ABSTRACT
While comic books have been a significant focus for my scholarly research, I sometimes consider how my most basic interest as a reader depended on global exchanges of people, goods, and culture. I became a regular comic book reader at the age of twenty-one during an impulse stop into Arkham Comics, a specialty comic retailer located near the Parthenon in Paris that traded signifcantly in American imports. While I was frequently exposed to the local bandes dessinées culture during my nine-month study abroad experience, I nevertheless found myself particularly drawn to the very same super-hero comics that would have been available to me at home. My interest in browsing the Arkham shelves—despite having entered specialty comic book shops in the US perhaps once or twice previously in my life—depended in significant part on having recently viewed Hollywood’s comic book adaptation X-Men (20th Century Fox, 2000) on the Champs-Élysées and more generally, the privilege of being able to move about the globe and have my comic book culture physically move with me through a complex global network of distribution. In order to be available to me on the streets of Paris, titles edited in New York, increasingly scripted and penciled elsewhere on the globe, printed in Canada or China and warehoused back in North America had to find their way across the Atlantic and into the hands of Arkham’s proprietors.
