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Underground > Comic Books >

Comic Stores in India and Paris?

  
 
Horatio Hellpop
04:02 / 19.01.04
hi, i'm new to the boards and am currently vacationing in south india where i've searched for comics enthusiastically but without terribly much success.

i've seen comics sold at:
  • book stores
  • street bazaars
  • the airport newspaper stand (actually the newspaper stands and the book stores are more closely-related here than america perhaps)

    what i've found so far:
  • lots of tintin
  • an indian (?) pocket-sized children's humour digest called "tinkle"
  • archie
  • some pocket-sized reprints of american superhero comics--i bought "superboy's legion" (by alan davis) just for a taste of home. it cost about rs. (rupees) 90 which should be about $2 american, it had a complete story from something that was originally published in two "prestige"-format regular sized books and it had the origin chapter of john byrne's "man of steel". some of the artwork had obviously been scanned off colour pages and not from the original film (?) but it had a complete story and more and it fit in my pocket. take heed, american comic book industry!
  • stacks of old (mostly DC, i think) comics from the 70's/early 80's, pretty standard fair, some of it in indian reprint editions.
  • there is also one indian publisher whose name i've forgotten that puts out a whole line of books with all pretty simple artwork and low production value extrapolated from indian mythology and/or action/adventure.

    i'm just wondering... is anyone familiar with indian comics? are there any "great works?" what should i look for? where should i go? i've already been through bombay but i'll be returning on my way out of the country where i'll be stopping over in...

    paris:

    what are the best stores in paris? i can read french decently enough so they needn't carry large selections of english-language bandes-desinees...
    i went to a couple of stores in berlin that were great so i figure there must be parisian equivalents. (preferably in the quartier latin where i'll be staying. i imagine it's called the "quartier latin" since that's what i learned in my seventh grade french class.

    if anyone could help me i'd really appreciate it!
    		•  
     
    sleazenation
    08:21 / 19.01.04
    I've never been to India so i can only offer my complete ignorance on the Indian comic scene -

    And I haven't been back to Paris since I was very young, but i've never found it too hard to locate comic shops in major european cities and would imagine the quartier latin to be pretty well stocked.

    I'll refrain from recounting my experiences in France just cos its been a long time now since i was last there and there are some french posters who are far more knowledgable and better able toanswer your questions - but good luck on the comics world tour.
    		 
     
    diz
    08:43 / 19.01.04
    when i was really young, my best friend was this Indian girl named Teja who lived up the street from me. she had a bunch of Indian comics in her house, which were all based on Hindu mythology and such. totally incomprehensible to me, due to language issues, but really strikingly colorful and kind of erotic, if i recall correctly.

    i don't know much about Indian comics other than that, except that Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy were really into them and drew on them heavily for inspiration when they did Rogan Gosh.
    		 
     
    louisemichel
    08:44 / 19.01.04
    Ok, comics shop in Paris...

    French comics : you'll find french comics in about every big store in France be it Virgin or Fnac, but you'll find them better in the Album Shops, kinda Forbidden Planet thing. There are three shops in the Latin Quarter, you can't miss the biggest, at the corner of the Boulevard St Germain and the Rue St Jacques.
    US comics : guess what ? just opposite of the Album Shop of the Boulevard St Germain, there's the biggest comics shop in Paris, Album comics !
    ok, that's it...
    Don't Worry, you'll find plenty of comic book shop in the Quartier Latin !
    		 
     
    ghadis
    10:36 / 19.01.04
    I've got a pile of small Hindu comics lying about somewhere which i found in a charity shop. Like Dizfactor says these are mostly based on Hindu mythology and are small pocket size, black and white with great garish colour covers and translated into english. They're printed in India and i kind of got the impression they're quite common on book stands etc. Well worth picking some up if you come across any.
    		 
     
    doctorbeck
    12:13 / 19.01.04
    i have a soft spot for ama chitra kala comics, the dc of india, most of their stuff is either indian epics like the ramayana told in comic form over loads of issues or stories like 'the indian battle for freedom' or the stories of the sikh gurus. can be quite crude art wise but really quite lovely and a good insight into the sub-continent

    in recent years there has been a trend to more superhero type indian comics with all the costumes and weird powers, fighting evil and most of the heroes turning out to be avatars of vishnu, art work is much more sophisticated than the earlier stuff i mentioed above, quite gory really but none too sohisticated either when it comes down to it

    usually dead cheap and available all over in english

    hope this helps

    andrew
    		 
     
    Horatio Hellpop
    02:34 / 20.01.04
    cool! great to hear from people, especially regarding shops in paris. the vast majority of the indian comics i've come across do appear to be taken (or extrapolated, i'd imagine) from the traditional indian mythologies. very crude artwork, i'm sure the writing is comparable, but a neat pop culture artifact. however, from all appearances, it seems that the indian comic industry has not begun (if it ever will, as one hopes) appealing to a more "adult" demographic. i love rogan gosh (which is actually what intially made the idea of tracking down indian comics romantically appealing) and i would love to know what brendan mccarthy drew his inspiration from.

    something i've seen that's very reminiscent of comics (in a scott mccloud "everything is comics" kind of way which i'm sympathetic towards) is in a lot of palaces one finds entire rooms filled with panels telling stories (about the most popular characters: ganesh, rudra/s(h)iva, krishna, etc.) and when i say entire rooms what i mean is that the artists had NO appreciation for negative space! why have three people talking when you can have three thousand? but they're all very sequenced and incredibly bright (even a few hundred years later) and more like the kind of thing i'd be impressed by in a comic than the ones i've seen which typically look pretty similar "western" comics except for subject matter (and come to think of it, most western comics have green and blue people running around too!).

    i'll keep on the look out...
    		 
     
    Krug
    15:38 / 20.01.04
    I've read a few adaptations of Indian films and a comic starring Amitabh Bachchan who's the Al Pacino of Bollywood.
    Never been to India but I lived in Pakistan and to my knowledge your best bet is old book stores.
    		 
     
    Horatio Hellpop
    10:57 / 30.01.04
    went to the album stores in the latin quarter (st. germaine & st. jaques. at the first one i went into jim lee (jim lee, of all people to find in paris!) was doing a signing. it was all western superhero comics, mostly in english, going for exorbitant prices (even not taking into account the american dollar's current shit value against the euro). seemed like a good selection for the kind of thing it was selling but it was really very disappointing. then i went across the street.

    what an incredible store! just endless amounts of european albums by people i've never heard of that just looked fantastic. i spent about two hundred bucks (since i can't imagine i'll be able to get to paris again anytime soon and i haven't had much luck procuring french comics over the internet.

  • i got one album by sergio toppi (whose work i've been trying to track down since seeing a pin-up in an issue of sin city) called warramunga which is not (like many comics by european writer-artists i've found, even the ones i really like) terribly clever but man, that guy even makes rocks look fascinating, with just a pen and ink. i know that walt simonson is a big fan of his work and denys cowan did some very toppi stuff on the question (most noticeable after issue 21 although some of that may be attributable to the excellent inking by malcolm jones iii).

  • les yeux dans le mur by edmond baudoin and celine wagner
  • mccay, a piece of biographical fiction about little nemo creator winsor mccay which i'm really enjoying, so far in three volumes (haven't finished yet so i don't know if it ends there)
  • one of moebius' recent projects, volume 5 of le monde d'edena (why volume 5 and not 1 through 4? i don't know...)
  • tokyo est mon jardin by benoit peters and frederic boilet with jiro taniguchi which looks beautiful
  • emma by some guy whose name i can't remember, it's all painted in beautiful watercolors

    the best thing is that, with the exception of moebius and toppi, i'd never heard of any of these people!

    didn't find one of things i actually meant to look for, i think it's called ombres & desirs and it's by warnauts and some other guy and i have one chapter of it serialized in the single issue of a suivre that i could find in new york

    weird thing about the store is that everything is organized by publisher. there's an association humanoides section for moebius and a casterman section for moebius and wherever else his work turns up. also, some of the books are ordered by creator and some by series title which is usually okay but makes looking for stuff a little more hectic (especially in french!).

    i imagine in the english-speaking world a lot of adult readers have probably heard of artists like manara and pratt but has anyone heard of these other guys? have any favourite european creators?

    it felt like a completely different industry! maybe there's hope for the future...
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    moriarty
    12:10 / 30.01.04
    I'm guessing you're American, considering your reference to the American dollar. When you come back to North America, if you should ever find yourself in Toronto or especially Montreal you could pick up at least a few of the titles you've mentioned, and more.

    I went to quite a few comic shops while in Paris. The one I remember the most fondly was across from Notre-Dame, near the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore. It was actually two stores, one for North American and other foreign imports, the other European. I couldn't spend as much time (or money) there as I would have liked, but they had Corto Maltese ashtrays which were super keen. I'm afraid my memory of street names or more specific loactions isn't much good eight years later, if the store is even still there.

    Glad to here you found something you liked!
    		 
     
    sleazenation
    12:45 / 30.01.04
    Yep - Montreal has a plethora of BD shops was well as stores in the style of most American comic shops. Interestingly I dodn't recall coming across comic shops that stocked a good range of both BD and American style comics - but I'm sure Moriarty could probably tell me such places exist.

    As for recommendations - Marc Antoine Mathieu's stuff, particularly L'Origine is a fantastic metafictive comic that loterally pokes a hole in the structure of comics - Mathieu's most recent offering has just been published in English by Dark Horse...
    		 
      
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