Day 401

aka Wednesday 7th March 2018

Today was New Comic Book Day, so I went into town and picked up these beauties:

...and as luck would have it Cecil Castellucci and Jamie Coe were signing at Orbital, so I was able to get my Shade, The Changing Woman #1 signed!!!:

…and I got some Tintin books (I loved Tintin when I was younger and I’m replacing the battered and wore copies of my youth), Twin Peaks Season 3 boxset and The Quiet American:

...I also did today’s G2 crossword:

...and I also learnt/heard that the NME announced that the 9^th Mar 2018 print edition would be the last print version of the NME. Which both surprised me and didn’t, before it became a free paper I hadn’t brought the NME because (a) as I got older my taste in music stayed the same and weren’t reflected in the NME and (b) the newer music the NME focussed on bored me or passed me by, but I assumed that I would be replaced by a younger reader, reading about bands doing music that is new and shocking to him/her (in the same way that it had done for me in my youth).

Then, due to the pressures of the modern world faced by print media, it became a free paper and I picked it up again and it was terrible. A soulless facsimile of the music paper it had once been, more interested in selling advertising space than reporting on music, which could be read, cover to cover, in literally ten minutes or less. Basically, they were holding up a white flag and surrendering to market forces (unlike other magazines, like Louder Than War and Electronic Sound who have found a way to survive as a printed magazine). 

For a good ten to 15 years the NME (along with the Melody Maker, Jockey Slut and Select) was a weekly (or monthly) part of my life, cluing me onto new bands, new sounds, new political ideas, new lifestyles and new ideas and now it’s gone.