The End Of The (World's) End

So yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing The World's End. It was a pleasure, although I wasn't sure that would be the case going in. (Deep-seated issues? Selective Memory?) 

I want to talk more about the ending, though. 

This necessitates BIG TEXT: 

SPOILERS! 

(Yes, Really!)

So now you know. 

At the end of The World's End - and let's say it again, SPOILERS!, so, you're warned - the revelation is that an alien civilisation called The Network has infiltrated Earth at points across the globe. They're supposedly here to make life better - all our technological advances of at least the last twenty years are through them - and to elevate us to the right level to start interacting with other civilisations across the galaxy. 

This would be noble except for the fact that to infiltrate our society necessitates replacing entire populations with Blanks, which are essentially... Well, the definition is back-and-forthed throughout the film, because they're not robots, as robots are, by definition - repeatedly - slaves, but they're not human either. 

The best way I can describe them is that they're a codicil to the original human, and I wish I could tell you why the word codicil just popped into my head right there and then, because I don't think I've ever used it in conversation at any point, ever. I'd love to claim it's because I have a writers' brain, but I think someone stole the jar it was in a long time ago. 

It's not totally explained, basically. If you go along willingly and submit to the Network's process, you get a version of your body which is how you want it to be - younger, fitter, peak optimal. If you don't go willingly, you get replaced anyway, and the implication is that you become a true Blank - i.e. human form, but everything else is gone and you're just a... Wait, this may be irony... slave. So you have a choice between Amended Human agent and Blank slave. Well, I say choice... 

This is horrific enough in itself, until what happens to the original human bodies - and, as Basil says (repeatedly), you shouldn't ask about that (I'm paraphrasing) - in that the original bodies are... 

Well...

... Mulched. 

So in order to elevate us onto the galactic stage, the Network kill entire population centres (and Newton Haven is said to have something like, I think, 110,000 people?), turn the bodies into compost, and replace them with one of two sorts of agents. 

This is all fridge horror, by the way, in that it's all explained in a whip-crack section of dialogue at the end between the survivors and the voice of the Network, so there's not really much time to stop and digest what the implications are. (At one point Gary smartly asks the question of whether the other sites the Network has on Earth are going as well as Newton Haven, poking holes in their logic and apparent desire to make humanity better whether it likes it or not.) 

This isn't the problematic ending, though. It works really well in context - Gary King, defender of humanity and free will through non-sequiturs and bolshiness, convinces a powerful alien entity to leave Earth because we just won't be helped - and it's whipcrack funny, too. 

The problem - at least, the problem to me - is what happens next. 

When the Network - or, at least the Network's representative - leaves, things go badly. 

Firstly, Newton Haven is destroyed in the resulting cataclysm - there's the classic outdriving-the-explosion sequence - and the town is consumed in crackling lightning and a wave of fire. 

Again, this is a traditional ending, which isn't a bad thing; bad guys defeated, big explosion, disestablished equilibrium makes way for establishment of new equilibrium, that sort of thing. No real problems here. 

But there's an epilogue. 

Nick Frost's Andrew - and apparently it's Andrew Knightly, whereas Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Martin Freeman only get characters with first names, but whatever - is sat around a campfire, telling a group of people what happened next. The takeaway from this is that he's been telling the story of the film to these people, although I didn't make the connection at the time - lazy brain - and, in principle, it's to give the audience some closure. 

This is done by explaining that when the Network left, they took every technological advance from the last twenty-plus years or so with them, plunging the world into darkness and post-apocalyptic wastelandedness. This kind of implies that humanity were content to just let everything technological run without actually questioning how it did so, or analysing what was going on - but, then again, I don't know entirely how my computer or mobile phone works, and that doesn't stop it working. 

So humanity is free, and not being turned into compost and replaced with duplicates in the name of progress, but we're back to what looks like a post-Feudal society. What's more, the Blanks in the silo in Newton Haven actually survived the cataclysm - well, most of them, anyway. Except now they're trying to integrate into human society. It's not going well. 

The main characters get arguably decent closure explanation endings, though; Andrew reunited with his family to make a go of it. Sam and Steven got together, properly - but that shacking up joke... really? As for Peter and Oliver, they're trying to make a go of it as blanks, except that nothing's really changed in doing so - Oliver's trying to be exactly what he was as a human, except with a replacement head, and Peter... Nothing's actually changed for Peter, as much as I could tell, except now he does funny tricks for his children with his removable body parts. 

And Gary King... 

... Here's where the problem is. So far, it's cosy catastrophe territory. Things have happened, a new normal has been established, and everyone's just trying to get on with it. 

Except for Gary. 

Gary is a fascinating character. I'd go as far as to say that he's Pegg's magnum opus, in that he's someone any sane and right-thinking person wants to punch after about twenty minutes, but he's still likeable over and above that. His energy, irrepressible nature, etcetera - sure, they all spring from his state of arrested development and lack of evolution as a person, but they still work on the level of animal cunning and the total charm offensive. (Which would be a good name for a band.)

Gary King is That Guy From School who hasn't actually changed at all, for whatever reason. Failure to engage with and be a part of the world, dislike of the idea of growing older - whatever, he is who he is, or, more accurately, he is who he was and wants to remain that way. It's because of this that he's able to convince The Network and their crazy mulch-and-replace program to leave the planet, and he saves the day for humanity in doing so. 

All well and good. 

Except that in the post-Network Britain, Gary's shown to have reunited with the teenage Blank versions of his friends (having killed his own teenage duplicate before the Network pulled out). This is... I don't like to say creepy, exactly, but it's a little odd; it's difficult to pull apart to write about, because Gary's still in the same psychological state he was when he left school, except that he now has his four friends back in the physical state they were in at the time and they are, in theory, the same psychologically. 

Gary's taking these Blank Friends around into the post-Feudal pubs and challenging their No Blanks policy by starting fights. 

This appears to be the sum of the ending. After all that's happened, Gary's still on a pub crawl with teenage versions of his friends, except that now he orders pints of water and starts fights. (Never mind that his Blank friends are one sharp punch away from having no face, thanks to the relative eggshell thickness of the Blank skull shown within the film). 

In theory, there's something positive to take away from this - Gary's doing what he's always wanted to, recapturing those teenage years, doing the things that made him happy, living his memories. But it's also a bit sad, in a way, because all that living in the past had got Gary before was, well, a failed suicide attempt and an unshakable desire to finish a legendary pub crawl. 

There's no progression, see? Even the Blank Adult versions of Peter and Oliver get a 'happy' ending, and so does Andrew. But Gary's become essentially a nomad in a state of arrested development. Which begs the question... 

What's the point of that ending? 

Gary doesn't change because Gary King doesn't want to change. Is it folly to have expected something along the lines of progression or character development or realisation or evolution? This is not to say that I can think of a better ending in the context of the epilogue - Gary does get everything he wants, truly, so what's better than that? 

The thing is... I'm not a great filmmaker, or writer, and I covered this yesterday, but... 

Why not just end it with the destruction of Newton Haven? 

The answer is, simply, structure. 

Shaun of the Dead could have ended with the army arriving, cut to black, credits, wham. Hot Fuzz could have ended without some of the final scenes in the police station (although, of course, you'd still have to have shown the final fate of Danny.) 

But Shaun finishes with an explanation of Ed's fate, and Fuzz finishes with a tying up of threads and an explanation of Danny's fate. This time, it's Andrew explaining Gary's fate, and it fits both structurally within the way the films work and, taken in the larger structure, within ending the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy; it's an ending to all three films, not just The World's End. 

I understand this. And in a way, it's the cinema equivalent of how Angel ended; running towards the next fight, "I kinda wanna slay the dragon", and this is no bad thing. 

In the context of the film itself, however... It's a little odd. 

Then again, maybe it's just me. 

"Can I not be the comic relief this time?"

So... 

I've seen The World's End. 

It turns out that midday matinees are about as popular as I remember them to be. No, seriously; because normal people have jobs and responsibilities and whatnot, I think I could have counted the number of people in the cinema on my two hands, maybe using a foot for the difficult calculations. 

This is how I like it. I'm an antisocial bastard, but it's a simple equation; the more people in a cinema, the more chances there are that someone will do something irritating. (Smartphone users, I'm looking at you.) 

I went in expecting not to really like the film. I went in out of misplaced loyalty because I loved Shaun of the Dead and liked Hot Fuzz. But something felt... I don't know, 'off' about things; is it Simon Pegg's meteoric - and quite possibly well-deserved - rise to A-list stardom? Ditto Edgar Wright, although Scott Pilgrim was not universally loved at the box office? When I say 'off', I mean that it's strange to see this reunion given the increase in wattage of at least two thirds of the trifecta - and Nick Frost hasn't exactly been too shabby, either.

So you have this group of on-the-ups high wattage people reuniting to do what is, in essence, something in the same thread as Shaun of the Dead, except with a bigger budget - although I can't justify that factually, as my web-fu is failing me, but it's probably not an unfounded assumption. 

It would be so easy for the elements not to mesh, or for something to feel out of place. 

I was surprised - pleasantly - to actually enjoy the film. It's chasing the same buzz of something weirdly cool, truly, trying to feel the same kind of epic that Shaun of the Dead did in sliding from romantic comedy to zombie film in a single seamless tonal shift; in this case, it's reunion comedy shifting to alien invasion, and it's actually arguably more seamlessly done than Shaun; it just sort of happens, without any particular warning. 

The pacing felt a little weird now and then until I realised it was driven entirely by the central character's obsessive needs, and then it made sense. The dialogue, too, is just crackly with sounding like how people actually talk to each other, especially people who were close a long time ago but haven't seen each other; the past is still there, and they still have the same kind of underlying 'love' for each other, and it takes so little for them to just access that kind of thing and start bickering and sniping and back-and-forthing; it's delightful dialogue, in a nutshell. 

It's also kind of refreshing to see that, at some point, Nick Frost asked not to be the Comic Relief, delegating the role entirely to Pegg; Frost is kind of revelatory as 'just a normal bloke badly irritated with the alien invasion'. He's serious, he doesn't really take any shit; he's Not Ed/Danny, in other words. Which is nice. 

One thing, though, and judge this for yourself; for me, the epilogue was completely unnecessary. God knows I'm no director, or decent writer, or in any major position to comment - I'm just someone on a desert island, throwing little blog posts out in bottles that occasionally people see - but the ending/epilogue/explanation was kind of... Odd. 

After THE BIG THING HAPPENS, there's this long-ish explanation of what happened next. It looks, in point of fact, like it was relatively expensive to film and ups the production values and feels, to me, pointless; after THE BIG THING HAPPENS, I expected a breather moment, a quip, then credits - and maybe in the credits, vignettes of post BIG THING life. 

Instead, epilogue. 

Oh well. Maybe I'm just missing the true relevance of Explaining What Happened Next... 

I guess if it were Trickeration he'd just X me out

I finally - after all these years, finally- got around to actually sitting down and watching Pitch Black.

 

It's one of those films that was always around when I was younger and at university for the first time. It had cachet; low-budget but good science fiction films were not exactly in premium supply back then. 

So there was always a video or - gasp - a DVD - lying around the shitty shared houses and bedsits I was living in, or it was always on Channel 4 (or 5) late at night. I think I must have watched it four times in pieces but never actually sat down and watched it from beginning to end before. 

(This has happened with a few films, I confess.) 

Having bought it for the princely sum of £1, though, I finally sat down and watched it from beginning to end, and enjoyed it immensely. 

I have a thing about Breaking Bad. It's good television, to be sure; expertly filmed, beautifully written. It's as good as people say it is. I don't go for it, however, because everyone in the show is an arsehole. I know this is probably the same as in real life - I'm a doe-eyed optimist, of course, and like to believe this is probably not true, but it probably provably is - but there isn't one single character in the show who's not unbelievably arseholic. Jesse is the nearest thing to sympathetic, and that's because he alternates between pitiable and powerful. Gus is perhaps the next along the line, but for all the good reasons he has for doing the things he does, he's still willing to do bad things for bad reasons, and does so, repeatedly. Hank is only that much less of an arsehole after he starts to deal with his PTSD and engages with his physical therapy. 

I don't quite get the appeal of watching a show where everyone starts out as irritating bastards and they only get worse. Granted, I've only seen the first four seasons, so maybe the fifth is a magical land of forgiveness and happiness and everyone gets what they want, plus a cake. But still. 

Maybe I just don't get the appeal. 

This is by contrast with Pitch Black, where only the bastards survive. 

Seriously; if you're anything other than a utilitarian hardcore bastard (or, to be fair, if you cross Riddick, which would just make you a stupid bastard) then, well, you die. 

The characters seem oddly fresh, too, thirteen years on; this is probably just my take on it, but this felt like one of the first times the Everybody Has Problems trope in filmmaking really worked. Nav-Officer slash Commander who heroically lands the ship? Yeah, she tried to jettison everyone in the cryogenic pods so she could survive. Security officer? A mercenary with a secret morphine addiction who justifies it by comparing it to coffee. Anyone who's a normative hero isn't; anyone who's just trying to survive is normative. 

There's also a sad judgment to be made about how Pitch Black, pre-9/11, was able to have an Imam with Muslim followers, representing the Religious People In Space subtrope. It's a little sad, and a little strange, watching this twelve years on, because it's religion in science fiction - something that doesn't necessarily happen quite so much these days. (I'd bring up the example of Shepherd Book from Firefly/Serenity, though. It does happen; just not quite so much.) 

Pitch Black, however, does have one of my favourite rack focuses in film. 

Early on - and spoilers, although the film's thirteen years old, so whaddayagonnado? - the survivors accidentally shoot another survivor who had only just woken up and didn't know about the crash, the circumstances, etcetera. He wanders up to ask some questions and blam, dead, hysteria moment. Everyone freaks, panics, but the camera remains still as they leave the frame, only to change focus; and there in the distance is Riddick, on a sun-lounger on top of a ship, having a nice drink and just relaxing. 

Comedy like that is why film can do things other mediums can't. Maybe. But it made my day...

The only way to get smarter is to play a smarter opponent

There is a chance that I'm the only person who woke up this week with the desire to see Revolver. 

Such is life. 

When I was younger - so much younger than today - I saw Revolver after it had come out because, as I think I've covered in some previous entry somewhere, I really used to be deeply into Guy Ritchie's films. 

If you've seen Revolver, you may find this funny, especially given the dodginess of Jason Statham's facial hair choices in the film. Seriously, that Fu Man Chu mustache / stubble combo is intense. 

Revolver is, however, an interesting film - in my opinion - if you take it apart and consider the pieces, rather than the way they've been smooshed together. 

Visually, for instance, it's fascinating - the colour palette is amazing, because it's more than just the orange/blue spin the colour wheel and pick two opposites school of thinking. (That said, Ray Liotta does spend a lot of time in blue light - or with a blue filter on the shot - while he's ostensibly tanning.)

There's also some innovative camerawork that needs paying heed to, also - especially during Sorter's very calm, very collected rampage towards the end, which is camerawork like you've never seen put together, where the camera never stops moving but the shot keeps changing (and the shots - a pun, or play on words - keep coming). 

It's also worth locating the film in the context of Strong's career, as an aside -  after revolver, it's less Prime Suspect Six and more Syriana, Stardust and Sunshine, so there's an alphabetical moving-on as well as a stardom-related moving-up. You could say the same for André 3000 - and it just feels wrong to refer to him as André Benjamin - but in his case, his film career... Let's just not go there. It'll take you all of two clicks to check it out in Wikipedia, if you're so inclined. I really like Idlewild, but the rest... 

Revolver is, however, not universally loved. I like to pretend that the criticism about the 'pretensions' and the 'plot' are just veiled digs at Jason Statham's facial hair, but the fact is that the plot is a bit pretentious, but this is only a bad thing because it keeps trying to ground itself in a gangster story. Ostensibly there are two plotlines; 

- Green is out for revenge on Macha because Green's sister-in-law ended up dead following the last time they were involved

- Green is trying to dissipate his id - which is named, I think, Sam Gold, although Sam Gold is a collective term for every character's id - by confronting his primal, fight-or-flight fight-or-fuck urges. 

Okay. Pretentious. 

The second one, however, is arguably the more interesting of the storylines, because it skips merrily away from consensus reality and moves the viewer into a world where two criminals - who may or may not exist - can vanish from their cells in solitary confinement without a trace, can predict the future (with a limited range) and can cure a man of a degenerative blood disease by making him donate his entire fortune to charity. 

It's all figurative, don't you know, because by ridding himself of his ill-gotten gains, Green is cleansing his karma (and doing so even more by displacing his largess onto his enemy for them to take the credit). Green, having spent his two years out of prison - 

- And yes, watching someone get released from prison then immediately cutting to black and Two Years Later is just plain cheeky - 

- making money using his ingenious con system taught to him by his maybe-cellmates, trapping the three people responsible for his sister-in-law's death in the web of their boss to their eventual detriment then demise and then walking up to his nemesis and winning a fortune from them on the flip of a chip, has technically rotten karma, and it's all because of his id. 

I don't know if I actually have to italicise id, but I'm enjoying doing so, so...

If Mr Ritchie had simply played it out as a straight revenge tale - Snatch meets Ocean's Eleven - then it would have been just another cockney-ish gangster tale in his canon of gangster tales. If he'd taken it all the other way and just went for full-on Kabbalah mysticism, it would, in theory, have had even less of an audience. So in a way - in a roundabout way, although as much of a roundabout way as a driving tour in Milton Keynes - Revolver is the ideal, crazystrange mix of 'Themes Guy Ritchie Knows How To Do" and "Themes Guy Ritchie Was Interested In At The Time", or at least the right mix to draw an audience, however small. 

Here's something final to ponder on - using my atrophied film information-finding skills, Revolver has a slight weirdness to it's statistics. For one, I can't find out what the original budget was. 

The last film I ever had this trouble with was The Spirit. Don't ask. Seriously, don't ask.

Spiraling out from this, consider that, according to my limited sources, Revolver had a box office of $84,738 in America, which is shocking. That's just under $1700 per state, or $0.0003 per person in the USA, although that's using the current population for the statistic, which is misleading. 

Were there just no Ray Liotta fans who wanted to see his arse on screen in blue lighting out there enough to justify a ticket to the film? Was it just not marketed, at all? Don't get me wrong, it went on to gross nearly $7 million in Overseas Territories, i.e. Not The USA, but still, I'm assuming that it cost more than seven and a half million to make, because it's so damn sparkly. 

Plus, it only cost me 80p to buy. 

It was worth the price. 

I don't wanna cause any unnecessary stress, but I just came from Gleason's property and he seems to think there's a panther roaming the area.

It took a bit of time to get back into watching films. 

My attention span is not what it -

- Ooh! Shiny! - 

- Where was I? 

Anyway.

Part of my rehabilitation was watching so-bad-they're-maybe-good films. 

Another part has been trying to find out-of-the-way films. 

To explain this; I'm a huge William Gibson fan. Of his books, I'd put Pattern Recognition right up there as my favourite. Pattern Recognition's central character, Cayce Pollard, is fascinating on many levels, but one of these is that she has an allergic reaction to certain brands (in the primary instance, the Michelin Man). 

I don't claim anything as extreme as that, but I have started feeling less and less like going to see what you might un-ironically call 'mainstream cinema', partly because the story-lines tend to be... Guessable, I think, is the word. 

There's a whole debate to be had about the necessity of selling recognisable product - i.e. guaranteeing an audience with the promissory note that what they're going to see will fall within expected experience boundaries - which is fine and good. Really, it is fine and good, because you have to have a template that at least tries to guarantee a return on investors' money. 

It's getting a bit bad, though, because I now hate the idea of going to the cinema, and that makes me feel old. It also makes me feel like, say, a Methodist going to a Baptist church; the same religion, but completely different expectations. 

For instance; I know I'm not the only one to think this, although that doesn't help, but; is it so fucking difficult to turn off your smart phone in the cinema? If you're so in-demand and can't miss an email or your personal empire will crumble, why the fuck are you watching a film? 

Having a bright screen in your field-of-vision in a darkened cinema is just distracting as shit, really. 

Then there's your common-or-garden talkers, crunchers, and all-around depth and variety of humanity represented in the worst aspects of what people think they can get away with in public spaces. 

So cinemas are out, unless justifiable homicide has been put on the lawbooks here and I simply haven't noticed. 

This has led to me trawling my local CEX to find cheapjack films or less cheap films that are, in some way, off the beaten track. 

This is how I came to end up watching Red Hill. 

If you're looking for the short verdict - and if you're looking for the short verdict and you've read this far, what the hell - then Red Hill is well worth watching. 

The trailer does a good job of making it look like a horror slash western, however, when it's really not. 

Spoilers from hereon out, in case you needed warning.

The one main problem with Red Hill is narrative necessity. You have two divergent plot strands; a young police constable moving to the sticks for the quiet life, and a violent prisoner travelling back to the town to exact a bloody revenge on all the law therein.

These just so happen to happen on the same day. 

In some ways, this may be a budgetary fact; to film an extra, say, twenty minutes to half-an-hour of Cooper adjusting to small-town life, getting to know people, settling in but not always sure of the secret below the town's surface would probably have cost too much and slowed the pacing down. 

So, fine. Narrative necessity demands that the escaped murderer - well, 'murderer' - comes to town on the same day the new policeman arrives. 

Such is life. 

I would take issue with one other neat piece of narrative causality, however; for a small town, Red Hill has almost no visible inhabitants. The only time you see more than, say, ten people at once, is at a church meeting at the beginning used to establish the Sheriff's character, where a lot of lineless extras sit in the church hall and clap and holler. 

After that, the most crowded scene is where the Sheriff rounds up his posse, and even then I'm struggling to remember if there were more than ten people there. 

After that, the townsfolk disappear, because there's a storm coming - so the storm warning is issued and everyone is told to hole up and hide - although the storm is, of course, also a metaphorical storm in the form of Jimmy. 

Jimmy is, arguably, the most fascinating character, even though he doesn't say a word until the final few minutes. He's portrayed as this force of nature sweeping into town to exact revenge on the people who wronged him in the worst possible way and made him pay the price for it. 

There's a slight story-line schism around Jimmy, however. Cooper's plot is kind of TV-movie big town cop in a small town, with all the cutesy that implies; but when Jimmy rides into town, that's all shelved and Cooper's elastic-band stretches further away from the main story-line until the end where it snaps back and draws him with it. Put it this way; out of narrative necessity, Cooper is knocked out and left in locations far away from the action twice, and has to work his way back into the main plotline. 

This means the pacing takes a knock here and there, but this is saved somewhat by the fact that the visuals are gorgeous. Seriously; any concerns about a tv-movie plot are taken care of by the cinematography. Occasionally the framing is a little weird, but otherwise it's amazing.

So the main problem is that the two story-lines take a long time to mesh, and because of this neither really has any room to properly breathe and evolve; they both just kind of happen and then happen together. It doesn't help that Jimmy's story is arguably much more compelling than Cooper's, although that's a function of the revenge story-line versus the pastoral story-line, and it's kind of inevitable. 

It was worth, however, the £2 I paid for it. 

I fear this cannot be said for the next selection, for which - like an idiot - I paid £6 for even though it was never going to be worth that much; 

In the desert in a house made of tin

So let's talk about something that I can actually say matters - well, 'matters' - to me. 

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 and carry on and whatnot. 

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. 

Old pair of shoes the same place they were left

I have to be honest; I thought about not writing, any more. 

This is one of those tricky situations, because if I start harping on about how nobody cares, it comes across as just, well, harping on at best and fishing for complements at worst. 

I like this blog. I like how it's hit a hundred and fifty entries over time.

I just don't know if anyone's actually reading the damn thing! 

The best of we had a couple of posts ago highlighted that certain titles seemed to bring in the readers - mostly Moby lyrics, really, which is kind of funny in a way - but it's probably time to just admit that this blog is not made for stardom, really. 

Then again, 2152 pageviews over three and a half years isn't, maybe, so bad. 

It's time for the second admission; I don't know if I actually have anything worth saying, or, at least, writing about. 

Shocking, I know. 

But I've been running this blog on the fumes of talking about the experience of being a mature student in the arts and humanities along with half-informed film criticism consisting of personal historical statements and half-formed analysis. 

This in itself isn't unusual - I like to think that there are many other blogs out there, some less informed or less well written or less prone to long, run-on sentences that tire you out just by having to read them - but it's not what I'm after. 

Herein, then, is - having written the one hundred and fiftieth post a while ago - the new-fangled, quality-controlling, Eton Crow pledge; 

From this post forward, I'll only be publishing anything if I actually believe it merits publishing. 

So there you go!