CHESSNOID

I mentioned this Superman comic a few days ago. I didn’t know it was Nicolas Cage who owned it. He made some serious money on this comic book.

Gawker:

Action Comics’ first issue from 1938 is also the first appearance of Superman, and yesterday it fetched a record price at auction (why are things at auctions always fetching?). Cage bought the comic back in 1997 for $150,000, but it was stolen from his home in 2000. It turned up later in a storage locker someone fetched at auction (just like on Storage Wars!) and given back to Cage, who now made a hefty $2 million off the sale.

I wonder if it was a real rich nerd who bought the comic book or just another collector hoping to hold on to it for appreciation purposes only. From 1997 to 2011, the price went from $150,000 to $2,161,000 which is better than the stock market.

NY Times:

An auction for a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938 set a record Wednesday night. After 50 bids the closing price was $2,161,000 — the most ever paid for a comic book — to be the owner of the first appearance of Superman. (And that new owner’s identity is currently secret.) The copy of the book was graded at 9.0 on a scale of 1 to 10, a full grade better than a copy of Action Comics No. 1 that sold for $1 million last year.

The saga of this copy of Action Comics no. 1 is worthy of its own graphic novel. Various reports have indicated that this copy was once owned by Nicolas Cage and was stolen from his home in 2000. Mr. Cage bought the comic in 1997 for $150,000. In April, Stephen Fishler, the co-owner of ComicConnect.com and Metropolis Collectibles, was contacted by a man who had purchased the contents of a storage locker in California. Inside was the copy of Action Comics No. 1. “After spending so many years looking for the book, I was blown away when it appeared,” Mr. Fishler said in a statement. “The book’s new owner and the whole collectibles community are lucky this amazing book was recovered.”