Friday, May 10, 2024

Bob Temuka's top five moments of remaindered comics bliss #2: Star Trek and Super Powers distractions

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Life is full of big and horrible decisions when you are an adult, and I really do miss the days when my biggest dilemma was how many Star Trek comics I could get from a cold warehouse full of toys in Dunedin.

This might have been the biggest actual amount of remaindered comics I ever saw on one place, my increasingly dodgy memory remembers it as a massive shelf that was 20 issues deep, full of DC Comics published just before the Crisis reboot. It was in a toy warehouse that only lasted a few years, in a town I only got to visit every other holiday, and I only had eight bucks in pocket money.

Eight bucks could go a long, long way in 1987, but there were tough choices to be made. The same store had Super Powers action figures, including the magnificently insectoid Mantis, for $5, which meant I could only afford three comics.

After long deliberation, I got an issue of the Red Tornado limited series, and two issues of the DC Star Trek comic, set during the excellent Mirror Universe story in that comic. That was all I could get.

There was one bonus - my little sister bought a Amethyst comic, because she thought it looked cool, and that somehow got absorbed into her big brother's collection, and I somehow still have that now too. It wasn't mine to give away.

I got a good few years out of that Mantis figure - I still think that design is absolutely brilliant - but that disappeared somewhere down the years. I still got them Star Treks though, and I'm still not convinced I should have got the issue of Superman: The Hidden Years instead of the Red Tornado. Some things you never quite get over, no matter how much you agonised at the time.

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