While in Paris, we toured the Eiffel Tower, took a cruise down the Seine, visited Versailles, the Louvre, Musée D’Orsay, and the Legion of Honor. We also attended a fantastic after hours light show at Napoleon’s Tomb.
But priorities—I also visited comic book stores!
In preparation, I Google mapped comics shops and bookmarked them before our trip. During that search, I came across the well known Forbidden Planet London Megastore and two stores in Paris’s Latin Quarter (which apparently is essentially a Frankified college town): Album Comics and nearby Pulp Comics. (By the way, the Paris stores are also within a stone’s throw of the English-language bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, founded in 1951, which took its name from the one founded in 1919 at another location on the Left Bank, which closed in 1941. We stopped by there as well.)
All three are fantastic comic book stores with diverse selections, but surprisingly very focused on American mainstream comics. At Forbidden Planet in London, they were well stocked with perennials like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. And when I visited, Forbidden Planet was hopping! I was impressed by the number of young people there (both teens and young adults), often in groups, talking about comics they were reading. I also noticed parents with their children.
But I really wanted to check out the native country’s comics selections. At Album Comics, I did purchase some French language comics I found.
After leaving Album Comics, I then visited Pulp Comics only about a block away. Then as I left the latter store, across the street, I spotted by happenstance what turned out to be what I was truly looking for, a separate Album sister store that focused on French language comics: Momie BD! (BD stands for bande dessinee, the French name for comics. There is also a nearby Momie Manga store.)
As you’ll see from my photos of my haul, I went a bit nuts there! My primary goal was to buy a Ric Hochet comics album—I posted about Ric Hochet awhile ago, originally a ‘60s-era world traveling journalist who encounters adventure and mystery, who also happens to coincidentally resemble my own lead character (or, rather, the other way around). New Ric Hochet adventures are being published, the first few being translated in English, which I purchased as Kindle books and loved. Sadly, they stopped issuing English editions only after a few issues, but I recently realized that I could use my iPhone’s native Translate app to read them (an app, I should add, came in handy on this trip).
Anyway, the other legacy comics series I picked up was a comics adaptation of Lupin (based on a Japanese manga and animated property that itself was partly inspired by an old French gentleman thief character) and Michel Vaillant, about the adventures of a race car driver that I also was familiar with. The rest were all new and unknown to me, but the art was terrific. (The draftsmanship and technical craft of European cartoonists are amazing.) In fact, after the first visit, I even returned the next day to buy more. Even my wife was impressed by the comics, and I purchased an album and some merch (a Tintin pin) that interested her.
On my second visit, I also realized that just next door was a small shop that specialized in vintage and collectible comics albums, called Aaapoum Bapoum—though American comics were well represented, they were all French language. (You’ll see a Will Eisner/Spirit section in the photos.) I asked if they carried any Terry and the Pirates, which the shopkeeper then pulled off a bookshelf for me to look at, which you'll also see in the photos.
As an aside, I initially planned to bring some of my own comics just to share with the stores. However, when I looked into it, there were some custom laws that I found a little daunting, particularly in England, that seemed to technically require me to declare that I was carrying commercial goods that might be subject to VAT tax. At the end of the day, although I believe I was below the taxable thresholds, I decided not to risk any trouble with customs. All that said, when we arrived in London and Paris, aside from normal security checks, we encountered no checks whatsoever entering the countries. In fact, having gone through TSA at LAX, there was no security check when we stepped off the plane in the U.K.—all us passengers were just waved through. I only planned to bring two or three copies of each of my trades and some issues; in retrospect, I probably could have done so without a problem. I did bring along some promotional postcards and business cards, and shared them at Momie BD.
No comments:
Post a Comment