Sometimes a lazy summer strikes when you least expect it. For a few random days at a time, you’re surrounded by quiet, relaxing doldrums. Your TV schedule loses its pulse. Theater screens are usurped by movies clearly rated NFY (Not For You). Headline news is, if not slow per se, more irrelevant to you than usual. Sometimes a muffin with too many ingredients is the most exciting thing that’s happened to you.
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a brand new comic book shop.
The Android’s Dungeon has operated as an online store since 2009, but this year its owners saw their long-standing dream of a brick-and-mortar storefront come true. After months of searching and hoping for the right combination of location and timing, they planted stakes, opened their doors to the public in March, and made history as the first official comic shop in the ever-expanding town of Avon, Indiana.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
For the last few years, my wife and I have spent our respective birthdays together finding some new place or attraction to visit as a one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on this most frabjous day, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. My 2014 birthday destination of choice: the town of Muncie, some 75 miles northeast of here.
Sure, many people celebrate their birthday on or near the original date. Some might take photos. Some might share them in a timely manner. We keep our own schedule. And by “we” I mean “I” because my wife isn’t as prone to distractions, digressions, or long, awkward pauses between chapters in her online projects. But I couldn’t very well leave this four-part MCC miniseries incomplete. I never explicitly promised anyone four parts, but that final “To Be Continued” at the end of Part Three cried out to me for closure. Also, I could use a short break from headline news and general relevance.
Part four, then: other things we saw besides nifty stores, official works of art, or Garfield statues. The most bewildering sight of all would be the “nature area” that contained a relaxing walking path, gentle plains, breezy forest, and a sacrificial altar.
One of many unreleased pics from our 8/31/2013 visit to the Indiana State Museum to see the “Star Wars: Where Science Meets the Imagination” traveling exhibit. It belongs in a museum!
Lucas is scheduled to present preliminary architectural plans to the proper committees in the fall, so we may have a long wait until we can storm the gates and take in the sights. Whenever it’s ready for us, we’re prepared for a certain lack of objectivity. Considering the media have refrained from calling it a “Star Wars Museum” it’s reasonable to assume we’ll see cameos from Lucas’ other works in addition to that one galactic-sized phenomenon. But we have to wonder: how much of his own history will Lucas leave out? Will we be allowed to see any flaws or signs of the stresses he’s endured in his forty-year career, or will his biography be subject to a selective “Special Edition” treatment?
No, I did NOT mock up this logo myself. Found it on their site. Anyone who knows me knows my art skillz don’t reach far beyond MS Paint.
But wait! There’s more! From the Department of Unannounced News, I was privileged to catch the following tonight, courtesy of Tony Troxell at Geeking in Indiana, which you should visit for more fun and geeking:
https://twitter.com/IndianaGeeking/status/481603262114971649
Behold two panels from the cool thing that landed in my mailbox last week: Jamal Igle’s graphic novel Molly Danger. This forty-eight page tale about the responsibilities and hardships of a government-allied teen super-hero is spunky, dynamic, written from the heart, suitable for all ages, and highly recommended for anyone who could use a break from comics about white guys by white guys.
This first volume was made possible through a Kickstarter project that was launched in August 2012. My local comic shop had a copy on the shelf in November 2013. As one of the 1,240 backers whose pledges helped make the project possible, my copy just now arrived, seven months after retailers could sell it and nine months after the original, estimated delivery date of September 2013. Unfortunately for everyone, U.S. Postal Service rates skyrocketed sometime between project launch and project completion, which means shipping/handling costs exceeded what he’d expected. Once the books were printed, Igle mailed out backers’ copies a few at a time whenever he could afford to do so.
It’s a great book and I look forward to seeing future Molly Danger projects, but this aspect of the experience didn’t turn out quite like anyone had hoped.
Igle’s story is ultimately understandable and pretty benign compared to others I’ve faced. Am still facing, in fact.
Hang out at any geek-news site, wait a week or two, and you’re likely to see the latest headline about a Kickstarter fiasco whose broken commitments ended in teeth-gnashing and garment-rending. Here’s a link to a recent one in which things have turned so grim and sour that the Washington State Attorney General’s Office is involved. Since Kickstarter assumes no accountability or liability for its users’ inaction or delinquency, it was only a matter of time before someone began channeling consumer rage into legal threats.
…
Hi. My name is Randy. It’s been eighteen months since I last gave a single dime to a Kickstarter project.
My son and I were part of the Dragon Training 101 graduating class that considers How to Train Your Dragon the Greatest DreamWorks Animated Film of All Time. In those basic studies we learned that dragons respond well to a combination of generosity and teamwork, that even the scrawniest Viking can surprise you, that Scottish Viking fathers are stubborn but negotiable, that Old World prosthetics were surprisingly advanced, and that cinematic dragons have come a long way since Dragonslayer, Dragonheart, Dungeons & Dragons, Eragon, Dragon Wars, and even Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where those mighty beasts received fifty-eighth billing, ranking well below CG mermen, nameless wizard henchmen, and a guy who turns into a rat. So How to Train Your Dragon was a tremendous PR boost to a once-honored race of monsters that deserve better than Hollywood usually gives them.
The How to Train Your Dragon 2 intermediate course had much to live up to in our minds, both as a sequel and as the next rung on the ladder of dragon-training success. We feared whether this would be a worthwhile study or one of those unaccredited, fly-by-night scams that hopes you won’t be able to tell their “dragons” are just really ugly dogs with paper wings taped to their fur.
Remember those old Peanuts strips where Snoopy impersonated a vulture? Based on a true story.
That’s right, kids! Friday, June 20, 2014, sees the return of Take Your Dog to Work Day, that annual festivity in which lovers of pets and pet-shaped things invite their trusty companions into the workplace and spend eight to ten more hours with them than usual. It can be a wondrous bonding experience, a welcome break in your routine, and a fun opportunity to talk about the joys of pet ownership to other lonely souls who have neither pets nor joy. I’m sure Take Your Dog to Work Day is already marked on your Garfield calendar and my gentle reminder is superfluous, but I’d hate to see anyone miss out and waking up kicking themselves on the 21st.
…
…wait, no, actually, I’ve never heard of it.
Behold one of the greatest pleasures of my work month: that very special occasion known as “breakfast for dinner”, or in some circles “breakfast for supper”. Always consult your local linguist for proper lingo before discussing cool things.
Tonight was that night for us, a bit of perfect timing for me since I’d had salad for lunch. Don’t get me wrong: fine salad, varied ingredients, fresh quality, but it only whets the appetite through part of the afternoon. Come three p.m. I’m already scrounging through my desk for emergency cheese-‘n’-crackers or stale chips left over from previous months’ birthday pitch-ins. But the premature hunger pangs are worth it if you know there’ll be a feast waiting for you when you eventually get home once you’re done working too much overtime yet again. Thankfully my wife has taken to making each breakfast-for-supper event an extra hearty meal — extra scrambled eggs, extra bacon, just extra, extra, extra. She’s stellar that way.
If you don’t get the magic of the whole “breakfast for dinner” concept, there’s not much I could do to persuade you. Either your eyes sparkle when it happens or they don’t. All I can tell you is it’s the kind of meal that puts a song in a man’s heart.
Family and some friends may have noticed I’m not on Facebook often nowadays. Or maybe they haven’t noticed because so many other people aren’t on Facebook often nowadays, including said family and friends. Naturally I have a long list of reasons for this, because having long lists is this thing I do, but one of the more benign reasons in the middle of that list is I begin to have issues whenever I’m around memes, Photoshop jokes, partisan pie charts, Buzzfeed quizzes, and fake Morgan Freeman quotes. Since this is now 90% of what Facebook is, abstinence becomes a sort of self-defense.
Sometimes I can keep to myself while I’m catching up on recent events. Sometimes I lose control and make things worse. This most recent example was shared by a friend today:
Whoever made this doesn’t understand how lucky we were.
I’m 95% certain I owned every single on this 1984 Top 10 list, even for the one song I hated.
As previously cited on Midlife Crisis Crossover in an entry about the joys of writing lists: “Casey Kasem’s American Top 40…had a profound impact on my childhood.” Syndicated reruns of that long-running radio show are still airing each week on both commercial and satellite radio if you know where to tune. Here in Indianapolis, they’re on B105.7 Sunday mornings from 8 a.m. to noon, pleasant accompaniment for my early drives.
The photo at left was taken by my mom back in 2002. The original is surely stuck inside one of her many photo albums. All I have is this poorly scanned, cropped version that I once used as my LiveJournal profile pic. My son was seven, maybe eight years old. To this day it’s one of my favorite pics of the two of us, despite the distance and the low-res haze. Something about our shadowy faces and that sunbeam between us strikes a certain poignancy for me.
Like most all-purpose bloggers, I’ve written about various holidays at length in the past. Father’s Day is one of those for which I wish I could present you with something warm, fuzzy, life-affirming, and role-model-ish. Truth is, he and I play the day so low-key that I imagine some relatives probably worry about us. He’s not the most expressive or enthusiastic when it comes to holidays, family gatherings, or mushy moments, and I’m not one to force hugs and pleasantries from others. That’s my wife’s zealous area of expertise.
For us Father’s Day typically means dining out, doing something fun together (either video games or a movie, typically), and calling it a day. He’s now living up at college year-round, but this year’s get-together will look similar, a benign combination of food and entertainment. I love him and I always look forward to spending time with him, but cards and presents aren’t a part of the process. I wouldn’t turn down free stuff if he offered it, but I’m not the kind of Dudley Dursley to demand it.
We live in a society where a movie can rake in twenty-nine million dollars on its opening weekend in American theaters and still be declared an immediate failure. The new Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow was expensively constructed even by summer blockbuster standards, but it was bumped back to third place this past weekend by both the young-adult juggernaut that is The Fault in Our Stars and the ongoing smash Maleficent. Audiences are sticking to their standard demographic preferences and don’t much care that Tomorrow has the highest Tomatometer rating of the three.
The over-50 action/sci-fi veteran meets his match (or better!) in Emily Blunt, last seen being overlooked in Looper, but their pairing plus alien warfare weren’t enough of a draw in a slightly crowded field in theaters. I’m not feeling drawn to Disney’s Angelina Jolie Fairy Tale Masquerade, but when I was faced with choosing between the other two on Tuesday night, I decided to give the pricy-looking underdog some attention. (To be honest, I think I’d rather read the novel first before seeing Stars.)
Right this way for more details! Unless you’ve already read this entry several hundred times…
Welcome! Turn back! Welcome back! Hie thee hence! Join us! Shoo! Whichever!
If you’re just joining us or recently discovered the site, you may be a bit disoriented, even after reading the “About” page I wrote two years ago and have amended a few times since then. That version contains the “in-story” reasoning behind the site name without confessing that it was contrived using the Wheel of Fortune “Before and After” method. I’m sure it sounds like rubbish if you’re not a comics fan who knows what a “Crisis Crossover” was. The bottom-line truth is I needed a name that no other writer, blogger, or sensible creative type would want. That’s one objective met, then.
In the days of yore, comics writers followed a helpful rule of thumb: “Every issue is someone’s first.” New readers appreciate accessibility. Most sites use the “About” Page to catch visitors up to speed and don’t look back. (I offered baseline advice on this one time.) While mine does its job to a certain extent, it doesn’t summarize every version of me that readers have seen in these pages. Sometimes each me can act as though they exist on a different Earth apart from my other selves. Sometimes those worlds drift apart. Sometimes the me of two worlds vibrates in harmony as one. Sometimes worlds collide.
Right this way for the Unofficial Handbook of the Midlife Crisis Crossover Universe!…
Headlines today informed Portland, Oregon, they were the next unfortunate recipient of a tragic American public shooting incident. You can dive into Twitter, Facebook, or any other corner of the internet where people with human emotions dwell and witness a diverse cross-section of reactions: horror, terror, outrage, lamentation, grief, et al. There are other corners where you can pull quotes from those who bask in inhuman emotions, but there’s no healthy reason for that.
Sadly, stories about shootings are commanding so many front pages and conversations, as much from frequency as from simple impact, that we’re seeing numbness and moral surrender joining the social-media chorus in increasing numbers. I’m a proponent of directed prayer myself because I firmly believe that many things are parsecs beyond my control, but when it comes to talking preventatives or cures or root causes or coping mechanisms with others of differing beliefs, I fear the internet in general may soon run out of eloquence on the subject. How many more ways can we express indignation, extend comfort, and proffer wisdom over the same kind of event over and over again? Could we reach a point of having to reuse the same sentiments every time it comes up? At the rate we’re covering this same ground at length, I won’t be surprised to see Hallmark mining everyone’s retweets and reblogs for material to reuse in a new line of shootings-specific sympathy cards.
So what can we do?
Elizabeth Olsen plays the obligatory Concerned Wife role and has more screen time than the King of the Monsters. Her agent must be one tough negotiator.
I saw the new Godzilla reboot over Memorial Day weekend, but we’ve had so much going on here at Midlife Crisis Crossover over the past few weeks, from my birthday road trip to the Indy 500 Festival Parade to Indy PopCon 2014, that its writeup remained relegated to the MCC reserve-topic list until those events were past. (Mostly, anyway. Officially I’m not done with one of them.) Four weeks into its American theatrical run, I figure why not get on with it.
So, monsters, then. Eventually.
James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender return for another Game of Genes.
From the same line of thought as The Avengers, Fast & Furious 6, and The Expendables comes another supermovie in which characters from other movies join forces in hopes of tripling their box office grosses while settling for a fraction of their normal screen time.
X-Men: Days of Future Past, the seventh film set in Fox’s version of Marvel’s mutantverse, may invite comparisons to the Back to the Future trilogy, but it’s based on an Uncanny X-Men two-parter cover-dated January and February 1981, four years before Marty McFly’s first trip, back in my day when the all-star creative team of Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and Terry Austin were on a roll (though Byrne and Austin exited after the next issue). Some plot elements have been added or reworked to mesh with the previous films (well, with some of them, anyway), but this adaptation doesn’t stray as far from the framework as I expected, throws in a couple of new surprises, and tries to give its award-winners reasons to return to a crowded ensemble.
Hey, kids! It’s the world-famous General Lee from TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard! Everyone likes TV cars, right? TV cars are pop culture and therefore totally on-topic at Indy PopCon. Please enjoy this eye-popping, gas-guzzling, moonshine-runnin’, crooked-cop-defyin’, Southern-fried, toy-selling idol of millions and be sure to Like and Share the heck out of it on all the best social media so I can finally take one evening this week to go rest and relax without fear of the oncoming post-convention traffic plateau. Remember, the power of my recuperation is your hands.
At long last, the week-long marathon reaches the end of its journey here on MCC! Presenting one last round of photos from the first annual Indy PopCon at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. Yes, we here at Midlife Crisis Crossover realize we’re still reliving this shindig long after the rest of the Midwest has gone back to their daily routine and stopped reminiscing about last weekend. And I can’t deny it’ll be nice to move on to other subjects and writing forms after this. We’re almost there, I promise.
Part Eight, then: the sights we saw (besides costumes) and the personalities we met.
My wife and I with the Seventh Doctor, a.k.a. Radagast the Brown. Yes, you may have already seen this photo in Part Four of this series. Keep reading for more pics…
The marathon continues! Our first six installments in this miniseries brought you all the photos my wife and I took of various costumes and cosplayers appearing at the first annual Indy PopCon last weekend in Indianapolis. Links are enclosed at the bottom of this entry for fun and clicking.
And now for something completely different: Part Seven chronicles one of the one-and-a-half events we attended at the Indy PopCon Main Stage: an hour-long Q&A with Sylvester McCoy, celebrated thespian and player of spoons. The following writeup is a rare guest contribution from my wife Anne, marking her fourth appearance in writing under the MCC masthead. Please note some questions are slightly paraphrased, but most of them weren’t complicated enough for us to misrepresent. Beyond some light editing, I turn the floor over to her. Geronimo!
The marathon continues! As promised in our first installment, please enjoy more photos from the first annual Indy PopCon convention. Same guidelines apply: we’re fans, not pros; corrections and comments welcome; hope they’re enjoyable.
Part Six: our last remaining costume photos from other categories that didn’t receive separate entries — characters from movies, TV, American animation, the time-honored “potpourri” division, and ensemble setups. After disqualifying several photos that were either blurry or missing key portions of anatomy, what’s here is what’s left of our costume pics. That’s not to say the Indy PopCon marathon ends here. Two more entries should be following this week, and then MCC returns to its regularly random programming of whatever and stuff.
Japanese virtual pop star Hatsune Miku bids you welcome.
Right this way for your last chance at costumes, costumes, and more costumes!
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 