In her regular weekly column, Flaming Nora boldly goes to a place where she's never been before...
Until this time last week, I was a comic shop virgin. When I broke my comic store duck it brought a smile to my face and, sadly, a dozen clichés to my mind. I went looking for a recently published graphic novel called Alice in Sunderland and when I entered a central London comic shop, I thought it’d just be like any other shop I’d ever been in. Oh, how very wrong I was.
I was the only woman in there, I couldn’t find what I was looking for and I was too scared to ask. I can’t recall having that problem in H&M before. Heavy-set men with beer bellies and beards were perusing the comics, some of them sitting on the floor and the guy who worked there sat behind the counter by the till, idling flicking pages of dragons, monsters and knights.
These were the sort of men who I’d guess wear long black leather coats in the height of summer and biker boots when they don’t own a bike. This was more than a comic shop, it was a fetid den of masculinity with a stench of sweat and more than its average quota of ponytails on the back of bald heads. I thought Comic Store Guy in The Simpsons was a cliché but I now know him to be true. Are all comic shops like this?
There must be plenty of women out there who enjoy reading comics and graphic novels so why aren’t comic shops more inviting and pleasant? Anyway, back to the graphic novel which I bought a signed copy of for reasons you can read here if you’d like to. My first foray into graphic novels and comics has got me itching to read more of the genre and I therefore send out this plea to female comic readers – what can you recommend?
Oh, and if I can pick up the stuff somewhere that doesn’t reek of eau-de-cliche comic store bloke, so much the better! [Flaming Nora]
Flaming Nora is editor of Corrieblog
