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"Smallville" Cast Members Attending La Mole Comic Convention
Superman has broken the $3 million barrier with the sale of an original vintage copy of "Action Comics No. 1" to kick off day one of Heritage Auctions' four-day Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction.
The issue sold for $3,180,000 and is one of the few surviving copies of the 1938 comic which features the first appearance of Superman. The sell marks the second-most-expensive comic ever offered by the Dallas-based auction house, behind only the finest-known copy of Spider-Man's first web-sling through Amazing Fantasy No. 15, which sold for $3.6 million last year to become the world's most valuable comic book sold at auction.
The copy is known as the "Rocket Copy" of Superman's 1938 first flight, given the playful moniker because of the red spaceship stamped on its cover by its first – and, until Thursday, only – owner, whose family kept the historic issue in an envelope meant to preserve important documents. This book is as consequential as it gets: Action Comics No. 1 is the palladium title of the Golden Age, the book in which Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced readers to Clark Kent and Lois Lane and ushered in the Era of the Superhero.
"I am very pleased the book sold for so much, in part because it's certainly one of the coolest items I've handled in my 20 years with Heritage," says Heritage Auctions Senior Vice President Ed Jaster. "But it gives me even greater satisfaction to have brought a life-changing windfall to the four siblings who put their trust in Heritage and our team to sell their family's copy of Action Comics No. 1."
Certified Guarantee Company knows of only 77 copies of Action Comics No. 1 in existence in any condition and of just two graded CGC FN 6.0 - one of which is this copy full of white pages. Well before Thursday's live auction, collectors made it abundantly clear they were prepared to tussle over this extraordinarily vibrant example. Shortly after the auction launched in the hours before Christmas Eve, bidding on the comic book - and rocket-ship stamp itself, included with the book - rocketed past the $1.5 million mark. Bidding had surpassed the $1.9 million mark just hours before live bidding began.
This was the first original-owner copy of "Action Comics No. 1" Heritage Auctions has offered since 2012, when a CGC GD/VG 3.0 book from the Billy Wright Pedigree sold for nearly $300,000. In fact, Heritage has offered only a handful of Action Comics No. 1s over the last decade, with none ever breaking the million-dollar barrier (one copy came close in 2016).
