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 married geeks twenty years and counting. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

This weekend we attended the fourth annual Galaxycon Columbus in Ohio’s very own Greater Columbus Convention Center. The show returned with another lengthy guest list for fans of all media across the pop culture spectrum…

…most of which we’ve covered: the actors! The cosplay! The panels! Artists Alley! But wait! There’s more! Not much more, but slightly more! Sorry if you were wishing I’d have dumped everything into a single 3000-word non-epic as usual!

Reminder to myself for next year: do not spend extra to prepay for parking spaces. If you arrive super early before a given event like we always do, parking isn’t a problem. (If you arrive anytime after opening, or even a half-hour before, sometimes apps like SpotHero can save you. Comic-cons are not like big shopping malls where customers come and go as they please throughout the day. Tens of thousands arrive, stay all day and often linger into the night. One does not simply pull up to a con at midday like a leisurely mallrat. Like, ever.) Friday the show opened at 2:00 EST; we arrived in Columbus at 12:30 and found the Goodale Street garage still had 404 spaces left out of 700. After we walked up High Street for lunch and back again to drop off our coats, they had 268 spaces left.

Parking is especially critical for GCC because Ohio winters can be as harsh as ours back home, and no one wants to be stuck wearing or carrying a heavy coat around for eight hours unless they’re cosplaying as Captain Cold or Arctic Chase Victor Frankenstein. (Unforgiving winters are why the Midwest con scene usually ends by Halloween, while southern states can get their geek on year-round.) The convention center has limited capacity for coat-checking and lockers, but they cannot possibly cater to tens of thousands of us. So we get into town early, nab a space in our preferred garage that’s connected via skybridge to the center, and leave our coats in the car. We only suffer frostbite for the distance from the car to the skybridge entrance, which I lovingly refer to as our annual Gordo and Tracy Stevens Memorial Fun-Run.

None of the actors on our autograph want-list would be there Friday, so we had no reason to rush ourselves and be at the head of the exhibit-hall line. We showed up after lunch and bumbled through the awkward security checkpoint, which would become one of the show’s biggest failures throughout the weekend. That part is a long story that didn’t affect us because we aren’t disabled yet, but it shouldn’t have affected anyone. So much egregious mishandling occurred that it became local headline news, on top of the righteous anger we witnessed in the relevant Facebook groups. We were really sorry to hear of so much mistreatment for so many disabled attendees that didn’t deserve such thoughtless shoddiness.

At the registration tables, for some reason the line to pick up VIP and “deluxe” badges was ten times longer than our general-admission pickup line. One letdown that affected far more folks: the professionally manufactured badges that GCC had ordered for the show didn’t arrive in time for handout on Day One. Single-day attendees got basic wristbands, which isn’t uncommon for a lot of cons, but as of Friday all us 3-day ticketholders had to settle for unlaminated cardstock badges that volunteers had apparently worked hard to print up last-minute. We appreciated their effort to improvise something, but cardstock isn’t as durable as the standard hard plastic. Quite a few folks reported their badges easily tearing and falling off their lanyards. They also suck as keepsakes, and their flimsiness discouraged most attempts at playing the Dragon Con badge-ribbon game. (I brought ribbons with me, but the subject never came up.)

Once again, both Friday and Saturday the showrunners made it a guessing game as to which exhibit-hall entrance to line up at before opening. Friday the line began at Hall C and stretched back to Hall A. At 2:05 we were delightfully surprised when a volunteer popped open a Hall A door right in front of us and bade us all welcome, in lieu of whatever the heck was slowing down progress up at Hall C.

Then it was shopping time! We kinda covered that in Part 3, but other wonders abounded throughout the crowded aisles.

The Q&As for “Weird Al” Yankovic and the Twilight cast took up the rest of our Friday at the show. We’ll cover the non-con sights in a separate epilogue for anyone who’s that oddly curious about how we spend our free time.

Saturday morning we arrived right at 8 a.m. while the garage had even more hundreds of space available than it’d had Friday. All attendees were ordered to report to Hall B — one line for VIP, one for the rest of us — only for both lines to be moved to Hall C moments later. Not long after, the VIP line was moved elsewhere out of sight. Presumably they would be entering through another hall entrance, albeit ironically farther away from the autograph area, which was the entire reason most of them overpaid extra for VIP privileges in the first place.

We general-admission folks were to be let inside at 10; we got the go-ahead at 9:50 and began another round of fun. While we waited at the front of Jodie Whittaker’s non-VIP line, Anne decided to tuck her easily damageable cardstock badge and her lanyard inside her hoodie — partly to keep it from getting mutilated and partly because she didn’t want it showing in her photos. For value-added fun, she decided to leave it there, out of sight, just to see how long it’d take before a volunteer or security guard said anything. All throughout the rest of the day, no ever asked again — not when she attended the second comics panel, not when we reentered the exhibit hall afterward, nary a peep from anyone about her credentials. On the other hand, if she’d been freely carrying a walking cane, she might’ve gotten pepper-sprayed in the face.

Although Ben Schwartz’ autograph line posed some logistical issues, especially when it was capped more than once, our other two stars had short lines. The entire guest list was in the house, some facing much longer lines than others. Reports of multi-hour waits weren’t uncommon. One recurring subject in the discussions we saw: cinema’s Shaggy himself, Matthew Lillard had flight issues and arrived too late Friday to do autographs, so everyone had to hope for the best on Saturday and Sunday. This show happened shortly after he’d been stung by public commentary from certain parties who’ve never actually worked with him, which he brought up in his Q&A, which was considered noteworthy enough to be turned into entertainment headline news. (It’s always so, so weird to me whenever we get back online after a long comic-con weekend only to see the very same show turn up on geek news sites, let alone mainstream media.)

Despite the controversy, our man Lillard had massive turnouts both days, spent time with each guest, and made himself available and enjoyable to one and all, to the extent that time and physics allowed, as long as folks didn’t mind waiting for hours. Anne and I were ahead of the curve and already got a kick out of meeting him at a differently controversial event back in 2017. Far as we could tell from the empirical, anecdotal evidence at hand, pretty much everybody outside Hollywood still loves Matthew Lillard.

Beyond the autographs, the comics panels, and a second run through some of Artists Alley, we also spent part of Saturday checking out the fan-club booths, which had been relegated to a large space on the south end of the show floor, which was at least 15-20 degrees colder than the other, more populated end. Their lavish creations were fun to behold.

(According to the artist, transporting all these from Boston was a “NEVER AGAIN” sort of one-time ordeal.)

(Disappointing fun trivia: among the few Star Wars characters who wear glasses like us, the most prominent female among them, relatively speaking, is Maz Kanata.)

Meanwhile across the aisle at Star Trek, another club offered free printed photos of fans in front of their backdrops, along with a selection of catchphrase word balloons to use at their discretion.

Our day ran a bit longer than expected because Ben Schwartz’ 4:40 photo op ran late due to other ops ahead of him falling behind. That’s a typical comic-con Saturday for ya. By 5:40 we were out the door and on the interstate heading home.

In all, our parts of the con largely went well, but it sucks that so many others ran into so many challenges that shouldn’t have happened. So far I’ve yet to see anyone comment on the most terrible change that personally affected me: the convention center’s coffee shop — the one that had blessed us with a free drink three years ago — was at some point dismantled and turned into an unadorned Chik-Fil-A. If this actually happened in some previous year, we didn’t notice. Now I noticed, and I am not happy. Except about all the other happy stuff we just mentioned.

The End. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, we’ll see you next con, sometime in 2026.

Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Cosplay!
Part 2: Celebrities!
Part 3: Comics!
Epilogue: The OSU McDonald’s and More