All-Time Awesome Lines From Comics pt. 2

Continuing the first regular feature of my blog so far, showcasing some of my favorte lines from comic books. Yesterday I focused on my all-time favorite single issue from any comic, Watchmen #6, and today I'm going to continue with another one of my favorite issues ever, Astro City #1/2. Astro City was a comic created by Kurt Busiek, a fantastic comic book writer, about a city that was filled with all sorts of different superheroes, most of them archetypes for characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-man, the Fantastic Four and so on. But Astro City #1/2 was far and away the best issue of the whole run and was based almost solely on a regular citizen from Astro City.

Astro City #1/2 - The Nearness of You

Astro City #1/2 focused on Michael Tenicek, a regular citizen in Astro City who is slowly going insane because at night he dreams about a woman who he has never met but that he knows every detail about her. How she likes to have her back rubbed, what her favorite song is, literally everything about her. Michael tries to track her down through all of his friends and family, but no one else even knows or thinks that this woman has ever existed.

So finally, because he's been driven to the brink of insanity, Michael decides to end it all by taking all of the pills his psychologist prescribed him to get rid of these false memories. It is then that Michael is visited by the Hangman, an enigmatic super-hero who is a powerful mystic. Hangman reveals to Micheal that there was an epic battle between the superheroes and a time-traveling supervillain which erased Michael's wife from the timestream. Turns out the woman that Michael has been dreaming about was his wife and they were married for several years until this battle caused her grandparents to have never met over half a century ago. So Michael and others are now cursed with memories of someone who never existed, with no way of ever bringing those people back. But even though he can't bring her back, the Hangman offers to erase Michael's memories of her. He refuses, which leads to this exchange.

Michael: Have any of the others ever wanted you to take their memories?

Narrator: ... And Michael sees a shift in the Hangman's mask, almost as if there's a slight smile.

Hangman: No. No one forgets. Sleep well Michael

That night, Michael sleeps soundly for the first time in a long time because he knows and understands what happened to his wife. Which leads to this ending, easily one of the best lines from almost any comic book.

Narrator: That night Michael slept and dreamed in peace of a woman that he had never met. But he knew that in another time, another world, another place, that he had known her and loved her. And she had loved him. And that made all the difference to him.

Just unbelieveable stuff from Busiek. Just wonderful. And I figured I'd leave you with this image from the beginning of the issue, a beautiful image.