Dragon Con 2025 Photos, Part 6: The Cosplay Parade, Marvel and DC Comics Division

Blade cosplayer crouched right in front of us, fake rifle outstretched to his left.

It’s Blade! Star of the upcoming Marvel Zombies animated series and four movies so far!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the longest-running science fiction conventions in America. We once again made the eight-hour drive from Indianapolis and returned for our fourth nonconsecutive Labor Day weekend at that amazing colossal southern spectacle. We can’t conscientiously afford to do D*C every year, but we’ll see how long we can keep up an every-other year schedule before we’re too old or overwhelmed to handle it…

Our belated coverage of Atlanta’s annual Dragon Con Cosplay Parade continues! We amateur enthusiasts took way too many photos that took me too long to sort in between juggling other life aspects (such as a family reunion this weekend). If you or someone you know was in the parade and you’d love to see them, pretty-please let us know! We’ll be happy to search our files and show ’em if we caught ’em. No guarantees, but we’ll oblige if we can. Also, please let me know if any characters have been misidentified. As we get older the number of pop-culture universes keeps multiplying and we can only contain so many of ’em in active memory at once.

Next batch up: the heroes, villains, and supporting casts of the Marvel and DC Universes, virtually the only comics-related characters we captured that morning. Enjoy!

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Superman” End Credits

My wife Anne in a blue T-shirt with large Superman S on it, flexing her cute tiny muscles next to a Superman movie poster in a dark theater lobby.

Look! Up in the theater! It’s a cute tiny bird!

Among the many benefits of seeing James Gunn’s Superman in theaters, you no longer have to worry about internet spoilers and you’ll be able to tell which culture-war blowhards haven’t actually left their Silicon Valley work-from-home basements and their soulless private-equity offices to at least hate-watch it for themselves and are mouthing off based only on misinformation and overreactions from other blowhards.

While the rage-harvesters gorge on clicks and dare opponents to quote-tweet them for reach-broadening clique domination and/or barroom-brawl “fun”, you’ll potentially earn the advantage of a more informed opinion and might just see the world’s finest Superman film to date without Christopher Reeve in it. Heck, if you’re under 40 and never got past “YOU CANNOT JUST REVERSE TIME BY SPINNING THE WORLD BACKWARDS!”, you might even like this one more. I wouldn’t know! You have the power over your own opinions. Don’t cede it to anyone, not even me.

(Not that you would. And I’m aware of the irony of declaring opinions about other people’s opinions of how to have opinions, so you needn’t point it out.)

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“Joker: Folie à Deux”: The Last Laugh Is the Best and Only Laugh

Poster for "Joker Folie a Deux" hanging in a theater lobby with gray walls above a red couch.

Oh, great, THIS frickin’ guy again.

So I saw this during the week of the Heartland International Film Festival, when it served as a sort of contrasting intermission between eight other smaller, better films. I was much more motivated to type about all of those first (along with two other delayed non-festival entries), but the MCC rule is every film I see in theaters gets its own entry.

[resigned sigh]

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My Free Comic Book Day 2024 Results, Ranked

Two black-and white panels: angry hunter points his shotgun in the face of a small-town sheriff. Sound effects are in Japanese.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Art by Masaaki Ninomiya.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Saturday was Free Comic Book Day! Per annual tradition, publishers and retailers nationwide collaborated to offer some four dozen comics gratis to any and all comers. Some comics generously featured brand new stories. Some contained excerpts from upcoming or previous works. A few were, at best, ad pamphlets. I visited four central Indiana shops, came away with 23 freebies in all, and bought additional cool things from each place.

Per my own annual tradition, my reading results came out as follows, ranked subjectively and upwardly from “Not My Thing” to “Buy More on Sight”:

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My 2023 at the Movies, Part 1 of 2: The Year’s Least Best

Scene from the second Shazam movie with all six powered-up Shazam Family members standing on a bridge, looking at you.

2023 was the 20th anniversary of the classic “LIGHTNING BOLT! LIGHTNING BOLT!” LARPing video. The future that faux-wizard foresaw has arrived.

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 24 films in theaters in 2023 that were actually released in 2023, a 33.3% increase over 2022 as COVID-19 retreated slightly into the bushes and folks began making more movies, many of them watchable. That number doesn’t include seven Academy Award nominees that were officially 2022 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest. It also doesn’t include the 2023 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” End Credits

Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson on a beach. Aquaman is trying to catch his breath and holds up his hand waiting for a high-five. His evil half-brother Orm, shirtless and bedraggled after a long prison stay, holds Aquaman's Trident of Naptune in one hand and just stares back at him, leaving him hanging.

Poor King of Atlantis, waiting in vain for all his DC fans to come high-five him again in theaters.

R.I.P., DC Extended Universe. I wouldn’t call theirs “a good run” through-and-through, but it had worthy moments. It’s a shame only a handful of us attended the farewell party in theaters, a.k.a. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. It’s also a shame this rather expensive, mostly underwater half-CG-cartoon sequel was only the year’s second-best DC film.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Blue Beetle” End Credits

A wide-eyed, astonished Blue Beetle stands still while the alien energy shield around him shears a bus in half.

If too few people see this action-packed gem in theaters, we fans will never stop calling it “criminally underrated” until the day you die.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’ve name-checked Blue Beetle ten times in past entries over eleven years. Four of those instances referred directly to Jaime Reyes, who inherited the mantle in 2006 from his Charlton Comics predecessors that DC bought in the early ’80s. Of those four, only once have I gratuitously yet heartily recommended Jaime’s original series, which began in the hands of co-creators Keith Giffen (R.I.P.), Leverage co-creator John Rogers, and artist Cully Hamner, and was carried expertly to the finish line by Rogers and Brazilian artist Rafael Albuquerque. I stopped reading subsequent Beetle books from other teams due to letdown. (If there’s been a grade-A Jaime story printed since 2012, I’m open to recommendations.)

Despite DC Comics’ big-screen misfires, their few rousing successes in recent times gave me the hope I needed to raise my expectations for the Blue Beetle film. I was thrilled by the film, and thrilled to be thrilled. Director Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) and screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Miss Bala) don’t try to reinvent the wheel, but their combined talents go a long way toward differentiating Jaime from the hundreds of other superheroes who reached the American mainstream first.

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Fan Expo Chicago 2023 Photos, Part 2 of 4: More Cosplay!

Mantis, Drax, Star-Lord and Kraglin

The stars of one of 2023’s best films so far, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3! (Full disclosure: Mantis and Drax — in Holiday Special gear! — are official Friends of MCC.)

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the second edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. Last year they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times and whose already-shaky financial standings didn’t fare any better during the pandemic. Fan Expo threw such a great inauguration party, and invited such a staggering guest list this time that we agreed an encore was in order.

Before we attempt any real storytime, let’s do mandatory cosplay photos!

And now, the other half of all the cosplay pics taken by us two aging geeks whenever we weren’t trapped in lines or off resting our weary bones somewhere. Enjoy! Again!

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Yes, There’s a Scene After “The Flash” End Credits

Michael Keaton as Batman in the Bat-Cave, with his costume on except no mask.

…a.k.a. Batman III, as far as Warner Bros. and nostalgia addicts are concerned.

Weaksauce disclaimers up front. Your Mileage May Vary.

Sometimes we spend money on things you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s for stuff we don’t endorse, like that time we paid to see the largest inherently racist monument in America, or when we watched House of Cards during the pandemic. Sure, we’re happier when our expenditures are a wholehearted vote for the parties responsible for the thing we’re about to experience or consume, but sometimes we pay the price because we want to see the flawed thing for ourselves and formulate our own impressions, for better or worse or worst. Any personal reservations and/or revulsion are then taken into consideration when expressing our opinions and/or regrets in the final analysis. Interpret it however you will, but we define it however we will.

In a sense, we compromised: my son and I went to see the latest superhero film starring an actor accused of felonies, misdemeanors, and misdeeds ranging on a scale from obnoxious to irresponsibly gross. Anne stayed home, enjoyed a free afternoon, and gave me permission to share all the spoilers later at dinner, from the funniest to the stupidest.

The TL; DR version: The Flash was better than I expected, which is more than I can say for some of this year’s other sequels. That’s neither a justification nor an unconditional thumbs-up for it. Onward we press with the usual wordiness.

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My Free Comic Book Day 2023 Results, Ranked

The nine free comics I picked up.

The reading pile, alphabetized by publisher.

It’s that time of year again, but delayed on my part! Saturday, May 6th was the 22nd Free Comic Book Day, that annual celebration when comic shops nationwide offer no-strings-attached goodies as a form of community outreach in honor of that time-honored medium where words and pictures dance in unison on the printed page, whether in the form of super-heroes, monsters, cartoon all-stars, licensed merchandise, or in rare instances real-world protagonists. It’s one of the best holidays ever for hobbyists like me who’ve been comics readers since the days when drugstores sold them for thirty-five cents each and comic book movies were shoddier than actual B-movies.

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