Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read lately that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-three years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place…

…but at least the following OGNs and trades have been rescued from the unread pile and can move on to their next home, by which I mean the endless stacks in our library/Anne’s office, where they and the past several years’ other finished works wait for us to figure out which major appliance to get rid of so we cam make room for a new bookshelf. I mean, do we really need a refrigerator?

Anyway, onward!

38. Ken Forkish and Sarah Becan, Let’s Make Bread! (2024) Why aren’t cookbook comics a thing? Possibly because artists would rather draw superhero wrestling matches than spot illos in a placid kitchen, or because chefs stereotype geeks as helpless fumblers who can’t cook for themselves and subsist on takeout and Hot Pockets. This book is for those of us who can be coaxed into picking up new skills, who hate reading recipe blogs that start every entry with a 6000-word anecdote about how their Great-Aunt Gertrude lived through WWII on just two slices of war cake a day and passed this recipe down to only them, and/or who would rather drop their phone in an acid vat than watch two-hour influencer videos. Those with fond memories of the COVID sourdough craze can indulge their short-term nostalgia with this one’s spotlight on baking that and a variety of other breads, with each step clearly drawn to follow along. Becan has illustrated at least four volumes like this, with other subjects including dumplings, ramen, and cocktails. (Oh, sure, now she has your attention.)

39. Ben Percy, Brent Schoonover, Luca Pizzari and Nick Filardi, Devil’s Highway, Vol. 2 (2022). For one brief, bizarrely specific moment, “trucker horror” became a noticeable niche in comics (see also: Nocturne, Phantom Road, Post Malone’s Big Rig). I read the first five issues of this AWA/Upshot series in monthlies, lost track of it, recovered and picked up the collected second half. Punk detective Sharon Harrow’s investigation of her father’s murder leads to a serial-killing cult that’s targeting truckers. The legacy of Maximum Overdrive and Large Marge is in much more disturbing, less laughable hands.

40. Jason Douglas, Annie Wright, and Dave Lentz, Jane American (2024). A cover by Sina Grace and foreword by Afua Richardson are recommendations in themselves of this aspirational period-piece about plucky Jane Johnson, a white teenager struggling to do her part for her family on the WWII homefront; confronting the KKK, racism, and lynching; learning lessons about the Tuskegee Airmen and the 1921 Tulsa Massacre; and concealing her heroic super-strength. Douglas, a Detroit public schoolteacher by day and Ringo Award-nominated indie-comics writer by night, serves history lessons and optimism in equal measure, plus a few challenging vocab words for younger readers to go look up.

41. Skottie Young and Jorge Corona, Ain’t No Grave (2024). Frenetic horror-Western about a gunwoman who tried giving up the life only to lose everything, take up her weapons again and blaze a trail of wrath through anyone ornery enough to stand in her way. I followed Corona to this after his wild Transformers run, but Our Antiheroine’s relentless vendetta gets wearying.

42. Ryan Stegman, Kenny Porter, Tyrell Cannon, Mike Spicer and John J. Hill, The Schlub (2024). Imagine Freaky Friday but it’s Black Superman forcibly mind-swapped with a short, chubby, dimwitted dentist. Hilarity ensues! Except I don’t think this is meant to be a comedy, which begs the question of why the protagonist is drawn like a Family Guy extra while everything else — persons, places, things — are straight out of a mid-’90s superhero world. Or maybe the jokes just didn’t land for me.

43. Gail Simone, Buddy Scalera, Evan Dorkin, Udon Studios, Mitchell Breitweiser, Juan Bobillo, et al., Deadpool Epic Collection, Vol. 7: Agent X (2025). Sometimes the Merc with a Mouth can be among the best black comedies in comics, as long as he isn’t taken too seriously. I definitely don’t need his complete archives, but one of the contributors here is an all-time favorite of mine, from whom I bought the book directly via his Patreon (and who threw in a free sketch, which he later shared with his followers) to add to my collection of his works. Originally published circa 2002-2003, this extended arc sees DP ostensibly die and get relaunched as an amnesiac with a new X-based cash-in moniker instead, with mixed results. It’s frequently hilarious despite the art not quite keeping up with the badinage quality, and the writers clearly had differing opinions about the supporting cast, resulting in one of the more complex characters getting booted partway through.

44. Ethan Sacks, Will Sliney, and Dono Sanchez-Almara, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge (2022 printing). For a while my wife and I were reading all Marvel’s Star Wars books, including this 2019 miniseries tie-in to the amazing colossal spectacle at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios, which didn’t mean much to us at the time because we’d never been there and doubted we ever would. Fast-forward to March 2023 and an unexpected blessing that was one of our all-time favorite vacations — so now we’ve been there and I understand these very specific theme-park references.

45. Jody Houser, Jim Zub, Diego Galindo, Msassyk, and Nate Piekos, Stranger Things and Dungeons & Dragons (2021). Everybody loves IP crossovers! Inter-company synergy doesn’t get much more apropos considering how hard the show leaned into the game’s mythos and monsters. The show could only fit in so many gaming sessions, so this sometimes sweet tale is a welcome expansion pack to compensate for that shortage…except it suffers the same drawbacks as most other comics based on movies or TV: characters’ faces must be traced off stiff publicity stills and aren’t allowed to have expressions; the dialogue falls short of evoking the actors’ performances and nuances to the same degree; and any one-liners feel copy-pasted from the episodes rather than being crafted newly for the print incarnation. But as a former Dungeon Master who’s mostly resistant to nostalgia, I’ll allow it this once.

46. Ben Percy, Cory Roger Smith, Oren Junior, Bryan Valenza, et al., Ghost Rider, Vol. 3: Dragged Out of Hell (2022). I thought Ghost Rider had a cool design when I was an ’80s kid, but the art and stories in his very first series were mostly blah. He looked better in the ’90s and even more so with modern computer-coloring advancements, but, well, I couldn’t fill a Top 3 Ghost Rider Stories list. After missing the Spirit of Vengeance’s past several years, this excerpt from a 21-issue series (epic-length by the current Marvel regime standards) wasn’t a bad reentry point. Johnny Blaze has regained the title role, found himself a new partner in an ex-FBI agent turned punk sorceress and runs afoul of demons and whatnot, including…Danny Ketch, also still sort-of Ghost Rider, but wearing a Weapon X helmet? Sure, okay.

47. Paul Dini, Adam Beechen, Stephane Roux, Jamal Igle, Chad Hardin, Cliff Chiang, et al., Zatanna by Paul Dini (2024). A weighty collection of nearly all the celebrated animation writer’s pre-New-52 adventures starring the stage-magician super-heroine and premier fishnet-stockings pinup model. (If only they could’ve packaged her eponymous Batman: The Animated Series episode with this, which of course he also wrote.) Dini’s sense of humor is a perfect fit for her established tone, though he goes darker at times as her sometimes demonic foes warrant. Events feel rushed by the end as cancellation presumably loomed, and a lot of contributors passing the art-assignment hot-potato back and forth makes for distractingly uneven visuals. She’s in more consistent hands at today’s DC, but she and Dini had some fun times together.

48. Brian Azzarello, Rags Morales, and Phil Noto, First Wave (2011). The bland title belies a big crossover event between Batman, Doc Savage, and the Spirit that’s a great showcase for Morales’ shadowy, muscular style despite my multiple misgivings coming into this. I’ve never been a big Azzarello fan, I have very nitpicky ideas about how Eisner’s Spirit should be handled, and it’s bundled with a Batman/Doc Savage one-shot drawn by Noto, whose covers can be fine but whose stiff, awkward postures can drain the energy out of action scenes.

49. Sam Johns, James Tynion IV, Mirka Andolfo, Sweeney Boo, Belen Ortega, et al., Punchline: The Trial of Alexis Kaye (2022). I kinda hate whenever Marvel or DC introduce a new character and promote them as the newest super awesome sensation that everyone’s gonna love, without actually letting the fans make up their own minds first. I also hate how DC caters so hard to super-villain fans that their bad guys aren’t allowed to suffer any consequences, which just makes the Batman Family look like bumbling Keystone Kops. This collection of backup stories stars an evil podcaster — and wow, did that part lose me really quickly — but yeah, an evil podcaster who yearns to become the Joker’s new love interest now that Harley Quinn’s finally canceled him. Maggs paces the serial just right and goes a long way toward distinguishing her from Joker’s far more interesting ex, but her courtroom trial is a Joker-sized joke and, as with a lot of Bat-villains, every single story could end with a single Bat-punch if plot-luck weren’t on her side.

50. Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad, Joelle Jones, Vita Ayala, Stephanie Williams, Jordie Bellaire, et al., Trial of the Amazons (2022). Queen Hippolyta is dead, and someone’s responsible! In the meantime, this Major Crossover Event’s premise is the Amazons — all the tribes, not just Princess Diana’s precious Themyscirans — must hold their own Super-Olympics and the winner gets to be her successor. Wonder Woman and Her Amazing Friends share some laughs and some action sequences, and a new queen is named at the end, but it invokes a pet peeve of mine: stories about competitions that break the promise by eventually throwing away the competition so nobody actually wins. (Yes, I’m booing YOU, Goblet of Fire and Mockingjay.)

51. Andersen Gabrych, Bill Willingham, Dylan Horrocks, Ed Brubaker, Pete Woods, et al., Batman: War Games, Book Two (2016). The second half of a 2004-2005 Major Crossover Event in which criminals have once again overrun Gotham City (so, a Tuesday), everyone’s mad at Batman, and chaos sprawled across eight different ongoing series plus two specials. It asks me to accept Black Mask as an untouchable, Kingpin-level master schemer (again: for want of A SINGLE BAT-PUNCH…) and ends with one of my favorite Bat-sidekicks brutally, stupidly murdered. Falling far short of clearing those rubbery goalposts, the best of the worst moments has to be when Batman announces the only way he can save the day is if the new commissioner lets him assume command of Gotham’s entire police force. There’s a certain level of comics-geek trivia-fun to be had in noticing a few talents among the numerous credits who’d done better things prior (Brubaker! Sean Phillips! Paul Gulacy!) or who’d move on to better things in their future (Eddy Barrows! Giuseppe Camuncoli!), but after guffawing at some of this claptrap…maybe I should just never go back and read old crossovers ever again.

…

…and I guess that’s it! There’s already a 2026 stack in progress, though indulging in a few longer works helped me stall for time. Till next year, then!

[Past 2025 links: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four]