[Read all of Deb’s Travel Diary here.]
Tuesday was mostly a free day in Carpentras before the start of the international webtoon conference on Wednesday morning. So I decided to explore the town, hoping it’d be a little more welcoming in the daytime.
A few more stores and restaurants were open that morning, and there were more people walking around, but despite the large local tourist information center near the main road into town, Carpentras Centerville wasnt exactly crowded either.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing… I saw people just going about their everyday lives… drinking coffee and chatting in an outdoor cafe. Kids going to school. A few cats on “neighborhood watch” duty from their 2nd and 3rd floor balcony perches.
I stopped for lunch at Les Palmiers. I told the waiter that i was thinking of getting the escargot and a salad. He said, “that is too much. The salad will be enough.” And he was right. I couldn’t finish my salad topped with melted goat cheese drizzled with honey because it really was more than I could finish before I got to feeling full.
Next order of business was to check out a comics shop. Central Carpentras is not a very big metro area but even given that, I found three stores that offered a pretty good selection of manga and French graphic novels (a.k.a. “albums” or “bande designee).
Librairie Gulliver, with its bright yellow store front and inviting window displays was my first stop. The front part of the store was separated into a kids and teens section on the left, and more grown-up graphic novel fare on the right. Most of the manga and webtoon books were on the right side of the store, under the watchful eye of a big Goldorak figure (a.k.a. Go Nagai’s UFO Robot Grendizer.)
Goldorak/Grendizer is France’s patron saint of manga, thanks to being one of the first Japanese anime series to air on French TV, back in 1975. On my last trip to Paris, i saw several Goldorak statues in comic shops and even some Goldorak street art. Here’s more on why France has a soft spot for Goldorak.
An interesting thing about the manga / webtoon selection at Librarie Gulliver was that the webtoon/K-comics books were shelved nearby but separate from the Japanese manga in French.
There were also a separate selection of manga that were better suited for older readers on the right side of the store, including works by Jiro Taniguchi, Atsushi Kaneko and Junji Ito.
I asked Marjorie, one of the owners of Librarie Gulliver about this, and general sales trends for webtoons and manga that she’s observed in her. She had some very interesting observations, including some that I didn’t expect.
About webtoons/K-comics: “They don’t sell so well, mostly because people say they’re printed too small.”
Too small? The full-color French editions of Villains are Destined to Die and True Beauty were pretty much the same size as the English and Korean editions I’ve seen.
She explained further. “People seem to prefer this size,” while holding up a hardcover edition of Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe.
This brings up an interesting difference, format-wise for French graphic novels. French graphic novels are mostly full-color too, but they’re also usually hardcovers that tend to have a much bigger trim size — maybe 20-40% bigger than manga or K-comics books. And K-comics in French compared with manga? The biggest difference is price. Most full-color, softcover K-comics graphic novels run about €15 while the cover price for most popular b/w manga are half that, usually around €7 or so.
Marjorie also explained a bit about who buys kids graphic novels, k-comics and manga in her store: “It’s usually parents or adults who buy them for kids.” How about teens? “They’d rather spend money on food than comics,” she sighed.
After buying a few thing at Librairie Gulliver, I next set my sights on Librairie de l’Horloge, a general interest bookstore just a short walk away that also had a pretty large selection of BD, manga and k-comics books.
In this case, the manga and webtoon books were shelved together, arranged alphabetically by title, although you could kind of tell which were the webtoon books because they’re maybe an inch or so taller than most manga.
Roughly speaking, I’d say the ratio of manga to K-comics was about 1:30, or 1 webtoon book for 30 manga volumes, which was fairly consistent with what I saw at Librairie Gulliver.
Like Librairie Gulliver, Librairie de l’Horloge had a separate “manga / graphic novels for discerning adults” shelf, tho this is also where i found the hardcover edition of WEBTOON hit Unordinary by Uru-chan, which might have been unintentionally placed there by a customer. Who knows?
Other neat things I saw – a special edition of Solo Leveling that came with mini replicas of (character)’s weapons, and a standee display for Versus, the latest Kodansha series by ONE, the author of Mob Psycho 100 and One-Punch Man.
I didn’t get a chance to chat with the booksellers at this shop about K-comics and manga sales trends since it was a more general interest bookshop, but I thought their selection was pretty impressive for a pretty small town.
In the French graphic novel section, they had a charming way to offer shop recommendations for books with these word balloon-shaped notes.
Coming next in my France-Japan travel diary: highlights from the International Webtoon Conference in Monteux!
