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Wednesday, January 04, 2006
City mouse, comics mouse
Monday Johanna wrote a post in response to Chris Butcher’s response to Andrew Arnold’s 2005 best of list. In that post she wrote something that goes along with a notion I’ve been having since August.
She wrote “This is a bookstore list, a list that plays best in ‘cultural capitals’ like New York or Butcher’s Toronto or San Francisco.” In August I moved to the third cultural capital listed and have found that the experience of being a comic book fan way different that of being a fan in the "bedroom community” of Los Angeles of which I was living in before.
In SF I can feel the new heights comics are reaching, from all aspects of the industry. Simply in regards to Arnold’s list I have been able to catch readings and signings from Charles Burns and Chris Ware. They both appeared at the popular bookstore Booksmith on Haight St. and I later saw Ware do a comics/audio showcase with This American Life host Ira Glass at UC Berkeley. The bookstore for my school has a graphic novel section that is primarily represented by independent books from Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly with another section of the store stocking a variety of popular manga titles. Hell, I’ll be working at a place that has a mural by Ware atop it.
I’m spoiled with three great stores relatively close to me that offer three individual ways of taking the Direct Market and making it an interesting and useful shopping and reading experience. When it comes to buying manga there’s the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Japantown, which I haven’t been to yet but it’s something Lyle says is good which is good enough for me.
I shopped at an awesome store that Mike runs when I lived in Ventura County but that was my only exposure to a comic book culture. The only thing that came close to something more was when I would go to the Los Angeles Times Book Fair at UCLA for the artist signings at the Golden Apple and Hi De Ho booths. I’d read about all coverage cartoonists would get in The New York Times and The Guardian but none of that would ever hit home, no matter how many times I would visit the Graphic Novels section of the Barnes & Nobles in Westlake Village. It wasn’t until I moved to an urban era, on a college campus no less, that I saw the real acceptance as a medium comics had reached.
This leads me to wonder if this type of phenomenon is something that will be restricted to urban areas. Will comics fan looking for an all-encompassing reading and social experience have to live in cities to find what they want? There are many cultural aspects that one, for the most part, can only get living in an urban area such as large and multi-faceted museums and seeing independent films in their first (and sometimes only) opening weeks. Will an intellectual and democratic bent on comics be something like that? Perhaps. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so.
It also raises the question of who is perpetuating this new comics consciousness. I don’t have any census figures handy but city-dwellers tend to be younger, without families and wealthier (except the college students, I can assure you of that). I think a lot of the new comics consciousness is an outgrowth of the literary cultures that already existed in many major cities. Personally, I’m loving the Hell out of it but it can make the trips back home a lot more boring. Well, except when New Comics Day rolls around.
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