The rain drummed on the hood of my jacket as I walked up the busy and trafficked road. Lines of people, holding open umbrellas, rushed up and down the pavement to find a nice spot where to stop and wait for the pouring rain to cease. I turned left, leaving behind me Shaftsbury Road, onto Wardour Street and went on until Peter Street appeared to my left.
There, at the corner with Berwick Street, I found what I was cravingly looking for. Gosh! Comics is a small, but special, bookshop. As you can figure out by the name, it mainly focuses on comics, art-works, and graphic novels. I stared at the huge windows, full of intriguing volumes – Japanese manga such as the known “Full metal alchemist” and “Tokyo Ghouls” instantly grabbed my attention (as I’m a big fan of both), but a wee bit of time spent observing the rich offer allowed me to visualise another favourite of mine: “V for Vendetta” and “Watchmen”, drawn by the superb Alan Moore. There was no time to spend merely staring at the windows, and I walked in. The glass window bearing the Gosh logo slowly swung open, and a well-organised large room materialised before me. Book-packed bookshelves ran along the four walls, and two tables stood in the middle. A nice blonde girl sat at the desk opposite the entrance, dealing with a customer who had just laid down a stack of a dozen comics. It doesn’t matter if I enter comics or books shop, but the enthusiastic buzz of voices and the welcoming smell of paper that always accompany my visits made me thrilled. As I walked around the huge stand, a discover beautiful stories I had forgotten. The amazing and revolutionary “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi was the first to stand out; an incredible story which represented the life in Iran during the Islamic Revolution when the author was a child. Another story, but still full of social critique and political meaning, was Discworld series by Terry Pratchett; the comics version is an astonishing visualisation of the incredible world the writer created in his books. Surprisingly, I found “Sandman,” a comics series created and penned by Neil Gaiman – the story “Season of mists”, contained in volume Number Four, is my favourite as Lucifer made his first appearance. The biography section was the part of the shop that stunned me the most. I had never thought about telling the story of historical and famous people by using comics, and the result was stupefying. Fidel Castro’s bio immediately caught my interest as well as Johnny Cash’s. The shop had also a basement floor in which the complete collection of manga and American comics packed the neat shelves. Gosh! is an amazing shop exclusively dedicated to comics. Although I’m definitely a grown-up, I still enjoy walking among the tall stacks of comics and absorb the power and magic those stories emanate.
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November 2020
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