Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Yesterday I subverted the norm by getting up before Nikki, on a weekend no less, and going to Bristol to a comic convention (well, THE UK comic convention) though we both nearly scuppered by travel plans when Seb met witha  bus drive who wasn’t going to allow him to pay and I was delayed by the Tube.

A funny thing about the tube is that it can tell you a journey will take 30 minutes and then take twice that long. I made it to Paddington with zero knowledge of where I was going, and about 2 minutes to spare. I found a board and just as I read what train I was suppoed to be getting, I heard an announcement saying it was about to leave. I looked at the board, which told me I needed to get to Platform 11. Then I looked around for a sign, which told me I was next to… platform 2. Cue some entirely unwanted sprinting the length of Paddington station. I did make it onto the train though. The first time I jumped in a door I found myself surrounded by bikes, and assuming this wasn’t some kind of bicycle-based invasion, I found a more suitable carriage.

Managed to meet Seb in Didcot, and then we travelled on to Bristol. We spent a short while trying to figure out where we were supposed to go for the hotel, eventually phoning Rachel for help and then following the trail of nerdish T-Shirts, which meant a conversation we had on the train about T-Shirts suddenly began to prove surprisingly prescient. We then had to walk back from the hotel to the train station, because only the talks were at the hotel, the fun stuff was in the conference halls of some museum.

As you can expect, the majority of the day was spent flicking through boxes, reminiscing about crappy old comics, geeking out over the rarer ones, and generally immersing ourselves in total nerdism. Seb showed me a hilarious comic from the 90s where Blue Beetle and Booster Gold got Exxxtreme makeovers that I initially refused to believe wasn’t a parody. This sort of in-depth comics examining isn’t really possible at other conventions. At some it’s because I’m with other people who won’t stand for that sort of hanging around for an hour, at others it’s because there’s no way to get around the whole thing if you were to stop for any in-depth analysis. The convention in Bristol was actually quite small compared to what I usually go to, but I spent easily the longest there than at any other.

We had a look at the Top Shelf stall and I decided to do one of my entirely rational “I’ll definitely buy it one day, so I might as well just buy it now” moments and spent £30 buying up Jeff Brown’s back catalogue. The guy at the stall told us how Jeff Brown had suddenly made it big in the UK this year, and thanked me for the sale because “small press lives and dies by each sale.” Pity the postage costs to the UK are astronomical else I’d do it more.

Mid-way through the afternoon we tried to find a pub that was open to have some food in, but eventually discovered that there was a canal between us and any possible eating venue. Temple Meads station should otherwise be known as the Station to Nowhere, because there’s really nothing you’d want to go there for besides a museum and a comic convention, unless Bristol’s finest, crappest hotels is your big interest. We did eventually find a half-decent place called Toto Rothschilds on our side of the canal and I was pretty pleased with the food, even if the dude serving us treated us not unlike the social lepers a couple of comic geeks would naturally appear to be.

On the way back, the train line website had scammed me into buying tickets for a train Seb couldn’t actually get, so I left him on the platform and was free spend my trip home reading the comics I bought (Avengers: Ultron Imperative, A Brian Wood issue of Generation X, and issue of X-Men Unlimited and the Jeff Brown stuff) as well as Excel Saga Volume 14 that Ian had lent me.

All in all, a most satisfying convention. I wonder what some of the talks were like, and it sounds like if you’re into the UK comics scene heavily the real thing to do is hang around after hours and get involved in the after-show events, but that wasn’t really possible. Perhaps another time. I look forward to future visits to the Bristol con.

Amusingly, last time I was in Bristol it was some years ago, we were staying at Relly’s flat, meeting her and Paul for the first time, and seeing Easyworld play the Ashton Court festival. It sometimes surprises me how much has changed since then. I’d do a list but if you lived it, you already know, and it you didn’t, you probably don’t care. I mean, I don’t even especially, it just gave me an odd sense of continuity to be hanging around in Bristol again after so much has passed.