The hanging sign is shaped like a speech bubble from a comic strip, spelling out the name of the store it’s attached to: Stribeladen!

Outside are shelves of comic books and a bicycle rack with hand-painted representations of Calvin, Hobbes and Marsupilami. In the window display is a cardboard cutout of Tintin and Snowy; beyond them, hanging from the store’s ceiling, is an inflatable model of the cartoon Belgian reporter’s Moon Rocket.

Inside, as you’d expect, are comics and collectibles: boxes full of Batman and Superman titles; graphic novels by Alan Moore and Joe Sacco; figurines from Saga and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The man in the middle of these comic curiosities is Don Fowler. Perpetually dressed in a black hoodie and black Levis, Fowler is quick to laugh and has a gregarious presence that makes him seem decades younger than his actual age.

Located in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, Stribeladen! is where Fowler spends his working days, helping Danish customers navigate both English-and Danish-language titles over cups of instant coffee.

Fowler and I have a few things in common. Not only are we both Americans in Denmark, we’re both former Richmonders.

What separates us is time. Fowler is 73 years old and moved from Richmond to Aarhus in the 1970s. At 37, I’m an inversion of Fowler’s age, and arrived in Aarhus last August to study for a semester of grad school. Prior to my move, I lived in Richmond for 18 years; it is the place I consider home.

On a chilly Thursday in November, after an afternoon rush of customers left Fowler’s store, we sat down and gazed across a mirror of time and geography to talk about home, change and the sociological tendrils that connect us.

Like so many stories, Fowler’s journey to living in Denmark began with a girl.

Taking a ferry between Esbjerg, Denmark, and Harwich, England, Fowler met a Danish woman named Pia who worked on the boat. She eventually invited him down to her cabin and the rest, as he tells it, is history.

“If I hadn’t met a Danish girl, I probably would have ended up living in Richmond,” says Fowler, leaning back in a plastic chair at his store in Aarhus’ upscale Frederiksbjerg district.

Fowler was born and raised in Alexandria. When it came time for college, the University of Richmond was the obvious choice. The dean of his high school had attended the university, greasing the skids for his admission.

More than drinking or chasing girls, Fowler says his college days were preoccupied with smoking weed. “We had towels under the door if we were smoking a joint,” he says.

Upon graduating, Fowler lived in a series of apartments in and around the Fan District near Virginia Commonwealth University where I went to school decades later. I too was drawn to the Fan for its beauty, walkability and constellation of cozy bars and restaurants.

After Fowler and Pia met, the two lived in Richmond for a time. The fact that Pia was Danish helped the couple obtain an apartment on Floyd Avenue: the landlord was a Jewish Pole who had been held in a concentration camp during World War II.

“The Danes had helped the Jews back during the war, during the German occupation,” he explains. “All of the Jews knew that, evidently. He said, ‘You’re Danish, you’ve got the apartment.’”

After college, Fowler was employed primarily as a taxi driver. He enjoyed the flexibility of the job.

“You could work whenever you felt like it,” he says. “You could go in at 2 in the morning and pick up a Yellow Cab. You could work from 9 to 5, but you could work from 5 to 9 if you wanted to.”

The Richmond of Fowler’s era was a rough place. He recalls driving through Randolph, south of the Fan, to pick up fares.

“Some of the houses didn’t have glass in the windows,” he recalls. “They were just boarded up, but people were living in them. They didn’t have money to even change the glass.”

Philip Morris, the massive multinational tobacco company, provided some of Fowler’s favorite fares. Shuttling businessmen to the airport paid well and allowed him to stuff his pockets with the complimentary cigarettes the company offered in its lobby.

One regular customer stands out in Fowler’s memory: an older woman who lived at the Jefferson Hotel. In the 1970s, the Jefferson had fallen on hard times. But in an era when retirement communities were sometimes looked down on, living at an old hotel provided a bit of dignity to a grande dame in her later years.

Fowler’s regular fare was a committed drinker and smoker whose husband had been a publisher in Paris in the 1920s.

“She knew all of those people like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alice B. Toklas,” Fowler says. “This was 1974, so she was in her 70s and she was pretty alcohol-ized. She had trouble getting in and out of the cab.”

Another mainstay of Fowler’s time in Richmond was the Village Café. Before he met Pia, Fowler says the Village was helpful if he met a romantic interest at another bar and wanted to get to know her.

“If you found a girl, maybe you took her to the Village to talk to her, because it was quiet,” he says. “There were booths. It was relaxing to be in there.”

The Dikos-Giavos family that founded the eatery is celebrated today for the numerous restaurants and grocery stores they own or co-own across the city, including Stella’s, Kuba Kuba, The Continental, Perly’s and Stella’s Market locations. Last June, Stella Dikos, the matriarch of the Greek family, passed away at 82.

The Village, which moved across the street in the early ’90s, also has special resonance for me. It was one of the few sit-down restaurants where I could afford to eat when I was in college. When I turned 21, I asked my dad to take me there for my first legal drink at a bar.

Fowler and Pia left Richmond for good in 1976; she passed away more than a decade ago and Fowler has since remarried. Today he owns Stribeladen! in Aarhus and a similar store called Comic Express in Aalborg, farther north on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula.

His interest in comics began in Richmond through a neighbor in his apartment complex; after moving to Aarhus, Fowler began helping Stribeladen!’s original Danish owner fulfill orders with American comic book companies. Fowler eventually started Comic Express in Aalborg, then bought out Stribeladen!’s first owner.

Aarhus feels like home to him.

“Home is where you’ve got family, and that’s what I’ve got here,” he says of Denmark. “I’ve got two daughters. I’ve got two grandchildren and a wife. I’ve got one daughter that lives maybe half a mile away. Everybody’s here in this country.”

While Fowler enjoyed his time in Richmond, he’s not nostalgic about it.

“I don’t think I miss anything,” he says. “I went back a few years ago. It didn’t seem that different.”

Personally, there’s plenty I miss about the River City. Beyond my favorite Richmond pastimes—sliding into a booth at Bamboo Café, eating an 8 ½ pizza in Scuffletown Park, sharing a date night special at Garnett’s or Bacchus—this time away has emphasized just how much it’s the people that make a place feel like home. It’s my friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances that I miss the most.

In the River City, my friends have a nickname for me: Mr. Richmond.

It comes from the fact that I’ve spent my entire adult life and journalism career in the city, talking to the people who make it such a fun and creative place to be. Going out on the town inevitably means running into Richmonders who are friends or people I’ve interviewed for stories, spawning jokes about me being a celebrity.

I moved to Richmond to attend college but was equally drawn to the city for its history. I grew up in the sanitized suburbs and was intrigued by Richmond’s damaged past. Could we ever move on from the boogeymen of the Confederacy and the antagonists of the Civil Rights Movement? Could we ever heal?

Both because of cost and necessity I lived in a series of apartments on Monument Avenue after college. When I first arrived in Richmond, the street’s statues lionizing the Confederacy baffled me.

“Isn’t anyone upset by these?” I asked myself of the statuary that Robin Williams once referred to as the second-place trophies to the Civil War.

Change finally came in 2020, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by police. In Richmond, the Black Lives Matter protests aimed, in part, to confront the legacy of slavery, the Confederacy and the “Lost Cause” racist ideology that attempts to justify the Southern side of the Civil War.

The protesters didn’t wait for permission; they began pulling the Confederate statues down themselves. The first monument that the city formally removed was Stonewall Jackson, located on the corner of Monument Avenue and Arthur Ashe Boulevard where I lived at the time. The street had been renamed for the humanitarian and tennis great only a year earlier.

It was hard to miss the symbolism; I lived at the intersection of where the city had been and where it wanted to go.

When the city finally removed the statue to General Robert E. Lee, the largest Confederate monument in the South, I had the privilege of covering it for The Virginian-Pilot, the state’s biggest newspaper.

Decades earlier, Fowler was involved in another anti-Confederate effort.

As a student at the University of Richmond, he and his friends formed the “Student Power Coalition” in student government. Their first order of business was banning the performance of the song “Dixie” at football games. The slavery-romanticizing composition came out of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy and was adopted as the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy.

The next student government meeting was packed.

“We were surrounded by rednecks” protesting the ban, Fowler recalls. The school made them overturn their decision.

Fowler looks back on those days with a laugh: “We were woke before there was ever anything called woke.”

It’s a curious time for an American to be away from his country. With the joy that comes from making new international friends also comes the understanding that they’ll probably ask you to explain what’s happening back home.

And the truth is that the fight between good and evil can’t be simply dismissed as the stuff of comic books. The threat to American democracy as we know it is very real, and it’s only through actions like pulling down a monument to white supremacy or banning a racist song from a football field that we can make America a place to be proud of once again.

Disclosure: Rich Griset is a longtime contributor to Style Weekly. This article was originally written as an assignment for the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX).