Oh no!

 

If you heard a lot of loud swearing coming from my bathroom window this morning, that was me dropping Kurt Busiek's Astro City No. 16 in the bath. The one with El Hombre's origin story, part of the Steeljack epic. I'm sure I can dry it out without the pages sticking together, so it'll still be readable (it's not the first time I've done this in all my decades of reading comics in the bath), but it's still really annoying!

I bought this comic when it first came out, in early 1999. Probably from Page 45 in Nottingham, though I see now that I'd been keeping it in a bag with the cryptic price label "NX1408, NM, £1.65" rather than one of Page 45's usual ones. Maybe I bought this one without a bag, somewhere else on my travels, and subsequently put it in a bag I'd got with some other "near mint" but cheap comic. I definitely bought this one new, anyway - the comic was coming out once in a blue moon in those days because Kurt Busiek was ill and there were all kinds of delays, so a new Astro City was a rare and special treasure.

The point is, I'm very upset and aggravated about this disaster! This is something I've owned for a quarter of a century, in as near to mint condition as you would expect from something I've re-read whenever I was in the mood, and now it's always going to have wrinkled, water-damaged pages! Just think of all the things I've done in these 25 years, with this comic safely in my cupboard.

It's not even an appropriate comic to get wet. Steeljack spends a fair amount of time underwater in this storyline - not a naturally tenable position for a big heavy guy made of steel - but not in this particular issue. I'm REALLY annoyed by this. I've just drowned a piece of my history.