I Love Legends Comics

Pictured: Nerd Alley

There's a particular section of Victoria's Johnson Street, from Douglas to, say, Government that I've taken to calling Nerd Alley. It features two comic book stores, a collectible store (in other words, a toy store for items that are not to be toyed with), two stores for WarHammer figure painters, and one used bookstore. Even the bookstore focuses on the occult, SciFi, and Ayn Rand. If they only added a bubble tea place to the block, it would be possible for any nerd to live, quite happily, in a block-square area of town.

Or at least it would be possible for me to live in a one-block radius, if I didn't hate Ayn Rand and her brand of cuckoo con-objectivism so much. But, from 5:15pm to 5:40pm on Wednesdays, I do anyways. That's because it's New Comic Book Day, and I have an unofficial appointment to be at my preferred of the two comic book stores at that time, begging for the latest issue of Sweet Tooth. Legends Comics is the best, because there are no action figures or licensed T-shirts, just comic books and graphic novels crammed into every conceivable corner and surface. The one area which doesn't have some kind of literature on it is only there, so you can park your coffee and not spill anything on the paper that's everywhere else.

Along with their stock, Legends also has Gareth and Lloyd, the owners. Gareth knows my name and always tells me that I'm awesome. Lloyd, on the other hand, still asks me if I live in town. This is in spite of the fact he's heard Gareth say I'm awesome at least a half-dozen times, so he should know that A. I live in Victoria, and B. am awesome. You might think this means I like Lloyd less than Gareth, but that's not true. Okay, so Gareth does have an edge, but that's as much for his expert lettering on The Perogy Cat as for his weekly validation of my worth. Really, G and L are the yin and the yang of customer-proprietor relationships. On the one hand, the soothing mother's milk where somebody knows your name and the books you like. On the other, the bracing two buck chuck of mild indifference that you yearn to impress away.

I might even be making progress on the latter: Lloyd now knows my name, and even dug through boxes to find an issue of this month's The Unwritten for me. This is a book I've found uneven in the past, alternately gripping and perplexing, but this month's instalment had my complete attention. There's a plot featuring an intelligent, brittle pulp fiction writer, blessed with a schnozz, and the hard-boiled man who loves her. For self-evident reasons, I'm a sucker for those.