Weather, floods and even Katrina !!!

[Senormac]

I hope its not too morbid of me to be thinking of this ......but there must have been some comic stores and or collectors down in Louisiana when Katrina hit the place. I mean, comics and water just don't mix too well. I sometimes wonder .....what if an Action #1 or a Batman #1 or some other equally prized book......ended up under a few feet of water. That would be a bad thing. And now theres more flooding in the midwest. Mylar is not gonna protect too well in that situation....but a taped plastic flap might survive. Any stories out there about water and comics?

[Paradox]

Some folks keep the especially valuable ones in watertight containers for just such an emergency.

[Paradox]

Oh, didn't notice the cry for stories. I've lost...I'm guessing about 1000 or so to various incidences of fire and flood (good stuff, too, like most of my '60s and '70s Amazing Spider-Man's and others in the "S" box). It basically taught me that comics are material objects, subject to entropy like anything else. I haven't cared about the condition of my comics in decades, as long as I can read them. If I buy one with a bag and a board, I treat it like a candy wrapper.

Yes, that was the sound of at least a dozen collectors fainting dead away. :D

EDIT: Surprising, the survivors of one flood were the unbagged ones. The bags hold the water in once it gets there. The unbagged ones are wrinkly now, but at least I can still read them.

[Greg Hatcher]

I'm in the same boat as Dox. Several boxes of older stuff have been a bit damaged over time; pretty much everything I own is a reader copy. There are two exceptions, really old books that were gifts from my wife-- those I keep bagged, but even those I take out and read once in a while.

[moonlight_night78]

I don't know about any private collections, but I do know for sure that there was at least one comics shop (Crescent City Comics) that was in a 2-story building and they kept all of their backstock at the ground floor. They got flooded out and lost their roof, essentially putting them out of business

[Senormac]

I used to work for The Comic Vendor....a guy in So. Cal. who had a multi million book comic book inventory. I think he's still in business to this day but I havn't talked to him in years......Well, he had these shelves in his warehouse that were at least 15 feet high with boxes and boxes of comics on em when I started workin for him....and at some point (before I worked for him) he had had a fire cuz the books which were all bagged in plastic (multiples in each bag) were all black from the smoke....and kinda melted at least on the tops. I made it my personal job to go through the guys inventory, open those bags....free the comics from their black melted plastic tops......and pull anything that was really valuable so he could put them in the safe. He had so many books....he just couldn't keep up with them I think. I must have pulled hundreds of ten centers that were just mixed in with the rest. Anyways it was amazing to me how much smoke from a fire can damage stuff. It was prob a good thing all them books were in plastic. I think that guy made out pretty good when he hired me....cuz I did waaaaay more than I was hired to do, just cuz I loved workin with comics. I organized his entire warehouse. It was a labor of love....:D