Slipping away from the Seto Thargo

It was nice while it lasted. A few years ago, I achieved a life-long goal of collecting every single issue of 2000ad, all 2000+ progs. And for a short while, I had them all, and was truly Seto Thargo.

But only for a short while, because last year I moved to a town where you couldn't get the Galaxy's Greatest Comic anywhere, so that immediately created a gap of almost 50 issues. I only got six progs at other bookstores around the South Island during the year, but with 2000ad coming out relentlessly every week, I was coming up well short.

And now I can't fucking find them on the shelves anywhere in a city of 1.5 million people, which feels wrong on a quantum level. Because 2000ad used to be everywhere - every corner dairy, every bookstore. It slowly faded away from all of these places over the years, and for the past decade or so, I knew of only two shops in all of Auckland that were selling it, and now that I've returned from a Southern odyssey, even those two places don't get it anymore.

Reading the latest issue of 2000ad while working back to my work or home is one of the great small pleasures of my life, and it's s shame to give it up. It's such a primal experience for me that I could never replicate with a digital subscription to the comic - the tactile nature of the thing plays a huge part in my enjoyment of it, along with being out the world with it.

And getting a mail order subscription is prohibitively expensive, and I have no doubt that many progs would go missing every year on their journey to the other side of the world (I have a monthly subscription to Empire magazine, and at least two of those go missing every years, to the point where I've stopped complaining about it.)

So I'm still looking for a regular source, and will pick up the missing back issues when they become available in some way, but I bet I miss a few. There's already at least one issue from the past few months that is sold out on the 2000ad website, and if you can't get it there, you can't get it anywhere.

I really need to stress that I am not complaining about any of this. This is the way I've read comics my whole life, in non-linear fashion, and the hunt is the thing. Now I'm looking in every random bookstore (half the progs I managed to scrape up last year were in a chain bookstore in a town of 7000 people), and that's genuinely fun.

The one thing I do regret is that I have no idea what's going on in my favourite strips, I've missed a lot of the brilliant Williams/Wyatt/Flint Dredd stories in recent months, (although they are all, of course, thoroughly spoiled). And I remain absolutely fascinated by the late-career brilliance of Dan Abnett - always a good writer, but a truly great one in recent years with Brink, The Out and Lawless, and he has even evolved hoary old Sinister Dexter into something spectacular.

I'm not totally bereft of thrillpower - you can still get the Judge Dredd Megazine in multiple places, probably because the newsagents selling them get a higher return on their shelf space from it. The Meg is still superb value for money, so there's still some thrillpower coming through, just not that weekly dose, the one I've been craving since 1982.