s MacGyver reboot. It’s exceedingly rare for Hollywood writers and showrunners to appear at comic-cons around us…especially those with comics credits. I did some digging and unearthed a copy of a 2011 OGN called Witch that his younger self co-wrote with longtime pal Travis Fickett (who’s joined Matalas for nearly all his subsequent TV gigs). I do love whenever con guests have written books. Also, Picard season 3 was solidly entertaining and at least 40% less fan-service-y than I’d expected.

By this time we were dying on our feet, but had one last photo op to go. We grabbed sandwiches from my enemies at Subway because they were directly in our path and I didn’t feel like wandering one step farther for alternatives. Since I took longer to eat, Anne excused herself to go track down the Heroes in Action booth (last seen in these pages at Fan Expo Chicago), where she picked up several Fansets pins that were sold out on the manufacturers’ website. Longtime MCC followers may recall those are her thing now.

At 6:45 we lined up for our final Friday appointment in the photo-op area. We were adjacent to an infinitely, boisterously happy dude who admitted to anyone within earshot, which may have reached as far as Toledo, that he had anxiety issues and had drunk a few glasses of wine in hopes of calming down. We chatted at length about all things Trek, he at volume 17 and us at age over-50-and-exhausted. We each knew much of the same Trek trivia and characters, he was among the many fans this day who’d complimented my Badgey T-shirt (you can’t see the back of it in our photos, which is even funnier if you watch Lower Decks), and we encouraged him to give Star Trek: Prodigy a second try, which he disliked after 1½ episodes but which we asserted gets much better once its intensely annoying main character calms down around episode 4. He was a really nice guy, but I have no idea whether the alcohol made a difference one way or the other, and his overflowing energy tanks flooded and nearly overwhelmed my introverted own.

At 7:00 we completed the day’s list with a dual op with Deep Space Nine costars Terry Farrell and Nana Visitor, a.k.a. Jadzia Dax and Kira Nerys. We’d met them at previous shows (Farrell at GalaxyCon Louisville 2019; Visitor at Starbase Indy 2014), but Anne thought an updated joint pic might be nice. She was correct.

…and with that we trudged out of the convention center and back to the car before Commander Squickerwonker could build an entire book fortress that would block our exit. By this time the garage had only 25 open spaces, and one SUV helpfully blocked incoming traffic while we pulled out so they could call dibs on our space. We adjourned to the same hotel as last year, ten minutes away over on the OSU campus. We had the same window view as last time and no change in amenities, which was perfectly fine. We collapsed on the top floor, pretty much dead and definitely dehydrated.

Twelve hours later, we’d be doing it all again, but differently and with even more Trek in our day. And no more free books.

To be concluded!