In 2000, I took a two-week trip to Costa Rica with some friends.  We stayed at a surf camp that consisted of a collection of bungalows, a swimming pool, and the open-air restaurant/bar where we did all of our eating and socializing, the camp being situated in a fairly remote area on the Pacific side of the country.  There, in a foreign place on the other side of the Caribbean, I had two experiences that at the time seemed to me oddly American.  The first was that I ate the best grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever had, hands down.  The second was that I discovered the music of a country legend who has since become one of my favorite artists in any medium: Johnny Cash. 

No doubt I’d encountered Cash’s music before, either on the radio, on TV, or possibly even in my own home (my stepfather has been a fan of the Man in Black since his Sun Records days).  If I did, I have no memory of it.  If not for the Texan who everyone called “Cowboy” and his copy of 16 Biggest Hits spinning its way through the restaurant/bar’s CD rotation, I might still be oblivious to Cash’s genius.  It took the solitude of the Costa Rican jungle to open my ears to his gravelly voice, affecting lyrics, and the boom-cha boom-cha of the Tennessee Two (or Three, depending on the song) backing him up on instruments.  Cowboy, wherever you are, I owe you big-time.

Flash forward almost a decade.  For years I’d been hearing good things about the HBO series The Wire, but I’d never seen it despite being an HBO subscriber for the entire duration of the show’s 5-season run.  When a reviewer described The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone as reading “like Philip K. Dick writing an episode of The Wire,” I was finally compelled to give the show a chance, if for no other reason than to find out if I’d been handed a compliment.  So I downloaded the first season before leaving for The Surrogates European book tour, figuring I’d watch a few of the episodes while in transit.  Riding the fast train from Frankfurt to Paris to begin the second leg of the tour, I was given my first opportunity.

Two days later I was scheduled for a free day to rest up and explore the Parisian sites.  I spent the entire morning and afternoon in my hotel room, where I watched the remaining installments of the first season on my iPhone.  I’ll forego adding my two cents to the Fort Knox of positive words that have already been written and said about the series, and just say that the remainder of the tour was a constant search for wi-fi hotspots that would enable me to download more episodes from iTunes.

During one of our last nights in France, Brett Weldele and I were eating at Creperie de Cluny (quality of the crepes being what they were, if it had been a wi-fi hotspot, it would be on the shortlist of my favorite restaurants ever) with Thierry and François, our guides from Delcourt, publisher of the French edition of The Surrogates.  We got on the subject of The Wire, and Brett and François quickly turned the conversation toward their favorite moments and the show’s many strengths, both as entertainment and as art.  Four guys—one from Atlanta, one from Portland, and two from France—all of us talking about a TV series filmed in Baltimore.

We live in the era of portable art, a time when Johnny Cash can travel to Costa Rica in a suitcase, and The Wire can find its way to France via . . . whatever it is that makes wi-fi possible.  The reality of that hit home in Paris, maybe because—for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on (and that might sound traitorous coming from an Italian)—Paris is the one place on the globe that I most instinctively equate with art.  It was the adopted home of American expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.  It’s the home of the Louvre and the Mona Lisa (I know, Uncle Jimmy, she was painted by an Italian, but I’m trying to make a point here). 

And, apparently, some fans of The Wire live there, too.

The guy in the glasses and hat behind the counter is Filip, Cross Cult’s PR guru, who did yeoman’s work (that one’s for you, Jensen) setting up around-the-clock TV, radio, and print interviews for Brett and me.  It was a hectic three days, but we left the festival feeling we’d done as much as we could to get the word out about the German edition.

On our last night in Frankfurt, Cross Cult treated us to dinner at what I thought they said was going to be an Austrian restaurant, but it turned out to be Australian.  When I realized my mistake, I wasn’t worried—I’m as close to omnivorous as you can get, only abstaining from eating pickles, raisins, and uncooked coconut.  The menu listed some exotic fare, including emu and other native fauna, but what struck me most was the image accompanying the Kangaroo section:

The restaurant was dimly lit and I’m a poor photographer, so the details may be difficult to discern, but that’s a photo of a mama kangaroo with a joey snug in her pouch, both of whom were staring at me with their sad, brown kangaroo eyes as I scanned the list of methods by which their kin could be served to me on a plate.  Germans are often portrayed as a hard, no-nonsense people, a portrait that, after spending a laugh-filled weekend with the affable Cross Cult gang, I was beginning to feel had been painted with too broad a brush.  Seeing this menu gave me an understanding of how such portrayals come to be. 

Before I forget: Thank you, Outback Steakhouse, for designing a menu that doesn’t rely on lifelike images of cows, chickens, fish, or any of the other animals you offer up for consumption.  Need to explain the circle of life to my children: Delayed.

From October 15 through November 2, Brett Weldele and I were touring Europe, thanks to the fine folks at Cross Cult, Delcourt, and Rizzoli Lizard, publishers of the German, French, and Italian editions of The Surrogates, respectively (there are also editions in Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese, but we could only do so much traveling).

This was my first time outside North America, and there are tons of memories, photos, and stories to tell.  I’ll get to those in the coming weeks, but for now I’ll say that if there’s one overarching theme I took away from the trip, it’s how much differently comics are treated in Europe as opposed to the States.  Here they’re often viewed by the media and the general public as an oddity of fandom, whereas in Europe they’re revered as an art form and a staple of erudite culture. 

This really sunk in during the French leg of the tour.  Delcourt reserved a room for us at Le Ciel de Paris, a restaurant on the top floor of the tallest building in the city.  Here’s a close-up of one of the views through the panoramic windows:

We did 8 hours of interviews with TV, print, and online outlets, and all the while the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysees are outside the window.  Never did I think putting pen to paper would bring about such things.

(Side Note: I don’t know if it’s true, but I’m told that the restaurant scene where Roger Moore and Grace Jones first cross paths in A View to a Kill was shot at Le Ciel de Paris, not inside the Eiffel Tower as the film would have you believe.)