We’re now two weeks away from this year’s C2E2, the fourth installment of Chicago’s up-‘n’-coming comic-book-’n’-entertainment convention that hopes someday to achieve the size and reach of the San Diego Comic Con if enough of us Midwesterners support it.

Every C2E2 has plenty of activities for the hobby enthusiast: entertainment guests signing autographs; popular comic book creators speaking at panels, holding Q&As, and likewise autographing for fans; aspiring young creators gathering in Artists Alley and hoping to sell you on their own proud efforts; comic-shop owners and SF collectors selling vintage back issues, rare toys, and bargain-box oldies by the pound; booths representing the major comics publishers, including Marvel and DC; and — most noticeable of all — fans attending in costume, resplendent in their creativity and/or audacity.

Part 1 of MCC’s C2E2 2011 retrospective has a much longer intro with more information about the con and its history. As with that two-part miniseries, the following photo collection, to be curated and presented here in three parts, was previously shared elsewhere online last year, two weeks before Midlife Crisis Crossover was born. (Someone should remind me sometime to tell the story of how C2E2 was indirectly responsible for MCC’s creation in the first place…) For the sake of bringing my works under a single, unified creative banner, it’s my pleasure to present to you, the Viewers at Home, this memory parade of our second time at C2E2.

We commence with the wider-appeal characters first to stress that the ‘E’ in “C2E2” stands for “entertainment”. Comics are a major part of the proceedings, but there’re more to most comics fans’ interests than graphic storytelling alone. Exhibit A: the outlandish stylings of Effie Trinket and Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games.

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