In the heart of downtown Vancouver, right on Granville St. you can find the Nerd Nirvana known as Golden Age Collectables. These guys carry more manga, anime, graphics novels and figures than you’d ever care to know existed. When I was in Vancouver on business recently I picked up a copy of NextWave here and blogged about how awesome it is. This place is jam-packed full of awesomeness of such magnitude as NextWave. They also had probably everything Neil Gaiman has ever written, including more obscure stuff like the edition of Sandman with art from Yoshitaka Amano. For those that don’t know; Mr. Amano was the concept artist for all the Final Fantasy games up until X. His brilliant artistry and unique style is well known in Otakudom.
Look at that wall of Manga! Where in Canada can you find a collection like that on sale for such great prices? If I had more money I would’ve bought that whole wall, or atleast the Initial D mangas at the bottom–I really need to take the time to give that one a look some time. I haven’t seen the animeof it either; I still haven’t entirely caught up on older series’.
One side of the store is occupied entirely by comics, manga and books; the other by everything else. Mostly figures and other miscellaneous merchandise. While browsing through their vast collection of merchandise I happened upon a whole bunch of Serenity/Firefly stuff; several PVC statues, a roleplaying sourcebook, playing cards–remind me again; why did Space Channel cancel Firefly? There was also several Frank Miller graphic novels, obviously includng 300 and Sin City.
I went to Golden Age once about a year ago when I still lived in Vancouver and picked up the first edition of Robot; that is an excellent project. For those that don’t know; Robot is a project started by Last Exile artist, Range Murata, as a collaborative manga series alongside about 20 of the biggest manga artists in Japan! The art is absolutely beautiful and I only wish I could get my hands on more of it. It’s 8 issues long, last I checked, but I’ve only ever managed to find the first issue. Golden Age apparently carries it, but they always seem to be sold out. :’(
