It's about my local comic shop.
When I was a teenager, I used to travel to the town I now live in to visit one of two comic shops, which we'll call Comic Shop One and Comic Shop Two, just because I'm, like, so original.
Comic Shop One was r-i-g-h-t on the edge of the main town area, and had, in the late nineties, a kind of scruffy chic; boxes full of back issues crowding the space, the rack of this weeks' comics up there, a few toys and associated bits of merchandise and whatnot.
I did love it there, but I didn't really interact with the 'crowd', as such.
After a while, the shop became uneconomic in the way that a shop ten minutes walk from the centre of town selling a niche product can do and, surely, closed down with a quickness.
What was nice here is that the proprietor then started offering a service that you really, really wouldn't see these days; for customers in the local area, he kept ordering subscriptions and offered to deliver them to your home. Like I say, I can't see this working these days, because you'd just post the damn things, but in the same way that the summers were warmer and the winters were shorter and the rain was never cold when you were young, this was a really nice service.
I can't remember how long I took that service for, but I think it was probably about six months before I went to university and it wouldn't have worked anymore. (Not least because I was seven stops from the Forbidden Planet where I moved to. Customer loyalty is a fine thing, but... It wasn't them, it was me, that sort of breakup rhetoric.)
What I do remember is the niceness of this guy bringing round my order, laying it out on the table, then taking the cash - and I remember it being a fair price, although, summers, winters, etcetera - and having a brief chat before disappearing into the night to disperse further comics-related purchases to his loyal clientele (of which I was about to not be one.)
When I moved back home from university, I would still - on occasion - go to London to visit the Forbidden Planet and stock up. Or I'd go when I visited friends, etcetera. Or when I had a plausible excuse. Or anytime I could, really.
I didn't actually discover Comic Shop Two until about a year or so after I'd moved home, and, again, it was in an out-of-the-way place that I would never have found without my crippling sugar addiction and the sweet shop round the corner. (Sugar addiction is a real issue, kids! Trust me, I'm still trying to sort out the consequences now.)
It was a small rectangle of comics niceness, which also sent out dandelion-like seeds to other towns on their markets, which I also found quite cool.
Here's the pertinent thing, though; whichever one you went to, you were bound to bump into one of three Older Folks who liked to chat about, well, their personal comic-book fetishes in a somewhat creepy but ultimately harmless way. It was mainly about certain characters that had excited them in some way, which had provoked the beginnings - or, in one case, a full-blown example - of a fetish.
Everyone has fetishes. (I think.) At least, everyone has different tastes, and if you're indulging them in the privacy of your own home without harming anyone or anything, then, whatever makes you happy, Spanky. Talking about them in public at the comic shop is a little far gone, maybe, but still, relatively harmless, if, seemingly, a constant presence. (I do, as we all do, though, wonder about Carrott Theory in regard to this.)
Time passed, and Comic Shop Two closed down, although The Stalls Still Remained (to my knowledge, anyway.)
And then, like unto the opening of a beautiful flower, Comic Shop Two got new premises and re-opened in a nicer, sparklier, less nice location. It is, I confess, a really nice-looking place, now, all professional and whatnot, with racks, customer order sections, lots of merchandise, and a general aura of happiness and wonderment.
So - now, in different circumstances - I started stopping by there again, and the owner was still really nice, and remembered who I was, and I thought, well, this is really rather cool.
Until I started trying to get anything regularly through them, as a, let's say, 'regular customer' would.
If I wanted to go in and drop, say, £30 to £40 on random trade paperbacks, well, that was fine.
If I wanted to actually try and order anything, hilarity. In the not particularly hilarious sense.
To be honest, I don't like talking about things like this. But I give up. I really do.
The first instance was the basic act of trying to get them to 'subscribe' me to an ongoing Marvel series. I'd bought the first two, came in to buy the third when I didn't hear anything about it on email, asked to be put down for the rest of the run, and never heard anything again.
Meanwhile, I'd bought a couple of other trades, and - credit where credit's due - they had managed to hold back a copy of one trade for me. Except that I'd already bought it from one staff member, who hadn't told the other member of staff, so they'd already sold it to me and kept another copy that they could have had on the shelves for a couple of weeks.
Which was a bit odd. But just a mix-up.
So last week I asked if they could order in a trade paperback of a series I was interested in, and was told, yes, no problem. I later emailed to ask about a series that was coming out this week that I was interested in, and was told, again, yes, no problem.
Except, problem.
If you consider not hearing anything further again a problem.
So I popped by on Monday to ask about this, and was told, yes, no problem.
You can kind of see where I'm going with this.
Except that I'm starting to feel like maybe I don't like the atmosphere in there.
I'm starting to think that I'm not actually that welcome.
I'm starting to think that they're expecting me to start talking about my wacky comics-book fetishes and sexual proclivities at any time.
And I'm not.
I'm really not.
But it's time to face facts; I'm just not the right target market anymore. I'm not young enough, don't have enough disposable income and, well, I'm just not worth the hassle, given how irregularly I can actually afford to buy anything.
This is a little sad. Back in the days of Comic Shop One - which, funnily enough, the owner of Two derided once it had closed down as cannibalising their market, how we laugh - although I didn't interact with anyone in the shop out of crippling shyness, I felt like I was somewhere where there were other people 'like me', i.e. into something a little different.
Now, there's probably a rant here about how comics are now accepted, acceptable, mainstream, whatsoever, but that strays dangerously into this kind of territory, which is somewhere we don't want to go. I like that comics are mainstream, and that book shops now have massive sections of manga and graphic novels, even if, for some reason, The Boys is massively popular in every single one. (And, seriously, sidebar, that makes no sense to me.)
There's a concurrent rant to be had about being pushed out of the mainstream because I now can't afford to keep current, keep cool, keep calm
But the simple fact of the matter for me is that it's now easier, less degrading, and above all cheaper to just order comics online.
This means missing the feeling of being a part of something, reducing it instead to reading comics in isolation at home, and not being able to discuss them with anyone unless you feel like braving the flaming waters of the internet and expressing your opinion.
The title of this post therefore is - believe it or not! - relevant, because I recently finished reading Three to see the King, and the parallels - man in a house of tin in the middle of nowhere ends up involved in a community which then disintegrates, to summarise it up really quickly - feel very similar to how I feel about comics at the moment. For a while, I was involved in a community, then still kept a line open to that community, and now, frankly, I'd feel happier going back to my house of tin in the middle of nowhere where, at least, I don't have to feel uncomfortable about walking into a shop.
So if you need me, I'll be here, out of the target demographic by a long way.
