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.