This is the Place.
It’s a place filled with items of course, as all shops are. Trinkets, artifacts, whimsies, and all varieties of treasure are hung, posed, and racked within. In a sense, we are no different than a hardware store, hammers and nails being substituted for paper and polypropylene. Here, the comparison ends, one is a store, the other is a place.
The address here is 2831 E Washington. It’s a strip mall across the street from where a restaurant named Ella’s Deli used to be. It was known for being filled with oddities, including a full-sized carrousel. It’s gone, replaced by an apartment building sporting the same name, a victim of entropy and lockdowns. Addresses stay the same, it’s the places that leave.
Walk in the front door and you will notice something. Nothing else in the world smells like that. Old books. 30,000 bagged back issues and thousands of dollar comics have that scent, some so brittle they make the Constitution seem supple. No Big Box odor of antiseptics and misery here, just the right smell for the right place, like patchouli in an old Pier One.
The shape of the place itself is strange. Curiously, the walls swing 45 degrees to the right at the back. A natural dividing line within the space, the back third of the store is where the action figures hang, seemingly flaunting their 3rd dimension as you pass past their thousands of flatter, less aggressively packaged representations.
It is a vast emporium this place, filled with literally thousands of tales, wrapped in thousands of colors. Like the comics themselves, each store is a piece of a larger story, each location unique and yet recognizable. It’s a dusty stall, offering a smattering of long lost nostalgia triggers, a temporary off ramp to the smoother roads of better days. It is filled with the soothing, bittersweet pang of wistful desire.
Most of all, It’s your place. If you like to stand somewhere and have very real conversations aboutvery fictional things, it’s yours. If you want to run in, head down, shunning humanity, it’s yours. If you want to buy something in the hopes to sell it for more than you paid, it’s yours. If your urchin has expressed an interest in reading, and you want to nurture that, it’s yours. If you have abandoned modern comics and only want to engage with what has come before, it’s yours. Manga, yours. Graphic novels, yours. Sanctuary, yours, even if it’s only for a few minutes.
This is the place.
Visit Graham Crackers Comics Madison!
2831 E. Washington Ave. Madison, WI. 53704
Monday-Friday: 11am – 7pm
Saturday: 10am – 6pm
Sunday: Noon – 5pm