Over the past two days, people have offered up countless examples of how actor and comedian Robin Williams, who died Monday at his California home, was, quite simply, a great human being. Here's one more that will be of particular interest to comics fans, who for decades have been seen as a fringe community: Robin Williams loved comics, too.

It may not be that much of a surprise that the man who played a live-action Popeye that was so very close to the comics and animated versions of the character would love the medium, but back in 2010, Williams spoke with USA Today about how much he enjoyed DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli and the manga Tekkoninkreet by Taiyō Matsumoto, but that's not the only evidence of how big a fan he was.




On Facebook, former ComicsAlliance editor Joe Hughes said, "I once sold Robin Williams an entire run of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, back when I worked in a comic book store that inexplicably featured dozens of celebrities among its clientele. He was a semi-regular customer, the first celebrity I ever met in the store, and could not have been a nicer man if he tried. I'm sad to see him go."

On Blastr, writer Dan Roth, who worked at Forbidden Planet Comics in New York, offered up a story about Robin Williams asking to look through the manga section just as the store was closing:

He was looking in one of the glass cases at some models. He wasn't just browsing, mind you, he was a man on a mission. He asked me if we still had this thing in stock. He'd seen it maybe a month or two back. "It's a rocket. It's big and red," he said, "and looks kind of like a weird, Japanese dildo." He smiled.

Brushes with greatness sometimes take odd turns.

Sadly, we'd actually sold the dildo model about a week earlier. But that was okay. Robin scoped stuff out for a while. He had a buddy with him, and he was just enjoying pointing out all the things he recognized and was into. Which was to say everything, basically.

 

For more on Robin Williams, our sister site ScreenCrush has been documenting the news of his passing as well as celebrating his incredible work.

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