Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

My wife Anne and I just got home from the latest edition of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), a 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. We were undecided for months because this year it was scheduled the same weekend as one of our hometown shows, Indy Pop Con. Ultimately Chicago lured us back…

…and we had a great time pushing ourselves to the brink of exhaustion and possibly over its curb. We’ve shown you costumes, celebs, panels, jazz hands, and Artists Alley comics. But wait! There’s slightly more!

For many attendees the show’s real superstar was Funko. Sure, Funko Pop figures are a pervasive fixture at all the comic-cons, where dealers yearn for those precious youngster bucks, but this year marked C2E2’s first time hosting an official Funko booth. The chibi-head overlords themselves were in the house, selling directly to fans. Well, to some fans, anyway — as we witnessed at Star Wars Celebration Chicago back in 2019, one does not simply walk into Funkor and commence shopping as if theirs were an ordinary business. AS IF. Where’s the sense of adventure or competition or palpable frustration in that?

No, before the show, would-be Funko patrons were required to make advance reservations online for an appointment to purchase. Hypothetically in a kinder world, one would then stroll up to the Funko booth at the ticketed time, buy any and all Funkos that would emotionally satisfy one and/or complement one’s character shelves back home, then five minutes later walk away and enjoy the rest of the show floor. This hypothesis is wrong and naive and shames any toy-scientist who wasted their life typing it. The extravagant booth design alone broadcasts from hundreds of feet away that Cloud-Funko-Land is more akin to an amusement park ride, by which I mean it screams “all-day line, sure hope you didn’t have any other plans.”

The hottest items were of course the show exclusives available only in person at C2E2 or at extreme markups from toy sellers who navigated the Funport and had tons of ’em up for sale online later the very same day. Like, seemingly entire wagonloads of ’em. Mind you, pretty much all the characters could be bought online for retail price in ordinary boxes, but then you wouldn’t get the show-specific stickers that make them “exclusives”. My fellow comics collectors know this pain; for us it’s called “variant covers”.

At SWC Chicago fans were required to enter a stupid lottery and win the chance to buy Funkos. We entered, we lost, and we lost interest in nabbing any of them for any price. C2E2 at least declined to repeat the frustrating lottery format, but I’m not sure how much that improved matters. Fans who showed up on time for their “appointments” reportedly still waited hours for their magic moment…only in some cases to reach the desk at last and learn the characters they wanted had already sold out for that day. Same as with SWCC, the booth-minders allocated a certain amount of product per day to ensure they had stuff to sell all three days, because imagine the riots if they’d sold out all their stock by noon Friday, packed up their wagons and left town early.

As we understand it, the place got so overcrowded Saturday that they moved the entire line out of the exhibit hall and relocated the points-of-purchase over to the opposite end of the convention center. In a show that had anticipated 85,000 attendees, it seems an ungainly percentage of those had come to Chicago only to fly their Funko-fan flags and fill their arms with the hottest new pop-culture collectibles, or at least with their super awesome exclusive stickers. The characters themselves may have been incidental.

We had our eye on exactly one (1) of those precious Funko Pops. Frankly, you’d be surprised or annoyed how often Poochie from The Simpsons still comes up in our everyday conversations. We thought he might make a nifty souvenir of The Funko Experience if we casually happened to come across one in the wild. That “if” was too gargantuan inside those buckling McCormick Place walls. Ultimately we opted out of Funkomania. White-hot collectibles generally aren’t our thing. I say that as a comics collector of over 45 years who almost never cares about variant covers and grimly recalls how Superman #75 turned every local comic shop into a madhouse for the space of one Wednesday. We say this as fiftysomethings who lived through the eras of Cabbage Patch Kids and Tickle Me Elmo. I barely survived working at McDonald’s during the peak Teenie Beanie Babies era and hated every moment of that onslaught, which felt like a month of Black Fridays. If the Funko Pop gauntlet brought joy to its fans, then hey, cool for them. From the outside looking in, we were certifiably FOMO-free.

Alternatively, for fans who had their fill of Funko Pops but still wanted to give Funko more money, Mojo Funko Casa House had an entire extra wing devoted to Loungefly, the same company’s non-bobblehead offshoot that sells licensed merch in other forms. We’d never heard of Loungefly and had to look them up. Far as we saw, the Loungefly half of their mega-booth never had more than five people in line.

Funko also held their very own panel at 1:45 Saturday. (Darn the luck, that’s when I was busy saying hi to Maya Hawke.) The promise of free giveaways lured quite an audience, though we’re told at one point a child won themselves a genuine Funko Pop, only to have it snatched away by some adult lady who wouldn’t give it back because she was allegedly raised by soulless reality-show villains. The Funko people tried to stem the child’s psychological bleeding by applying different freebies to the wound, with mixed results.

Again: my FOMO-meter needle is at 0.

Elsewhere around the show floor, life went on.

…and so it went. A Fallout shirt might’ve been keen, but Stylin Online only had two designs: a white T-shirt, which I don’t prefer; and one with the Fallout 76 logo (no thank you). Of our two convention-center lunches, Robinson’s giant meats easily clobbered the tinier, overpriced Chicago Deli fare, and a creme-filled churro hit the spot Friday afternoon. We’re actively angry at this year’s complete lack of ice cream stands, not even so much as a single Dippin’ Dot.

We left Saturday at 4:00 pm and drove straight home to Indy without any issues, with new books, new pains, and new memories. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con.

Other chapters in this very special miniseries:

Part 1: Friday Cosplay!
Part 2: Saturday Cosplay!
Part 3: Actors!
Part 4: Artists Alley!