Last 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.