Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the twelfth edition of the Indiana Comic Convention at the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis — a fun 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, avoid AI “art”, and scratch their heads at the inexplicable comeback of the 19th-century rubber-duck fad.

Rather than dump all our pics into a single omnibus entry, we’re mercifully splitting them into a trilogy of galleries…

Rare are the opportunities when a Midwest comic-con signs a guest who’s such a significant household name that local news outlets treat it as a major headline event. Usually our cons are relegated to a Thursday morning sidebar to the effect of, “Looking for something to do this weekend? Lee Greenwood will be performing at the Fieldhouse, here’s a list of fifteen different farmers’ markets, our state parks are still pretty, and Hoosier Comic Expo is bringing in three Yellow Rangers, a canceled stand-up comic, and…uh, sorry, those are the only names we recognize and our Google’s broken.” Not so this time: ICC waited till a mere week before showtime to announce they’d scored Academy Award Winner Nicolas Cage’s Very First Appearance at an American Convention. This became a BIG DEAL. For once our journalists had something to write about besides sports.

Cage was scheduled to appear Saturday and Sunday only. We skipped Saturday altogether, owing more to a scheduling conflict than to our prediction that Saturday would be a madhouse, which isn’t uncommon for any given con. We’d already bought weekend passes before he was added, in case we’d need extra time to accomplish our to-do list, even though we almost never do Sundays as a rule. The way things worked out, Friday went so smoothly — plus at least one key guest canceled on us — that Cage’s photo op was very nearly all we had left to do Sunday.

We opted out of getting his autograph due mostly to pricing — he would’ve cost at least as much as Mark Hamill’s prized signature had, which wasn’t the sort of sticker shock we’ll override for just anyone. I trust I don’t need to explain why Hamill is a different category unto himself. Yes, I’ve seen several of his films, even liked some of them, but I’m finicky about autographs. Sure, he’s Academy Award Winner Nicolas Cage thanks to Leaving Las Vegas, but he wouldn’t even be the first Oscar winner we’ve met. Just the photo was fine by us.

As it happened, skipping the signing worked out in our favor. We saw numerous complaints from fans who went all-in on the autograph — some who bought pre-signed photos, others who paid nearly twice that fee for an in-person signature, in some cases paying extra on top of that for him to add character names and/or quotes — only for the result to be an N, a squiggle, a C, and another squiggle. Hastily dashed-off John Hancocks are discouragingly common for big-name actors scribbling across thousands of items consecutively, but at that price point, it can hurt more than a little. A few fans unlocked a secret here, though: if they asked Cage specifically to sign his full name, he graciously complied. We witnessed a few examples posted online by their proud purchasers.

As it also happened, waiting till Sunday for our photo op had a benefit, too. The majority of Cage’s Saturday photo ops bore no smiles — mostly they bore a paralyzed, quizzical look that said, “I regret every choice that led me here.” Any number of factors could’ve contributed: jet lag, nervousness at doing his first American con, sensory overload, a nagging feeling that his staff left the oven on at home, a deep-rooted fear of exhibit halls, his Spider-Sense wouldn’t stop tingling, or maybe his face has lost some elasticity as he’s gotten older and smiling isn’t the effortless reflex that it used to be. I know this defect well: sometimes when taking my photo, Anne has to tell me to smile, even though I think I am smiling, when in fact my mouth apparently hasn’t curved a single degree. It isn’t hard to look at all the Saturday photos floating out there and write Cage off as just another celeb who thinks themselves miles above us hoi polloi. The only way to find out for ourselves was to do the thing and see what happens.

Our op was scheduled Sunday at 11:30 a.m. Things ran a tad late, not unbearably so. Before the line moved forward, the head of the photography team — a disciplined, organized, brawny man with a stentorian voice, graying beard and tattoos, whom we’ve witnessed straighten out photo-op gridlock at past cons to our grateful relief — announced Cage’s rules up front: (1) no touching Cage; (2) no prop guns in the booth; (3) no handing him props to hold; and (4) no pose requests. That last one was a bummer, but it wouldn’t be the first time a guest denied us.

Right around noon came our turn, whereupon we charged into the photo booth wearing our matching “Jazz Hands Enthusiast” shirts. I thought back to that time The Late Show With Stephen Colbert taught us the difference between a polite audience and a TV audience, drew from that, and we ran out there like hyperactive The Price Is Right contestants and did the thing. Cage read our shirts and boomed with approval: “I LOVE IT! I LOVE THAT COMIC-CON ENERGY!”

As we ran to the booth exit, a guy in a suit stopped us: apparently I’d blinked. He walked us back to the head of the line and we went again. What you see in our lead photo was actually Take 2.

So…yeah, he has that same paralyzed, quizzical look. We’ll never know if he was beaming in Take 1 and I totally blew it. Photographic evidence notwithstanding, in that moment he was alive. We kinda think Cage needed Saturday as warm-up — as comic-con practice, if you will. Several other Sunday-op fans showed off more positive results from Cage — more smiles, more gestures, just plain more Cage. And sometimes an actor’s response depends on what their costars “give” them, emotionally speaking. The more energy you bring, the more they feel it and bounce it back in kind. Maybe too many fans were coming into the booth quietly, hesitantly, overwhelmed by the aura of a former A-lister who once earned 8-figure salaries. That’s not for me to second-guess, really. All I know is we got a pure, spontaneous, positive reaction out of Academy Award Winner Nicolas Cage.

So now we have A Nicolas Cage Story to tell to any new line-buddies we meet at future cons.

And he wasn’t the only actor in the house! Those local “CAGE IS COMING!” reports only vaguely gestured toward the rest of the lengthy guest list. As for who else we met and/or saw, we rewind to Day One.

Once we general-admission ticketholders were admitted into the exhibit hall Friday at 12:45, the two of us sped back to the autograph area, where numerous actors were already at their tables and welcoming any and all comers. Right out the gate, former actor Ian Somerhalder had the longest line by far, a confluence of viewers of Lost and The Vampire Diaries. Sporting a shaggy mane, mustache, and rancher hat, he’s apparently now a documentary producer and bona fide farmer, so this was a rare opportunity for his fans to lay eyes upon him in the here and now.

Next door to his booth was Vampire Diaries costar Paul Wesley, whom we mostly know as Young Captain Kirk from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. (We struggled to recall his season-2 episode of Smallville where he played Lex Luthor’s surprise half-brother.) We confirmed we’re from Indy, and so of course he brought up the Pacers and we swapped loud sighs. We had a hard time chatting with him, though — either behind his booth or possibly under his manager’s chair was a phone or radio blaring an all-’80s hit-mix, as if someone felt compelled to totally full-on get this party started! WOOOOO! Anne did her best to compliment his Kirk performance (which deftly avoids the too-easy pitfall of doing a stand-up’s Shatner impression) while trying to ignore Kenny Loggins’ hairy-chested mating call of “HIIIGHWAAAY TO! THE! DANGER ZOOONE!”

His photo op was scheduled at 6:00, but ran later still because of the huge turnout for his preceding Vampire Diaries team-up op with Somerhalder. Our turn didn’t come till 6:50, making for one heck of a long day by our standards. Nevertheless, he was game for whatever.

We exited Wesley’s booth at 1:05 and walked to the distant opposite end of the autograph stretch, where they’d sequestered a reunion of the stars from CBS’ long-running military drama JAG. We never saw a single episode and have quite a few thoughts about the recent proliferation of actors from non-geek series breaking into our formerly geek-centered spaces, but one of the gents has a career dating back to our childhoods. Before JAG, Patrick Labyorteaux got his start as a child actor whose most prominent early role was on Little House on the Prairie as Andy Garvey, son of Merlin Olsen’s Jonathan Garvey, recurring fellow farmer friend of Pa Ingalls. Little House is a childhood touchstone for both of us and for Anne’s grandma, for whom Anne loves buying the occasional surprise autograph.

(I was today years old when I looked a little more closely at his credits and learned he was also in Heathers, as one of the two football players. I first watched it when it premiered on Cinemax on New Year’s Eve about 35 years ago, having zero idea what it was about or who was in it. That left a mark on my psyche.)

Our only other photo op of the weekend was scheduled at 3:10: Amy Smart! I’ve seen her most recently when I binged Justified, where she had a recurring as one of antihero Raylan Givens’ least messed-up love interests. But together Anne and I know her better from The CW’s Stargirl, where she was the mom to Brec Bassinger’s titular DC Comics superhero. To our amazement, Smart’s character managed to survive all three seasons without dying, turning evil, or getting superpowers. She was a little late, but the 19 of us in line were perfectly okay, and done by 3:30.

For the record, Anne has no memory of making that face and has no idea why the camera did that to her. We debated swapping in a previous Anne-head from some other photo op…

…or cropping her out altogether, which seems rude.

We only attended one panel this weekend, but it was a delight: Matt Lanter and Abigail Spencer, stars of the short-lived NBC time-travel drama Timeless. It sported a heavy pedigree behind the camera: its co-creators were Shawn Ryan, who gave us The Shield, The Unit, Netflix’s The Night Agent, and in his youth worked on Angel for about ten minutes; and Eric Kripke, immortalized thanks to Supernatural and enjoying phenomenally profitable success with The Boys that ensures he’ll never have to submit to a broadcast network’s capricious whims for the rest of his life. The series lasted two seasons before NBC gave up, but allowed them one last special to wrap up.

We arrived twenty minutes early and waited outside the ballroom for the preceding event to end — another Twilight panel like the one we attended last December. We passed the time chatting with a Timeless superfan (and fellow attendee of Star Wars Celebration 2019) who was deeply involved with the “#SaveTimeless” efforts that were staged when it was on NBC’s chopping block more than once. We watched every episode and found it pretty enjoyable, though Anne the history aficionado quibbled with its facts at times. That is, more than a few times, far more than she ever has with Doctor Who. ‘Twas still fun! But we didn’t invest in the show quite to that level.

Before the panel I jokingly guessed two of the fan questions: “If the show continued, which eras do you wish you’d visited?” and “What’s it like working with ___?” Regardless, topics included but weren’t limited to:

• Spencer hated memorizing all her character’s lengthy history-textbook speeches, which were a necessary narrative crutch since Our Heroes couldn’t just Google useful facts while stuck in the past.
• Lanter hated going through fight choreography in period-accurate boots with extremely slippery soles. The effects crew would minimize his pratfalls by pouring Coke all over the floor so his feet would stick.
• Spencer wishes they could’ve done an episode that forced her character Lucy to go undercover as a man in some random no-women-allowed space. She had no particular setting in mind, just the gag.
• Lanter wishes they could’ve gone back to the Crucifixion, or to the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, as his grandfather was among its surviving crew. Lanter also appeared in the film about that event, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage, though he seriously doubts its star Nicolas Cage would remember him today.
• They recall Kripke had also hoped to do episodes about the founding of Tiffany’s (which is reportedly far more interesting than I’m imagining at the moment) and about MLK.
• That one episode where they went back to the Alamo was set up and shot entirely in a Vancouver parking lot.

And we all warmly remembered the onetime prescient casting of future superstar Colman Domingo as Bass Reeves, whom Spencer referred to as “the Lone Ranger”.
We all miss the late Annie Wersching, who played the show’s strongest recurring villain. (She’d go on to different time-travel shenanigans as the Borg Queen in season two of Star Trek: Picard before her unfair passing three years ago at age 45, a year after we met her.)

Lanter and Spencer had a dual photo op scheduled at 6:40. We hadn’t bought it in advance and were quite tempted to add it to our to-do list. It would’ve made our third jazz-hands pic with Lanter, which would’ve been worth it in itself. Alas, if you go back and check the time stamps, you’ll note Paul Wesley’s op ran too far over; the once-Timeless couple had wrapped up their line by then.

We thought that’d be it for the weekend outside of Cage, but Sunday afternoon brought us within range of one last unexpected actor. While roaming the remaining exhibit-hall aisles that we hadn’t already seen Friday, we chanced across one table with copies of a graphic novel called The Last Spartan: Red Tape. The writer’s name leaped right off the cover at me: Christopher Priest, one of my all-time favorites. With few exceptions, if he’s in a project, I’m in.

Then I looked up at the gentleman who was selling it and towering over me, whose name was also on the cover: Tyler Mane, the former wrestler who made his American film debut as Sabretooth in the first X-Men, before going on to high-profile horror movies (The Devil’s Rejects, two Halloweens) and reprising Sabretooth in Deadpool & Wolverine for no small amount of viewer fun.

(At some point I’ll catch his recurring role in season 4 of Doom Patrol, but it’s kind of a low priority because I hated the first three.)

…and then we were done with actors. That’s a few more folks to add to our jazz-hands Pinterest gallery when time permits, as well as our master list of every celeb we’ve ever met to date.

But naturally there was more to ICC than costumes and celebs. To be concluded!