The best comic book store in the world is in Barcelona (according to Chris Ware)

BarcelonaLast week, Nico Rodríguez (Reus, 1973) received an unexpected visitor at Fatbottom, his bookstore specializing in comics: it was Chris Ware, the most influential American cartoonist of his generation, to whom the CCCB is dedicating an exhibition until November 9. "I was doing the quarterly invoices and, suddenly, I raised my head and saw her there," explains the bookseller, still incredulous. Ware is not only the patron saint of modern experimental comics, but a very important author for Rodríguez. "I had been a big comics reader, but over time I became detached," he explains. "And one day, when I was living in England and hadn't read anything for five or six years, I went into the Forbidden Planet bookstore to browse and bought the Jimmy Corrigan Ware's work and I got hooked on comics again." A few years later, already in Barcelona, the 2008 crisis forced Rodríguez to abandon his job as a photographer, and he opened a bookstore specializing in author comics with a special focus on fanzines, self-published comics and imported comics, in other words, exactly what was missing from the other bookstores.

If Ware's work had impressed Rodríguez, Ware was also impressed by Fatbottom. After browsing through it – and through the printing and self-publishing workshop Máquina Total, which shares premises and sensibility with Fatbottom – and acquiring some titles (the catalog of the exhibition dedicated to Saul Steinberg at the Fundación March, the flipbook Sparrow Dance with drawings by Hokusai, Bad smell of Nadia Hafid...), Ware told the bookseller that it was the best bookstore he had ever seen. And he didn't mean well: the next day, in an interview with ARA, he reaffirmed: "It might be the best comic book store I've ever been to. It's truly amazing, impeccably curated. [...] I found it inspiring and impressed."

Rodríguez believes that the cartoonist most enjoyed seeing "how the self-publishing workshop was integrated into the bookstore" and that he was surprised to discover "many comics I didn't know, but not just those published here, but also American ones." One of the things Ware highlighted to the ARA was Rodríguez's "sensitivity and intelligence," which he appreciated just by looking at the shelves and the peculiar way the comics are organized. "The covers are where they are because they somehow fit in Nico's head," Ware said, and Rodríguez confirms it. "I have a space problem in the store, but I try to organize the comics in a more intuitive than practical way, and so that the covers can be seen, or at least part of them," he explains.

Cultural programming

Although it's now located at 21 Carrer Lluna in the Raval district, Fatbottom was founded in 2010 in a shop in Poble-sec, where, to attract the public, it organized comic book and fanzine presentations and exhibitions of authors who shared the bookstore's independent sensibility. Over time, these activities have become one of Fatbottom's defining features, and it has a group of regulars (mostly cartoonists) who drop by every Friday. If last week it was a Nadia Hafid exhibition, this Friday will be the presentation of Orlando, by Delphine Panique, which inaugurates the Catalan comic collection The grinding machine.

Natural epicenter of the independent comics sceneFatbottom even hosts the work meetings for Gutter, the self-publishing festival in Barcelona, one of whose organizers is, in fact, Pablo Taladro, the soul of Máquina Total. Rodríguez is already accustomed to receiving foreign visitors who have heard about the bookstore; Ware is the most illustrious, but a few months ago it was Canadian Dave Cooper, who took advantage of a trip to Angoulême to organize a book signing at Fatbottom, which many, including Chris Ware, consider the best comic book store in the world.