I try to think back to the 80s and 90s, to the things that excited a younger me, who was much more invested in movie series and comic books. I scan the shelves again. There’s no Ripley from Alien here, no Rachel or Leon from Blade Runner, no Clarence Boddicker from Robocop—all of which I’m sure exist. Reluctantly I grab a (Mad) Max Rockatansky figure as it feels like the next best thing, a tiny recreation of Tom Hardy stripped of all the identifying facial features that make him Tom Hardy. Plus it’s been discounted to just $10 from the usual $15, for some reason that the clerk is unsure of. It might just be that it was unpopular, he told me. I feel like my fan-based identity is being valued and ranked.
Comic book stores are complex places for me these days, I have to admit. I get a weird mix of nostalgia and dread when I walk into one. I spent a sizable chunk of my life growing up in the UK hanging out in them, pouring over top-shelf copies of Heavy Metal magazine, sci-fi artbooks, Love and Rockets comics, and the translated manga that was still such a rarity back then. Up until a couple of years ago I’d still pop in to any comic book store I passed to see what interesting indie published stuff they had. But increasingly it started to feel like that stuff was being pushed to the back of the store, to some ever shrinking dark corner, while valuable shelf space was taken up by the products from the big corporate franchises—Marvel, Star Wars, DC, Harry Potter. Very American stories about good and evil from very American corporations. Sure I could dismiss a lot of this feeling to being a grumpy old man—I’m well into my 40s now—but I see plenty of other men in their 40s in these stores, and they usually look far less grumpy than me. They look like they still belong. Instead I feel like I’m being crushed by an unstoppable wave of nerd imperialism, a steamrolling of pop culture by corporate franchises that want to reduce everything to product lines of episodic stories that never end, generic Lego playsets, and uniformly sized and packaged vinyl toys.
Plus there was something else that pulled me out of my comic and movies obsession when I was a teenager. Fueled by early hip-hop and rave culture I became engrossed with music, and the comic stores I hung out in soon gave way to record stores. Buying and collecting vinyl became my new obsession, my new main source for spending the little money I had, and the new way of defining myself, of giving teenage me an identity. I was one of those record guys. A wannabee DJ. Over the following years I amassed a collection of a few thousand cassette tapes, CDs, and vinyl records. I still have most of them now, stored away in a friend’s attic back in the UK.
And it was then, just as I was leaving the store with my Mad Max Funko Pop! that it hit me, the most basic of connections I’d somehow failed to already make. Wait a minute. Vinyl records? Vinyl toys? Are they made from the same thing?
No comments:
Post a Comment