Ordinary Person

Comic-Con in this city
is a dull affair,
not much cosplay and
too many stalls, you’ll find a few
Kylo Rens facing off a Scorpion
or a Sub-Zero and wonder
why NetherRealm hasn’t added
a Star Wars character to one
of its DLCs. Is it because Disney
would find the idea of Chewbacca
with his fury claws
feasting on Sonya Blade
repulsive? Or is it something
to do with the
franchises owned by
different conglomerates?
It’s probably the latter because
otherwise, we’d get the MDCECU
with The Joker conspiring
with Thanos in an asylum
in the multiverse where
a deranged Peter Parker 4 who
went insane because a
rogue Superman tortured him,
finds a stash of Kryptonite
that the Batman Who Laughs
hid. You won’t find robot heads
or angelic beings from Landfall
straight out of an issue of Saga here,
you won’t even find a
cigarette smoking Trumbo
or a bearded, dirty looking Bukowski,
you might, however, find
regressive, religious fanaticism
in its subtlest, soft-pedalled
form: people dressing up
as certain gods whose very names
others invoke when vandalising
a minority’s place of worship.
I look at the stalls, and most
of them cater to gamers,
hardcore shooters without
much narrative or player choices
and a lot of gore,
PS5 disks because Nintendo
doesn’t have a market here,
most deem it childish,
and subscription-based
Game Pass probably won’t work
because of the numerous edicts
relating to monthly payments
that the government has passed
in the name of a ‘cash-free society
without black money or corruption.’
A few stalls display prints and other
artwork and I pity the poor
buggers, spending hours drawing
up a graphic novel and standing for
days, trying to sell it in
a place where the machine gun
machismo of COD, or
the bottomless, uber-competitive
cesspool that
is FIFA are the only things
that seem to matter.