Bob Temuka's top five moments of remaindered comics bliss #5: Lost in the supermarket with the Nth Man

Of course the greatest moments in my life involve my wife and kids. As much as I have been obsessed with so many facets of pop culture, and comic books in particular, nothing compares to their laughter and joy.

But when it comes to sheer geek bliss, nothing - and I really do mean nothing - ever beat finding a pile of remaindered comics in some random store. Stumbling across the cheapest of four-colour thrills in large quantities could literally get me shaking with excitement.  

You don't really see them anymore, now that American comic books are a direct market thing, they don't seep out into the general population like they used to. But there were days where you would find them in supermarkets, toy stores and corner stores.

They were always great, because comics are so fucking expensive - we always paid about three times cover price, at the least, by the time comics got to our part of the world. So to see piles of the things for a buck apiece, flogged off by some distributor or something, was as good as it ever got.

They were often comics that never even appeared in the local bookshops. Not exactly brand new, but never read before. By the nature of their unsellable origins, they usually weren't the greatest comics - you never saw a Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen in these pile, but you could find some gems.

Like the time I went to the local supermarket I'd been to a thousand times before, and they had a stack of weird Marvel goodness sitting there. The only geek thing I'd ever seen in that store was the Return of the Jedi soundtrack vinyl in the early eighties, and suddenly there's the motherfucking Nam right there.

This was the very early 90s, and the unusual thing about this pile was that it was Marvel - for some reason, the remaindered comics were almost always DC. Not this time, it was full of things that nobody cares about anymore like issues of Shadowline, and post-Pitt New Universe titles (which actually got genuinely interesting when the world turned to shit).

They were not, by any measure, terribly good comics, but I was a fiend for anything I could get, and they were only fifty cents each, so I bought so many that I actually started giving a shit about D.P.7. 

There were no Spider-Man or Captain America or X-Men comics. Barely any actual Marvel Universe at all, apart from some Power Pack with some lovely Bogdanove stories and the Gerber She-Hulk comics with a young Bryan Hitch on art.

There was also some Nth Man, and you don't often get that kind of high octane zen craziness at the local store too often, so I was in with a grin.

The supermarket where I got those comics closed down last year, which is a pain in the arse, because our current house is just a couple of hundred metres away, and I could really use it. The building is deserted now, but I still can't help peeking inside, and looking for ghosts of cheap comics.

This is a house of Sienkiewicz: Mega-Cities, Treks and a galaxy far, far away

I still think a vampire is gonna get me

Daylight savings ended recently, and now when I get the chance to take an evening walk after the kids go to bed, I end up walking around in the dark. This is not unusual - I have spent many, many hours walking around my home town in the dark - but what might be unusual is that I still have a genuine fear that a fucking vampire is going to get me one night.

I've seen every kind of vampire film there is, and I know they're not real, but sometimes I swear I can still hear them flying overhead, looking for human prey, and setting their sights on some dork like me, and I'm gonna end up like this poor bastard in Hellblazer #68, and just meat for the beast:

Shit, Steve Dillon did the best facial expressions in the business, man...

Super powers always fighting, but Mona Lisa just keeps on smiling

I still don't know the exact lyrics to a lot of my favourite songs, and still just hum along to Nirvana - especially the one where he likes the songs, but doesn't know the words, and I'm suitably aware of the irony to all that. 

You can get the lyrics for anything in 10 seconds flat now, but the lyric sheet printed on the back of the album cover used to be a major reason for getting the tapes or CDs, because then you could show the whole damn world how much you loved some music by singing along with it to the proper words.

I used to spend ages in the local record store, peering at the vinyl issue of Pink Floyd's The Wall, deciphering some of the lyrics I couldn't make out in my endless listenings, until the store owner gave me enough stink eye to drive me away. I would wear out video tapes going back and forth on songs like Queen's The Miracle, the immortal Star Trekkin' by The Firm, and all the songs from the first half of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (I only had the first 40 minutes of the film on video before the tape ran out.)

It was pain-staking, but sometimes it was the only option, and I remember well into the 90s, sitting around the table in our flat, trying to decipher Spoonman. All that effort, over all those years, and now I can look up lyrics anytime I want. I still don't do it most of the time, because singing the wrong words with passion is just as much fun as getting it right.

Nopeing out on a Hunter so fast

The first Stephen Hunter book I ever read was Dirty White Boys, when it showed up at the local library in the early 2000s. I was going through one of those phases where you're constantly trying new authors to find something new to read, and I just liked that title and the synopsis sounded dope, and I just jumped right in.

Twenty years later, and I've read all of the books featuring the indominable Swagger clan and their unwavering talents for killing bad motherfuckers, often at considerable personal cost.

I call it sniper porn, and even though I'm a proudly lily-livered pacifist, I love the way the Swaggers take down the worst scum in the world, with a bullet in the right place. A lot happens in Hunter's books, but it's all so direct and clear and free of any bullshit, as sharp as the sniper's sight.

So of course I had to check out Basil's War when I saw it in the library the other week, and I haven't checked out again of a book so quickly in years. I don't think I made a dozen pages. Because while the Swagger books are straight to the point, Basil's War is full of nothing but bullshit.

I can certainly see what Hunter was going for, a piss-take of all the stiff-upper-lip ideals of old WW2 films, taken to the ultimate extremes. But it's so extremely different from the usual directness of his books, it was everything I didn't want in a Stephen hunter book.

I'm still down for the next Swagger (or Cruz) book, but Basil can do his own thing, I ain't got time for all that bullshit.

Power Pack never appreciated their parents

I read my first Power Pack comic when I was 10, and have a deep admiration for any PP comics drawn by the mighty Jon Bogdanove (he did a great Superman, but his kids were sublime), and I only just realised that the Power kids' parents were clearly based on Louise and Walt Simonson.

The Simonsons remain the most awesome couple in modern comic books, and now I just think their superpowered fictional off-springs are evil little shits, for all the crap they put Wezzie and Walt through.

Dicks in the New Adventures

Terrence Dicks was the first book author I knew to search for, because I knew he did a lot of the Doctor Who novelisations. But when I first got into the New Adventures books in the 90s, Dicks felt like old hat, and since I only had a limited amount of time to spend on Doctor Who at the time, I was more inclined to read the other books by the young, hip and experimental, like Cornell, Orman, Parkin, Miles and the rest.

So I've only just read Blood Harvest - Dick's second effort in the range - 30 years after it came out, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was bloody brilliant.

It's got vampires straight out of a Hammer film in the same story where the Doctor and Ace are rubbing bootlegging shoulder with Al Capone., before the TARDIS crew are suddenly dealing with a full-on Five Doctors sequel.

And it reminded me that Dicks was still a master storyteller in the 90s, long after I first read the great Dalek Invasion of Earth. Blood Harvest just hums along and gets to the point with extreme efficiency, and has terrific cliffhangers, each chapter ending with a new twist or dilemma that demands more reading time.

Hell, it even gives old Borusa a happy ending, and I did not see that coming, and makes a joke about Dick's own clichés, which I kinda did.

I'm more than two dozen books into a re-read of the New Adventures book, and after endless cyberpunk bullshit, the straightforwardness of a Dicks beats all that post-modern nonsense with professional ease. The old guard were always the best guard.

Living the beat life

It's fun to think that On The Road is the greatest book in the world when you're 20. It would be weird if you didn't, and I know I went through the same kind of beatnik phase so many other teenagers do.

Of course we all contain multitudes, and you can be several things at once - a geek and a jock at the same time. And while they will bury me a punk, I definitely went through a deep and passionate love affair with the poetry and prose of all the beat generation crowd at the same point in my life.  

I don't know how much he gets lumped in with the rest of them because he came a little afterwards, but I was always a bit of a Emmett Grogan fan, even though I believed less than 10 percent of his stories. Ringolevio felt like a blueprint for some kind of life, but was too extraordinary to take as a practical guide. 

On The Road offered more, and while the endless roads of America might as well have been on the fucking moon for how accessible they were to me, Kerouac's book was full of tiny little truths, and the freedom of hitching a ride in the back of a truck, and watching the cold stars above, is still immensely attractive. And the story about the endless roll of paper going through the typewriter is still one of the most genuinely romantic images in literary history. 

I was turned on to all the great writers by smart girls and nerdy co-workers and was soon haunting the bookstores, looking for the most obscure authors (and finding a surprising number of them, New Zealand used to be one of the most literary countries in the world, with amazing proportions of readers, and you could find the most extraordinary books in small town second hand bookstores).

And you follow those threads and get stuck into the spiritual side of thing, and there are all sorts of revelations to be found in the Eastern philosophies that were never mentioned in school.

And while that all gets very zen, following the beat generation means you inevitably read more about the actual writers who put together these extraordinary words, and they mostly turn out to be the worst fucking people, melting down into hopeless drunks, or beating women with absolute gross impunity.

Bill Burroughs could break your brain with his literary mash-ups, but was also a whiny old shit who shot his wife in the face - and then was embarrassingly snide about the horrific incident in later years.

At least we'll always have Ginsburg, who seemed like a decent dude, especially compared to his contemporaries. It's little surprise how majestic Howl still is, and can still be absorbed with few caveats.

By the time I grew out of my beats streak, I was more about Hunter S Thompson, and his truth bombs in amongst the hedonism. He could still be a shit, but was more open about those short-comings, rarely just blaming it on the drugs when he so easily could have. 

That infatuation lasted a lot longer, largely because it was just way more fun. But again, if you're in your forties, and still think Hunter's stoned ramblings are all you need to know about the American experience, you've got some way to go yet. Don't we all?

This is a house of Sienkiewicz: Outside the mainstream (part two)