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Comic Con 2025

Today turned out to be far more interesting than I expected it to: maybe not quite up there with those truly awesome days, but certainly good enough to blog about. I had heard Comic Con was happening this weekend on the news a couple of days ago. Such events interest me, but to be honest I was not enthusiastic enough to pay an exorbitant amount to get in. Thus this morning I thought I would just roll over to the Excel Centre to check out what was going on, try to find something worth blogging about, and then come back.

That, then, is what I did, catching the DLR a single stop under the river and having a trundle around the dock, before heading to the exhibition centre to check out what was going on. I thought I would hang around there for a few minutes before heading home. However, on the spur of the moment and out of pure curiosity, I decided to roll up to the entrance and ask how much it would cost to go in, and to my total astonishment I was told I could go in for free.

In that moment my afternoon obviously changed: I suddenly had something interesting to do. Going into the exhibition centre, I was instantly fascinated: there were thousands of people, most younger than me, dressed in all kinds of weird costumes. Many I recognised, but others obviously came from fictions I had no idea about. There were also stalls and tables and talks being given. People were playing computer games. I was instantly fascinated, and my affection for London was instantly renewed – where else could I just roll into such a monumental event?

I stayed there for two or three hours, fascinated by the culture. Maybe it wasn’t quite my thing, given that I’m not really a comic book or computer game guy, but it certainly got my cultural juices flowing. Comic Con is on all weekend, so I’m now seriously considering heading there again tomorrow: if today was anything to go by, given it will be the main day of the convention I suspect it will be incredible.

Are They Filmmakers?

Film is such a strange, beguiling artform when you think about it: to a unique extent, it is at the same time supremely democratic and eye-wateringly exclusive. Unlike any other art form or mode of expression, it is something just about anyone can ‘do’, simply by holding up a camera and pressing ‘record’; yet on the other hand the film industry is notoriously difficult to get into, and making a proper, professional film for cinematic release takes years of work, dizzying amounts of networking (and luck), and obscene amounts of money. Thus in these days of camera-phones and Youtube, we find ourselves at a point where anyone can make a film by pointing a camera at something and recording it, before uploading it to make it available to the entire online world.

The question is, does that mean that they are filmmakers? At university I learned what an extremely sophisticated artform film is: Contemporary cinema is an amalgamation of techniques and styles, all of them having evolved over the last century or so, to form a rich, intriguing filmic language. You only have to read guys like Andre Bazin or Christian Metz to get an idea of just how beautiful and complex it is. Now, however, all that is being bypassed: online, film in the broader sense is becoming simply the recording of moving images, devoid of any art, style, technique or appreciation of film in any philosophical sense. It is as if what came before has been bypassed and ignored, akin to someone throwing paint haphazardly onto a canvas in roughly the shape of a woman, and proclaiming themself the next da Vinci. The result might express someone’s thoughts and feelings clearly enough, but can you call it art?

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Film, like any other artform, is constantly evolving. The way it is accessible to anyone makes it hugely democratic. Yet, as a cinephile, part of me worries that the door has been opened to luddites with no idea what they are doing or any real appreciation of the artistry of film, resulting in the slow yet gradual wilting of the quality of films as a whole. To put it another way, it is not that difficult to write a few sentences to convey a message; but to write something with any deeper meaning or nuance, to say something meaningful about life, the universe and everything, it helps to have a knowledge of literature more broadly. That is the point at which writing, film or any other art gains true intellectual weight; without such context, it is just a few pictures or words, void of any real meaning.

Notes On A Fixed Lift

Just to follow up on this entry from a couple of weeks ago, not that I think anyone will be particularly interested, but I’m pleased to note that the lifts at Star Lane DLR station are working again. On the whole, it must be said that I’m quite impressed at how quickly TFL seems to fix such things. I have encountered broken lifts several times in the past, only to find them fully functional upon my next visit. Obviously it just goes to show how much money there is in TFL and London in general.

In contrast, this morning on the news I heard that one of the very last potteries in Stoke on Trent is about to close. The item mentioned how the pottery industry there has been decimated, bringing the economy of the entire city with it. As someone who was brought up quite close to Stoke and who visited it regularly as a child, I can’t help being struck by the contrast between London and other parts of the country. I know that manufacturing pottery was once part of the very identity of that area, so it might be difficult to see how it could live on after this decline. But surely with the right investment, Stoke can be as vibrant a place as anywhere.

I see wonderful new things being built every day in the capital; each time I go out I find yet another highly gentrified redeveloped new area as I explore the metropolis using it’s state-of-the-art, multi-billion pound transport network (the overground notwithstanding). I know I have touched on this before, but to what extent does all this come at the expense of elsewhere in the country? Frankly, it sounds more and more like places such as Stoke are being left to go to ruin while the front facade of the nation, it’s capital, is endlessly spruced up.