Night Flight Comics!

Things are going well here in Salt Lake City. We’ve seen some terrific actors, and the weather has been perfect for exploring the town. Yesterday, as planned, I headed over to Night Flight Comics in Library Square. It’s an awesome little store in a great location, right next to the public library, along with a group of other stores and a cafe.

Night Flight’s manga section is small, but kind of interesting. Most shops I’ve visited that have very little manga tend to carry only the most recent volumes of current, popular series. Night Flight’s selection is pretty eclectic, including volumes of older series that are difficult to find in most brick and mortar stores, even the large ones, like Please Save My Earth and Banana Fish. They don’t have full series of most things, but if you’re looking for a specific volume of something-or-other, it would definitely be a place to check. I picked up volume 20 of Please Save My Earth (yes, I’ve had it on the brain this week), and volume 1 of Yotsuba&! which I’ve been hoping to find for a while. Manager Mimi Cruz admitted that she didn’t know a lot about manga, but her knowledge of comics in general was obviously extensive, and her passion for the medium was palpable. If I’d had more cash, I would have asked her for recommendations of American comics, because I have a feeling she’d steer me to exactly the right ones. She did talk about some of the Minx titles she’d tried out, and gave me her last 2008 free sampler. Some of them look really interesting, though knowing that Minx has been dropped by DC makes me leery of starting a series that might not be finished.

The store is attractive and well-kept, and absolutely packed with comics. I browsed for over an hour, and did not come close to really taking in everything there. My one caveat would be that everything is wrapped in plastic, which makes it the perfect store if you know what you want, but not quite as perfect if you don’t. I’m sure they have very good reasons for choosing to do that, and especially with the library right next door, they don’t want people using the store as a library instead. But I personally like to be able to flip through a book, especially if I’m considering it for the first time, so I found the plastic wrap a little daunting.

Overall, though, I was thrilled to find such a great shop here on my visit. I’ll be back here again next year, and a trip Night Flight Comics will be on the top of my must-do list!