Bob Temuka's top five moments of remaindered comics bliss #1: The best of times with the Beard Hunter

The shift to the direct market and away from the newsstand might have saved the entire American comics industry in the 1980s, but I was living on the arse end of the world and absolutely nowhere near a comic store, so all that wonderful content were nowhere to be seen.

So when I was 16 and dying for more sophisticated suspense in my life, I could never see any of it. Watchmen was a weird reference about sugar cubes in the Johnny DC column, and when all the writers I had followed in 2000ad for years were making a splash in the US, I never got to see any of their comics. No Doom Patrol, no Shade the Changing Man, none of it.

And then I walked in to the bookstore at the Christchurch Airport, and there were examples of all of those things, and so much more, for $2 each.   

This was very early 1992, and it was the last time I ever saw a pile of remaindered comics, and it was the best of them all, because that was where I got my first ever issue of Sandman, and my first ever Doom Patrol.

They weren't easy comics to come to in such a cold way, the Sandman issue was the last chapter in the Season of Mists, so I had no idea what was going on, and the Doom Patrol was the issue with the Beard Hunter, and that was just a trip. But the craft was there, and they were funny and intersting in a way that usual superheroes really weren't.

And those comics were just a small part of a fascinating pile. There was also a bunch of the Armageddon 2001 annuals, and plenty of Superman comics from the exact period they started putting the little triangle numbers on the cover. I got the second issue of Twilight by Chaykin and Gacia-Lopez, and that was absolutely incomprehensible without the other two parts (it took me years to realise who all the characters actually were and their place in DC history).

This was more than 30 years ago now, and I still literally dream of finding a pile of comics that good again. That haul set me on a new course in the medium, one that I was more than happy to follow. It was the right comics, at the right time, and the greatest moment of remaindered comics bliss I've ever known.