There have been only two instances I can personally recall in which anybody has clapped in a cinema. The first was at the beginning of yet another Harry Potter movie. A gang of teenage girls heralded the opening theme with whoops and cheers, whilst even my five-year-old brother cringed, along with the rest of my family, at the thought of the next three hours he had to endure. As Daniel Radcliffe appeared on screen my mum started sobbing quietly into her coat at the realisation that ‘family time’ would forever be associated with torture.

Needless to say, the ending credits rolled in silence.

The second, more relevant instance was at the end of Tarantino-flop ‘Death Proof’. Having read, and been disappointed by, the reviews, I had braced myself to do the right thing by my fan-boy nature and gone in, teeth-gritted, to show my support. And I loved it. Absolutely thrilling, and hilarious, and thrilling again. This time the ending credits burst onto the screen, finally giving the audience a chance to catch their breath. The lights went up and I could see the grins on people’s faces, just as the front row started clapping and, caught up in the moment, so did I. This is what the reviewers missed. They’d been so busy scrutinising the technical structure of the story that they’d forgotten to notice that the whole thing was just insanely good fun. But the strange thing was that I actually agreed with the reviewers. It wasn’t that they didn’t know what they were talking about, they were completely right. The pacing was completely off, screeching to a halt halfway through and starting to build the tension again from scratch. The dialogue was laboured and maybe tried too hard. But the people in the cinema with me realised something the reviewers didn’t; it didn’t matter.

So here’s what annoys me. Every five minutes I hear some movie buff complaining that Hollywood is churning out the same formulaic movie again and again, faded copies of once successful formulas, done to death. They mourn the loss of something genre defining, something risk taking, and most importantly something original. But then, when Tarantino actually does that, actually experiments with narrative techniques and plays with the formula, he is slated for doing precisely what these people complain doesn’t happen enough, NOT sticking to the numbers. Sure it might not have worked completely, but he did something different, and I for one wasn’t bothered for a minute. In fact I enjoyed it more. Now Tarantino is powerful and rich enough to do whatever he wants without bowing to what producers think movies should be like, we get to experience to the full all the characteristics that made us love his movies in the first place, namely the dialogue, the soundtrack and the all-pervading sense of cool. It’s a movie that was made by Quentin Tarantino and I can tell it is; because his personality shows in every frame.

And this is exactly what happens with comics.

Sure people can and do make unique, personal works in the mainstream, but only when they’ve spent years toiling at the same formulaic superhero guff for years. And even then, it’s only begrudgingly that these editors you’ve spent years writing for will publish your baby, because if it takes a risk, then no one wants to invest the cash. The reason Death proof ran for only two to three weeks in my local London cinema, and the reason only about thirty people were in the audience was because it did something different. Why waste the money trying to push something that people might not like when you have another guaranteed hit with Harry Potter: The wizard’s retirement, or Infinite Crisis ninety nine? But the thing is it’s not the film industries or the comic’s industries fault, it’s ours. Because no matter how much reviewers complain, it’s what the people want. We all went to see Die Hard 4.0 and everyone will buy Spiderman all over again because a different artist might give us a completely different angle on the same story told for the seventeenth time.

But it’s a dangerous game they play. Each time the sequel of the sequel (in spirit if not necessarily name) gets released, slightly less people will pack the box office as the jaded ones are left behind. Eventually more and more Marvel fans will realise that they’ve read this one before, and it all turns out the same in the end. Eventually there won’t be anyone left. And good. It’s a shame it has to happen this way, but when it does maybe for once a major comics publisher will take a small press creator who really experiments, who really pushes the envelope, and let him write something interesting instead of saying, ‘wow this stuff is so original but we’d rather you write our comic THIS way, otherwise the fans might be scared off.’ Maybe this generation will discover it’s own Tarantino, hell maybe university students will be given a band of their own to dance to so they don’t have to listen to The Smiths any more. But I’m not going to ask for miracles.

It’s up to US to try the new stuff, to see the experimental films, to show that we aren’t going to be scared by something DIFFERENT, that it might, just might, be worth taking a risk for once. Hopefully then, comics as a whole will have its own infinite crisis, new writers instead of veterans will be given the chance to write something new, to change how we, and the public in general, perceive the medium. And when it’s over, the future will be glorious.

Oli Smith is the man behind Hazy Thursday and the new Summer Ball. See more of him at www.idlechild.co.uk