I visited Montréal once, in 1967. It was like, "Oh, wow! Bandes dessinés everywhere!" That wasn't surprising because Montréal is like a little France in many respects, but it was the bandes dessinées that I locked in on.
But I had trouble buying any because the shopkeepers tried to ignore me because I didn't speak French. (I flunked French in school because I never could speak it fluently, although my reading comprehension was excellent.) I got around that by speaking Southern Californian Spanish at them, so they would think that I was a Spanish tourist. Montréal is friendly to everyone except English-speakers.
Yes, I still get Stuart Ng's online catalogue updates even though I haven't bought anything from him since my stroke in 2005. His bandes dessinées imports and his cartoon art books in general are to die for! "Near LA"? Well, Torrance is a separate city, but it's all part of L.A.'s South Bay district. There are a lot of Japanese-community shops in Torrance and Gardena, too. Japanese bookshops full of untranslated manga and manga-artist and anime art books. (And supermarkets that have all the Japanese snack foods that vendors at the anime conventions sell at huge markups, at normal prices. I haven't been out of my hospital bed since 2005. *Sigh*.)
I visited Montréal once, in 1967. It was like, "Oh, wow! Bandes dessinés everywhere!" That wasn't surprising because Montréal is like a little France in many respects, but it was the bandes dessinées that I locked in on.
But I had trouble buying any because the shopkeepers tried to ignore me because I didn't speak French. (I flunked French in school because I never could speak it fluently, although my reading comprehension was excellent.) I got around that by speaking Southern Californian Spanish at them, so they would think that I was a Spanish tourist. Montréal is friendly to everyone except English-speakers.
Yes, I still get Stuart Ng's online catalogue updates even though I haven't bought anything from him since my stroke in 2005. His bandes dessinées imports and his cartoon art books in general are to die for! "Near LA"? Well, Torrance is a separate city, but it's all part of L.A.'s South Bay district. There are a lot of Japanese-community shops in Torrance and Gardena, too. Japanese bookshops full of untranslated manga and manga-artist and anime art books. (And supermarkets that have all the Japanese snack foods that vendors at the anime conventions sell at huge markups, at normal prices. I haven't been out of my hospital bed since 2005. *Sigh*.)
http://stuartngbooks.com/
Fred Patten