From Bob Boze Bell’s Big Bad Book of Bad Diary Entries
By Bob Boze Bell
July 24, 2017
My son Thomas
finds all the best comic book stores in every town we visit. In Paris he found,
what we came to call Comic Book Row, which is an intersection and side street
off Saint Germaine, on the Left Bank, full of specialty comic book stores (one
shop specializes strictly in Tin Tin art prints). I was immediately stunned
(and that is the right word) at the wide variety of Western comics and Western
themed graphic novels shown prominently in almost all the stores. And we're not
talking about just the old school titles like Lucky Luke and Lt. Blueberry, but
new titles with big, over-sized, hard covers and excellent artwork on the
inside. I bought as many as I could fit into my carry on suitcase, quickly went
over that limit and decided to buy another bag to transport these home. They
are that cool.
A partial sampling
of the Western graphic novels I bought in Paris, Mainz and Frankfurt.
As I have
studied them for the past several days, my amazement has given way to
bewilderment. Why aren't these titles available in the U.S.? Or, better still,
why isn't there a market for Westerns in the country that created the genre in
the first place?
I asked the
Frankfurt Comicladen X-Tra-Boox shop owner Ludwig Strzyz this question, and
here is what he told me: "In the U.S. it's 90% super hero comics, and then
in the back of the store, near the toilet, or in the toilet, is all the rest.
In Europe we have big and healthy categories for Adventure and Western."
Frankfurt Comic
Shop Owner—and fellow drummer—Wolfgang Strzyz
Full disclosure:
Wolfgang put on a tape of the Kink's "You Really Got Me," and I knew
I had to buy something from this guy. We compared notes as drummers and rock
music (at the checkout counter he has a 24-hour cam site pointed at the crosswalk
at Abby Road in England and we spent several minutes laughing in amazement at
all the kids posing on the legendary site of the Beatles walking across the
painted stripes).
T. Bell scores
another coup down a side street in Mainz, Germany
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