Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the eleventh edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in scenic downtown Indianapolis. ICC 2025 was another opportunity for fans to look at walls covered with old comics, build lightsabers, buy 3D-printed knickknacks, overstock on Funko Pops, respect the anime fandom whose population dwarfs us older generations, and navigate those vast crowds. This year the showrunners occupied more square footage than ever, and last year’s edition was by no means dinky. Geek life had more space to thrive and sometimes enjoy some breathing space in between some of the narrower alleys of thriving pop-culture commerce…

Convention joys are many and varied and all around. You can appreciate the efforts and imaginations of the cosplayers who toiled to recreate and embody their favorite characters from the pop culture spectrum, as we illustrated in our costume gallery. Or, as we described at length in Part Two, you can meet actors and other celebrities, get their autographs, have your photos taken with them, attend the panels where they answer questions about their works and careers, or simply gaze upon them from a safe distance where your nervous system won’t overload at the mere thought of meeting them up close.

For some, it’s cool just immersing yourself in the main exhibit hall — a magical world of whimsy the size of multiple football fields and filled with IP-based merchandise, antiques, arts, crafts, games, toys, and vibes. It’s the nexus of our temporary realities, a three-day safe harbor from the “real” world and all its problems — the burdens, stresses, horrors, letdowns, sorrows, infuriating disruptions and abject drabness. Here we can connect with like-minded aficionados in celebrating the mass-media universes and multiverses where stories and inspirations thrive for our entertainment, meaning, uplift or escape. Community can feel positively transcendental in a place like this.

Part 2 ran nearly 3,700 words long, so this one’s technically a collection of its outtakes — a gallery of other sights we caught along the way as we walked up and down the convention center too many times to browse the myriad booths, buy whatever spoke to us, and try really hard not to think about the world outside its walls, where all the goods and services cost disastrously more than they used to and may continue escalating toward infinity for the foreseeable future. Right here, in this moment, we could allow ourselves to enjoy overspending, if only for a short while.

Or, y’know, save your hard-earned cash and just look around. Exhibit A: the section occupied by the 501st Legion, those stalwarts of Star Wars fandom who always bring the best party decorations.

Friday we walked up and down nearly every single aisle so we wouldn’t necessarily have to worry about revisiting them Saturday, when attendance would be much higher and bottlenecks might throttle the foot-flow. The proceeds from last year’s big ICC shindig featuring Hayden Christensen raked in enough proceeds to help boost their square footage to an all-time high, taking up all but two of the halls on the first floor, as well as the second-floor Sagamore Ballroom where they relocated the registration tables and functions. That additional space allowed for wider aisles and easier breathing, but it also meant a lot farther for us to walk if we wanted to take in everything.

One of Anne’s favorite moments on the show floor was a sort of dream come true: a ride atop Falkor, the “luckdragon” (read: happy flying snake-doggie) from The NeverEnding Story, that 1984 kiddie-film classic she loved in her youth. The work of sculptor John Marks, whose creations have graced various cons in the past, his Falkor had a seat on top and controls that let the rider move his head, jaw and eyes. I think that’s pretty much all the original Falkor’s points of articulation anyway.

Marks also graciously offered to capture a few seconds of Anne’s flight of fancy on video, which is a thing the kids these days worship. Longtime MCC readers know we’re rarely captured on video, partly because we aren’t deeply interested in filming each other and using up all the storage space on our phones, but mostly it’s because no one ever offers to film us. Like, almost never. We pear-shaped middle-agers aren’t among the most coveted TikTok demographics, no matter how many con write-ups we post or how many jazz-hands photo ops we collect. (Not that our relative internet obscurity is entirely due to ageism or body-shaming, though there’s a tangent begging me to add another 1000 words to this chapter, based on some incidents I’ve heard about over the past couple days…)

Anyway! Please enjoy this new evidence that Anne does indeed exist in flesh-and-blood and isn’t merely a 2-dimensional fantasy geek-girl that I Photoshop into all my selfies.

Food options in the exhibit hall was slightly more varied this year, with stands at each of its opposite ends. Friday afternoon we had cheesesteaks that were priced in line with today’s budget-crushing restaurant prices, which isn’t a compliment. Anne was incensed that she asked for no onions on hers, only to find them diced and embedded in there. Mine was Peruvian-styled and…well, it filled a need. Saturday lunch was superior: açai bowls! They cost the same as the cheesesteaks, but were more satisfying and definitely more nutritious.

After Rainn Wilson’s photo op we had ourselves a 4:00 decadent chocolate break at a Fudgie Wudgie stand. The hits of sugar helped carry us through our final three hours at the con and restored a few health points.

On Friday we also bought Asian snacks to take home, but we didn’t photograph those or the two stands we found that sold them. They’re one of our unsung little pleasures at every con. Something about a snack bun filled with red bean paste is a nice chaser for me at the end of a long walkabout.

Otherwise, that’s pretty much it for our Indiana Comic Con experience, beyond one of the best parts of all: chatting with other fans while trapped in long lines. The more of these cons we do over the years, the more familiar faces we see, which is always cool. (Special shout-out to Richard, a fellow survivor of ICC 2015 and the Carrie Fisher experience. Good to see ya again!)

We were surprised, though, at how many first-timers we met this year. As comic-cons keep on rolling and intriguing, newcomers are getting increasingly curious about them and tiptoeing into this whole scintillating new world. Among this year’s rookies was one of Anne’s coworkers, who’s been listening to her tales for years and decided to take the plunge himself with a buddy in tow. In fact, it was his neophyte befuddlement that inspired our recent epic-length comic-con survival guide, which was something we’d been meaning to codify for years. His excitement and inexperience helped convince us to make it happen. For him and many other attendees, Indiana Comic Convention 2025 was their very first con.

In Part 2 I mentioned my heaviest acquisition at this show, Grant Morrison’s Absolute Multiversity, large enough to flatten small household pets if you’re not careful. Its special features include a foldout map of his vision of what the DC Comics multiverse looked like at the time it was published. I imagine this is what most comic-cons look and feel like to newcomers — one big ball of confusion filled with lots of smaller balls of confusion orbiting even tinier balls of confusion.

…so we’re relieved that the con went as well as it did from a logistical standpoint, that the showrunners implemented quite a few good ideas. We’re glad we were able to help her coworker have a good experience, and that we could offer guidance and war stories to other newbies who hung out with us over the course of our two days. Maybe those folks will come back next year, or even to other cons, and one day they’ll do the same for the next generation of fans after them. They too can learn the inherent paradox in the comic-con experience that sounds silly until you realize it yourself: it takes enormous hard work to have this much fun.

To this day the fruits of the experience can still surprise us. Sometimes these death marches up and down every aisle, past every dealer and vendor and salesperson and spokesperson, can still lead us to a new source of wonder. Once upon a time in 1985, Anne’s family had a complete set of Alvin and the Chipmunks drinking glasses that were sold as a special promotion at Hardee’s. The entire set were among the casualties when their house burned down a few years later. Her grandmother also had three of the four glasses, missing only Alvin himself. When she passed away in 2018, Anne inherited that incomplete set.

Lo and behold, a dealer in Aisle 1200 had Alvin on their front table for ten bucks.

That’s convention joy for ya.

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