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14 March 2013

If only arms dealers could merge with the friendly ranks of nerdy comics fanatics

Will Self's "Madness of Crowds" column.

By Will Self

At Canning Town Station, on the Docklands Light Railway platform, the crowd is building up. It’s not yet so dense that I have that disturbing mental image of a human version of the penny cascade in an amusement arcade: all the little bodies clunking down on to the tracks, the game of life playing out in bloody and mangled change . . . Still, the crowd is sufficiently numerous and I can’t forbear from considering whether there are more anti-pigeon barbs in sight, or people? Moreover, if those people were to be miniaturised, would the barbs be sufficiently rigid and acuminate for me to impale them on these, as if they were sentient canapés?

The train comes and it’s crowded in the carriage – but what sort of people are these? Certainly not the type I expected to be heading to the ExCeL Centre on a cold Sunday in February for the London Super Comic Convention. I know the comic crowd; I see them all the time on my trips to the Forbidden Planet shop in the West End. They have hoodies and piercings, acne or facial hair (if they’re old and male enough), garish T-shirts and leather overcoats/waistcoats/bucklers; they wear glasses and bobble hats and a disproportionate number of them have idiosyncratic body forms. They’re too frumpy to be serious music fans, and too pallid and unconventional to be sports nuts. If they looked a little more studious they’d be science geeks. What they are, indisputably, are nerds.

Yes, black, brown and white nerds; girl and boy and intersex nerds; gay nerds and straight nerds; old and young nerds – and I love them all. One of the most heartening phenomena in today’s Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd – the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love Buffy the Vampire Slayer merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.

My membership of this happy band is distal – it’s my 11-year-old who most loves comics – but I’m looking forward to the Super Comic Convention as much as the next 51-year-old who has a sneaking urge to reverse the dressing order of his pants and his tights. However, the passengers in the train carriage have the caramelised skin tones of sunbed worshippers and foundation-slappers; their clothes are oppressively colour-coded and they all have that painful air of people who, though not inherently attractive, are fiercely dedicated to making the best of what they’ve got. They give me the heeb. Still, the journey is short and soon enough we’re all tramping along the walkways into the gigantic exhibition centre, where all is revealed: the travellers on the DLR are amateur uglies heading for Professional Beauty 2013.

Still, let them flog unguents for all I care – I’m delighted finally to have made it to the ExCeL, that great entrepôt of consumerist desire that now squats beside the docks where once its objects were unloaded. The closest I’ve got in the past is a road bridge half a mile off, where, together with other arms trade protesters, I was kettled by police protecting the right of Her Majesty’s Government to flog death metal to the Saudi regime at the annual DSEI (Defence and Security Equipment International).

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Wandering along the central concourse, I am thrilled by the great profusion of eateries. It’s like a mash-up of the two columns I write for this magazine: a mad crowd – if you will – of real meals. Here and there are little groups of Batmen and Wonder Women who strike poses for happy snappers. After about 200 yards of this we reach the right hall and, picking up our programme and plasticised badge, we start to tour the stalls. The atmosphere is ecumenical: spiky-haired manga fans and mutant-survivalist Judge Dredd acolytes mingle in the queues to meet their favourite artists.

There’s only one problem with the manifestly sane crowd assembled for the London Super Comic Convention: it’s rather on the sparse side. Indeed, the huge and echoic exhibition hall (easily high-ceilinged enough to hold a knock-off Polaris missile) feels distinctly empty. If only, I muse . . . if only the arms fair and the comic convention could somehow be amalgamated into one event. Initially the arms dealers might bridle, but they’d be absorbed into the nerdy mass soon enough, I think, and end up trading brightly coloured pictures of weapons, rather than the hurtfully real thing.

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