It's all Nana Smith's fault

If there is one person that I can blame for my extremely dorky life, it's my Nana Smith.

My parents patiently tolerated and slowly fed my obsession for comic books, and my Uncle Sol would let me read horror comics that I should not have been reading, but it was my Dad's mum, Joan Smith, who really got me started. She did this by working at the absolute coolest places in town, including the greatest second hand bookstore ever. 

This country used to be some of the most voracious readers on the planet, but we must have all got sucked into our phones or something, because the second hand bookstores are fading away, and the ones that remain are a shadow of their former shelves.

There was a time when the Readers Book Exchange in Timaru, next to the Majestic Theatre, had hundreds of different comics, all sorts piled up on creaking shelves. And every Tuesday for a couple of years in the early eighties, I would go to that bookshop and swap a grocery bag of comics for svereal dozen others.

This is where the comics obsession really begins, because I would read everything - Sgt Rock comics and Claremont/Byrne X-Men and Richie Rich and Whizzer and Chips and some very nasty vampire comics. The first issue of GI Joe. Little digest editions. The issue of Ms Marvel where Deathbird kicks her in the face. Terrible Charlton comics and absolute classic Brave and Bold comics. 

It's where I got the Unknown Soldier comic that was the first comic I ever read all the way through and understood all the words, and that was a great fucking day.

I also got my copy of Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth from that store, and I read that book a hundred times and a part of me still thinks it's the best novel ever written. I still have that copy, barely held together with aging glue and absolute affection.

But I didn't keep most of the comics that came home with me in the big brown paper grocery bag. Almost all of them were in and out and gone again. It didn't matter. I was only six or seven when this was happening, and I soaked it all up.

When she left the bookstore (she'd go back a decade and a half later) she went and got a job in the town's first ever video store. There were only a couple of hundred titles released, and I still remember being appalled and fascinated by The Killing Of America and some film about Idi Amin, but the idea that you could watch any film at any time was genuinely mindblowing. We didn't even have a player when Nana was working there, but the boxes on the shelves was still the coolest damn thing I'd seen in my young life.

Nana passed away more than 20 years ago now, and I miss her every day. But I still feel her presence whenever I'm sorting through another pile of comics, because she was there when it started and she's still there now.