Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. In 2022 they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times, and have expended tremendous efforts to maintain the previous showrunners’ geek-marketed traditions to keep luring in longtime fans and newcomers alike…

…and for this longtime comics collector, that means keeping an eye out for favorite creators and/or new reading material. Pictured above are the graphic novels I picked up in this year’s Artists Alley, plus a sketch of a character from my childhood. As for the creators who sold me those items…

One of my top two must-meets was Eric Zawadzki. I first saw his art in two issues of Image’s time-travel heist epic Time Before Time, which — no slight intended toward its regular artists — left me wanting to see a lot more. He’s now co-creator of his own timey-wimey project, Assorted Crisis Events, an anthology riff on Crisis on Infinite Earths‘ final-act catastrophe in which infinite versions of our home planet and their endless time streams collide within a single Earth, collapsing and knotting and accelerating and reversing and creating a wide tableau for whatever chronally warped tales he and writer Deniz Camp can cook up. It vacillates from funny to thoughtful to heartbreaking and back again with each new standalone story. It’s one of my favorite books on the stands today.

Camp is now highly in demand at Marvel and DC, but hopefully he can keep fitting Events into his schedule. I’m already buying it in singles, but also bought the first trade from Zawadzki at his table for my bookshelf. Unfortunately, a few minutes after we stepped away I looked down and realized that while ducking around other passersby, I’d swiped my thumb right through his autograph.

Refusing to let me accept the consequences of my own klutziness, Anne grabbed it and, while I waited in an autograph line five rows away, went back to his table, explained the calamity and planned to pay him to re-sign it. The eminently creative Zawadzki came up with an alternative I’ve never seen done before: he used the same turquoise pen to turn his smudged name into a turquoise rectangle, let it dry for a few awkward minutes, then re-signed over the rectangle in yellow. You can see the results in our lead photo. 11/10 experience, would buy more comics from…such as the second Assorted Crisis Events trade, which hits comic shops this very week.

While Anne ran that errand of grace, I had the pleasure of meeting the other of my aforementioned top-two must-meets: Pornsak Pichetshote! He leaped into the comics fray as an editor for DC’s Vertigo line before branching out into his own writing career. So far I’ve read and loved Man’s Best, The Good Asian, and Infidel. His star’s now rising in the mainstream-comics sphere with Absolute Green Arrow, which — along with top artist Rafael Albuquerque — reimagines the Emerald Archer as a serial killer stalking evil billionaires…or at least, that’s what they want us to think.

He’s concurrently keeping a Substack about his AGA experience in progress, a journey of incredulity as he navigates the creative process and the side effects of having a Big Two series racking up six-figure monthly sales. I’m 98% sure that very title is why his table had one of Artists Alley’s longest lines on Friday. While Anne was away on her side quest, I spent so much time chatting with him unsupervised that I forgot to ask if I could take a photo, which she usually does while I’m in fanboy mode.

Farther down the same row: novelist Alex Segura! At various times a journalist, editor, marketer, and comics executive, Segura has written for just about every major comics publisher — Archie, Star Wars, Dick Tracy, Edge of Spider-Verse, and more, more, more.

When we returned to Artists Alley one last time Sunday at 9:30 (huzzah for early entry courtesy of our Ultimate Fan Package badges), I braked for one last creator: cartoonist and animator Scott Shaw! I previously met him at Indy Pop Con 2016, but wanted a closer look at what he’d brought to this con — original art pages from Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, which I absolutely loved as a kid, as well as sketches of some of its cast members.

We chatted for minutes about various topics, including but not limited to other artists’ inability to do right by the good Captain, as well as DC’s recent, abominably humorless, revisionist takes, including at least one that gave Cap a stupid name change that Shaw believes was specifically intended to cut out his contractual co-creator rights.

We also discussed happier subjects, such as the talents of fellow animator Mike Kazaleh (I’m old and weird enough to remember The Adventures of Captain Jack) and the extensive work he’s done with Sonic the Hedgehog, which easily catches the eyes of any kids that stray past his table, more than anything else from his storied career. (He’ll be 75 next month.) Anne was totally lost, but she loves seeing me wide-eyed and in my conversational element. Our lead photo shows off the Little Cheese sketch I bought from him — a Zoo Crew member with the Atom’s shrinking power who was introduced late in the original series’ run. 10-year-old me is tickled pink.

As for the other items in that photo: same as at past shows, I grabbed a discount hardcover from the good folks at Gem City Books — this time, a graphic-novel adaptation of The Wire creator David Simon’s landmark book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets).

I rarely buy anything from Fan Expo’s own merchandise booth, but their variant-cover exclusives caught my eye with one title that I hadn’t already bought the first time around: the 2024 DC All In Special, the one-shot prologue to that particular branding initiative. The story was exactly as disappointing as I anticipated (hence why I’d skipped it), but it continued Fan Expo’s annual tradition of variants starring Mark Hamill. This year’s model featured a nifty cover by Mitch Gerads, whom I met at C2E2 2025.

For value-added comics-related fun, I filled an empty gap in the photo with my Ultimate Fan Package-level entry badge, with Supergirl art by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau. (He wasn’t a guest at the show, mind you.)

Also comics-related: Saturday at 3:00, we attended one Sketch Duel! These have become my favorite kind of panel in recent years, whenever a con arranges some and I recognize at least one of the artists. The participants are asked to draw something in a particular theme; they try to concentrate on sketching while a moderator asks them career-related questions or solicits same from the audience. It’s all in fun with no real winner except audience members: when the panel ends, the results are given away as prizes. Our duelists of the hour were each high-profile among DC fans. On a related note, this was the most crowded Sketch Duel we’ve ever attended, and the only one ever to have a long line waiting outside the room for the previous event to end.

In this corner: Amanda Conner! Best known for her lengthy Harley Quinn run that developed the sidekick-turned-antihero into more than just a certain villain’s codependent super-moll — accomplished in collaboration with her husband Jimmy Palmiotti, who was also at the con but not at this panel, unless he was lurking in the audience. In hindsight I wish I’d thought to look around.

In the other corner: Dan Mora! One of the fastest artists currently working for the Big Two, Mora co-created the Arthurian reincarnation saga Once and Future with writer Kieron Gillen before revving up such DC titles as Batman/Superman: World’s Finest, Superman‘s solo flagship, currently Justice League Unlimited, and however many others whenever he has a free moment. At one point he recalls doing three monthly books and variant covers for other titles all at the same time. It’d be fun to put him in a room with Mark Bagley and Sergio Aragones, and see how many gigawatts their pencils could jointly generate.

They “dueled” for two rounds, fifteen minutes each, producing four sketches total between them. Our moderator bugged them with questions throughout, which usually brought their penciling to a halt until they got into enough of a rhythm to handle talking and drawing at the same time. Among other topics, we learned Mora hates drawing people just sitting, and Conner hates drawing rocks.

Mora prefers drawing interior art to covers; Conner concedes covers are “more lucrative”, but prefers when covers tell a story, even though the original art for generic pin-up covers routinely sells better to art collectors.

Neither of them love drawing hands, but Conner calls them “fun-difficult” and Mora thinks they’re “easier than feet.”

Among the characters they have yet to be paid to draw, Conner would love to do Big Barda, while someday Mora would love to do Spider-Man or Swamp Thing.

All attendees were given raffle tickets upon entering. We’ve won art at past Sketch Duels, but not this time. The lucky audience members included the Absolute Flash cosplayer we met later in the hall. Congrats to you, sir!

To be concluded! Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: A Little Cosplay!
Part 2: Slightly More Cosplay!
Part 3: Celebrities and Catastrophes
Part 5: [coming soon]