Manga By Moonlight

We had planned to take a trip into London last weekend to take the kids through the British Museum (after the requisite stop at King's Cross platform 9 3/4, of course :-) As it happens, another Amazon American expat in my group lives in London, and happens to have a 9yr-old godson deeply into anime & manga. Therefore, she offered to meet us near the museum and give us a walking tour of the Soho manga market.

We had a really wonderful time, led by our trusty guide. This was the first time Laura had the chance to meet one of my Amazon co-workers, and it was nice that she was able to connect with part of my distributed team. It was also nice to have London explained to us by someone who actually lives within its boroughs, yet hails from the midwest and was able to express its many twists and contradictions from an American perspective.

Undoubtedly the biggest discovery of our expedition was Forbidden Planet, a comic-book "megastore" whose multi-story reaches rivaled many big-box wholesale selections. There was a whole room of Doctor Who books & videos, and another room upstairs of Doctor Who toys. There was a room for Dungeons and Dragons; a room for manga; a room for anime; a room for Marvel and another for DC. There were whole rooms in the basement and most of the ground floor which I never even saw, though I spent an hour trying to drink it all in. My best comparison would be a geek's version of The Book Loft in the German Village, Columbus Ohio (although these rooms weren't connected by that establishment's network of narrow, twisting staircases!) It was the kind of place where I probably could have dropped £5,000 in an afternoon, and just gotten started. *sigh* Anyway, we limited ourselves to only a couple books at each shop we visited that afternoon, which is a good thing or we'd have to put the van in hock.

In summary, another jaw-dropping, mind-wrenching weekend in London :-) (Oh, and at the museum we saw lots of Egyptian mummies, Assyrian statuary, Roman temples, Celtic weaponry, yada-yada-yada...but then you knew all that! :-)