Thursday, March 28, 2024

Goodbye, Readers Book Exchange







This shop was my favourite bookshop in the whole world, and it closed for good today. It had been around for nearly 60 years, opening when The Beatles were still a thing, outlasting the USSR and surviving well into the 21st century, but its day is done. The Reader's Book Exchange in Timaru, just down from the Majestic Theatre, is no more.

I thought it was going to shut down months ago, and got abnormally emotional about it in the back room, but I got to go there a couple more times in the past few weeks, buying a few of Mick Herron's books, a little bit of Snoopy, a collection of science fiction short stories by an author I'd never heard of before, and an old book about disasters which was far and away my favourite non-fiction book in my primary school library when I was 8. That all seemed pretty apt.

The book selection got thinner and thinner as the years went on, but every time I was in town for the past decade or two, I'd make some time to bound up the concrete steps and have a browse, at least walking out with a Michael Moorcock paperback or something. 

It was my place. It always was. My Nana Smith, who passed away 24 years ago, worked there on and off for many years, and encouraged my reading to a wonderful degree, largely forming the nerd I am today. If she hadn't worked there, I wouldn't be doing this blog, or read thousands and thousands of wonderful comic books over the years. 

This is where I got the Unknown Soldier comics that I used to learn to read, the best issue of the Uncanny X-Men ever (#138) and the 2000ad cover where you see who Old Ben from Harry 20 on the High Rock really was. I got the thoroughly excellent Robocop novelization from there, and regularly bought Exploits of Spider-Man mags in the 90s. I still have issues of Hulk and Unexpected and Legion of Super-Heroes that I bought decades ago.

It'll probably turn into a vape shop, but it'll always be the best second-hand bookshop there ever was to me.


Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Coming off your bike at the end of the world



I've never been a motorcycle reader, and it's not just because everyone I know who is a regular rider has come off it at some stage and done themselves a horrific injury.

It's because I will always remember the parts in The Stand where people come off motorbikes and really fucked themselves up. And the mundanity of those injuries, in a world where the ambulance is never going to come again, just made it all the worse.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

What's in the box?



Nothing feeds the desperate desire to see what happens next in a comic book quite like a weekly schedule, so it's no surprise that 2000ad has had me frothing for the next prog for decades now. 

Even now, I'm still desperate to see how the latest Sinister Dexter turns out, just as much as I needed to see how Zenith was going to get out of the existentially dark hole it was digging in its final storyline, or how Day of Chaos was going to end. (Badly, for absolutely everybody, it turned out.)

And that weekly dose was never more thrill-powered than twice in one beautiful year, when I absolutely had to know what was in Kano's black box, and who was going to win Supersurf 10.

The first run of Bad Company by Milligan, Ewins and McCarthy was a blast, bringing the incredible clichés of the British war comic into a literal new world, full of killer robots, pitiless alien foes and war zombies. And the mystery of what the lead character Kano was carrying around in a black box - enough to kill anybody who tried to open it - was the ultimate plot point of the series, and there was a whole goddamn week after Danny, Mac and Mad Tommy opened it before we also got to see inside.

My mate Kyle got the issue first, and brought it into school the next day, and I still remember waiting for it on the long driveway leading up to H-block. The revelation was, of course, perfect. Of course that's what was in the box.

Almost exactly a year later, and I'm bunking off school early this time, because I have to see if Chopper is going to win Supersurf.

Like all good young nerds, I didn't really are about sports, but I was deeply invested in Supersurf 10, and can also remember reading the end of the race in front of the rack at Temuka Stationery, and being absolutely floored by the result.

Chopper was the best -  the greatest wallscrawler Mega City-One had ever seen, and the protagonist in one of the first Dredd stories where the title character is objectively a dick. He had, of course, won  Supersurf 7 with one of the most amazing feats in fictional sports, going backwards against MC-1's heavy traffic, carrying his great rival who had been mortally injured. 

And when he returned, it was in the latest mega-epic, with weeks and weeks of the Oz storyline devoted to Chopper making it to Australia. Once all the foolishness with the Judda was sorted out, with the unfortunate loss of Uluru, the race was on, stretching out for long pages of high velocity action on antigravity surfboards.

And then he lost, because shit happens, and a loudmouth Aussie was proclaimed the best in the world, and it wasn't fair.

But then again, what is? This was a good time in life to learn that type of lesson.

Chopper came back for the breathtaking carnage of Supersurf 11, and is still hanging around in the skies. Even Kano and crew have been back in recent years, for more trippy military mayhem. But nothing compares to those long seven days, a lifetime ago.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Boba Fett in the peas (and other lost treasures)



Every time I've opened a bag of frozen peas in the past 40 years - and I really do mean ever single time, and I really fuckin' love peas - there has been the smallest part of me that still hopes to see a Boba Fett action figure in there.

Sometimes you lose some mundane possession, and it ruins your day and you never forget it. I still mourn the loss of my first great pair of sunglasses, which I left them behind at a screening of Heavenly Creatures at the Hoyts 8 on Moorhouse Ave in Christchurch, in the shadow of the Port Hills where the terrible events of that movie took place, and that was in 1994. Hell, I still kick myself for leaving  a prized soccer ball at the playground out at the Waipopo Huts, a decade earlier.

It's stupid, because all these things are replaceable, but it's still annoying, and sad. I really liked that soccer ball, man.

The things I hated losing most as a kid were my Star Wars action figures, because I coveted all I could. The good stuff never made it as far as my part of the world, but I still got a few.  The only Luke I ever had was in his Hoth outfit, but I still had a Walrus Man. They were relatively expensive, and I might only get two or three figures a year, so appreciated what I could.

One of the biggest disasters was when I was six or seven, and somehow thought my C-3PO and Death Star Droid would have a great time swishing around in the toilet bowl when I flushed it, but they just fucking disappeared, and were gone forever. That was a life lesson.

They were gone, and even though I spent the next few days looking in all the drains, I knew they were gone forever. But I never gave up on the Boba Fett I lost. 

He was accidentally flung into a field of peas next to Morrison Park on the edges of Timaru, sometime in the early 80s. Me and my mates spent ages looking for him in the pea plants, but he somehow vanished.

I was absolutely gutted - they were valuable as hell,  because you only very rarely saw anything as cool as a Boba Fett figure around here, we all would have killed for a stormtrooper of Vader figure, and you know what, it only just occurred to me that one of the other kids who helped me look for it probably palmed it for themselves.

Son of a bitch.

Still, I convinced myself that maybe it would get harvested and end up in a bag of peas somewhere, I'd read stories about people finding lost wedding rings in the fish guts, so it didn't seem that implausible. Maybe there was a Boba in the peas.

I got another Boba Fett a few years later, who was terribly melted in a fireworks incident, and then another figure that I picked up in the 90s, and still have today. I can get all sorts of Boba Fetts from the local stores now - and have been sorely tempted by one based on the eternal art of Cam Kennedy - but I still take a peek inside every damn bag of peas I open.

I drove past the pea field the other day, and it's just a curtain factory now, and I would like to say I won't be wondering if Boba Fett will turn up in a curtain somewhere, but that would be a lie.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Building time in the Twilight Zone: 'Maybe we're the fiction'



Like everyone else who has ever lived, I don't really know how the world works, although the idea that we're all the hologram generated by a four-dimensional block of solid spacetime always sound right to me.

But I can not shake the feeling that the world is created by dudes with blank blue faces who build everything in time, minute by minute, just like that episode from the 80s Twilight Zone. 

I have felt guilty about walking down back alleys that those poor bastards all had to build from scratch just because I wandered down there, but it keeps them busy for the rest of eternity, I guess.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Skrillex and Maiden on the desert road



What music do you play in the desert? When you're driving through those wide empty spaces, where nobody else is around and there is just the glorious nothing everywhere, and you just need something loud to fill that void, what do you listen to?

Anything you want! Who cares?

So you bet your arse that I played music that would get me sneered at by all the cool people when I was barrelling down the Desert Road through the middle of the North Island recently. Nobody cares about Skrillex anymore, but dubstep will never die! And while Iron Maiden are clearly still a lot cooler, they are still raging dorks, and playing Rime of the Ancient Mariner at top volume is rarely acceptable in polite society.

Things are different out on the road, out in the nothing.

Thank goodness we had a Queens of the Stone Age album when we went though the American desert, because nothing sounds better in that slab of the world. We only had that and OK Computer for hundreds of miles, but even the most familiar Radiohead sounded new again in the desert sunset. The colours, man.

I did spend a lot of time in the Mongolian desert listening to Last Christmas on the tour driver's one cassette tape, and I figures that gives me a pass on playing Whamageddon for the rest of the century.

The desert doesn't care about you. If you disrespect it, it will chew you up and spit you out. But you can also throw all the terrible - and great - music into it, and it will eat it all up. Go hard.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

The taste of four-colour dust in the back of my throat




My comics do not live in bags, because I want to read them. I know this means they are more easily damaged, and rapidly lose their value, but I'm not into comics for the money. I'm here for the thrills.

Even comics that were published in the 60s and 70s are out there in th eopen air. They've survived decades of other owners,circling around collections and second hand stores, but they probably won't survive me.

But I might not survivethem, because every time I get stuck into an old comic ,I come away with weeping eyes and a sore throat, and it's not because of that sweet old Gil Kane art.

I've always had a dust allergy, so that's got to be a lot of it, and some of these things were printed on newsprint 50 ago. They're literally flaking away every time I read them, micro pieces of paper floating right up my sinuses.

I'm not going to read these comics any less, they're worth a little eye-ache. But the older they get, the more they exude, and the older I get, the more I feel it.

This has been another post that probably has some kind of moral or metaphor hiding in there somewhere, but fucked if I know what it is.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Trotting into the void



I had two deeply existential dreams recently about getting caught up in extradimensional voids, falling into an endless abyss, and when I woke up, I was heavily freaked out and then I realised that I had extradimensional dimensional portals on the brain because I'd seen them in something I'd watched recently.

And it wasn't anything cool like a Lovecraft adaption or anything like that. No, it was episode of My Little Pony. Don't worry, the unicorn could fly, so everybody who fell into the abyss was okay.

This is my life now.