A Beautiful Gory Display — Kickstart Comics

As I write this, I’m in Belgium.  Yes, this is relevant.  At Carrefour, which is sort of the Belgian equivalent of a Super Target store, I saw something that really surprised me.  In the Books and Magazines section, there’s an entire aisle devoted to comics.  They’re books, what we’d call graphic novels over here, with complete, stand-alone stories.  In some cases, there are multiple books devoted to the same character but without any indication of a serial nature.  There’s no “you have to read that one before you read this one” – it was just a big wall of choices appealing to casual readers and with production values that impressed even a lifelong comic reader.  And people were lined up at that wall – people with carts full of groceries were stopping to pick up Blacksad and IR$.  Nothing would make me happier than to see this same scene in America.