The most unloved comics in the world

These issues of the Defenders, Starriors and Power Pack were always perfectly innocuous comics. Even that one issue in the first Secret Wars series, which has garnered a lot of love over the years, was a fairly average comic book in every way. 

They're not terrible or anything, and there are moments of genius in them with lovely art by Bill Sienkiewicz, Mike Zeck and June Brigman, but in general they are nothing special - the epitome of mostly mediocre Marvel comics of the 80s. 

And I used to hate them so, so much, because they were everywhere in New Zealand.

When all the comics in the world are an ocean away, sometimes you have to take what you can get. The freight charges are abominable and the exchange rate is usually kicking your arse, so who knows what is going to show up in local stores. 

If you were lucky, you might only miss one issue of 2000ad or the X-Men every year, and sometimes you find yourself buying something like the DeFalco/Ryan Fantastic Four comics for more than a year because it was the only Marvel comic showing up in town every month.

And sometimes, somebody somewhere would end up with a crate of comics from the US, and flog them everywhere, selling them off to every second hand bookstore and junk shop around. (Sometimes I hear stories at the comic shop about someone ending up with a large pile of Black Goliath #5 and how they took decades to filter through all the back issue bins in NZ stores.)

That's what happened with these comics above, because in the late 1980s, they were absolutely everywhere.

They all came out within a few months of each other in 1984 and I don't know who was responsible or where they came from. There were such a ubiquitous sight that they have all stuck in my mind and I only had to glance at the Marvel from this period to recognise them.

This was the time in my life when I was hugely devoted to to hunting down any comics I could find in every single second hand bookstore in the South Island. And there used to be a lot of these stores - a town like Dunedin, with a population just over 100k, might have two dozen potential place to buy second hand comics - and half of them would have three copies of these fucking things

My hat is off to the importer who probably made some money from them. I don't know who they are and I also don't know why they thought New Zealanders were gagging for The Defenders at the lowets point of the comic's history. There was no X-men or Avengers or Fantastic Four, just lots of Kull comics.

Anyone who was interested in these things got all the copies they wanted and the rest sat around for years. I still remember seeing them everywhere in the 90s, and even into the new century. Unloved and unbought, they lingered on shelves for decades, curled at the edges bleached out in the open daylight. The most unloved comics in the country, slowly fading away in irrelevance, long after the rest of the world stopped caring about them.