It may sound absurd but don’t be naive. Even heroes have the right to bleed. I may be disturbed but won’t you concede even heroes have the right to dream? And it’s not easy to be me.” — From Superman (It’s Not Easy), written by John Ondrasik.
Do you think $4.99 is a lot to pay for a superhero comic book? A comic book first advertised as “one you can’t afford to miss?”
Either way, my guess is, unless you’re one of Trump’s chosen people you’d think laying out $15,000,000.00 for a single comic book is a bit too rich for your blood. This represents a 150% increase in value since 2024. Talk about affordability…
But that is what a CGC 9.0 (!!!) copy of Action Comics #1, June 1938, went for last week. For those who are zero-challenged, that’s fifteen million bucks. Of course, being CGC certified, this comic book is slabbed — another word for embalmed; so, if you want to destroy the plastic encasement and actually open it up, well, that’s $15,000,000.00 up in smoke.
For all we know the real comic book inside that slab might be a 40 year-old copy of Marvel’s Royal Roy. Unless Disney adds Royal Roy to Avengers: Doomsday, we might never know.
The purchaser of this expensive plastic trinket is “Anonymous.” Obviously, they have relatives, next of kin, who now are pissed about their inheritance. This book has something of an add-on “value” in that it was owned by actor Nicolas Cage, who is well-known to have been a world-class comics collector and who almost got (and sort of did, briefly) to play Superman in the movies. But it doesn’t look like that price point was hit because it once was owned by a great actor. As you can see from the photo, Cage didn’t sign the book.
Well, maybe Cage signed it on the inside. Go ahead, crack it open.
The Cage credit is somewhat enhanced by its more recent back story. The actor paid a mere $150,000 in 1996, but it was stolen four years later. In 2011, his Action #1 was uncovered. My guess is the thief(ves) figured out selling it would constitute a confession. Nic got his comic book back, and sold it six months later for a mere $2,200,000. Nonetheless, given the 11-year trauma of hide and seek, I think he probably made the right decision.
Amusingly, just a few weeks ago its predecessor-in-the-spotlight, Superman #1, sold for only nine and one-eighth million dollars. It, too, was graded 9.0 by CGC. I dunno; if Action #1 went for $15 million, this kinda, sorta, makes a tiny little bit of sense. Maybe. It seems a shame that Cage didn’t get a piece of that bounty, but as a long-time collector of rare comics you quickly come to understand the meaning of the phrase “don’t look back.” I wonder if Bob Dylan collected comics.
It is an interesting coincidence that these two books sold within weeks of each other. Given my rant about honesty, forgery and slabbed comic books, I’m prepared to consider the possibility that, somehow, somebody figured out a way to deploy Artificial Intelligence to forge stuff. Not just comic books, although forging paper money probably is no longer worth the effort. I have no direct knowledge of using Artificial Intelligence to generate fake shit. I have a hard enough time using my so-called human intelligence to suss out the real shit.
Getting back to our brother fanboy, I wish to note that Nic Cage crafted his stage name after Marvel’s Luke Cage (the comic book; well before the teevee series) and avant garde jazz composer John Cage. I think that’s really cool. A lot of performers read or have regularly read comic books — a lot — but Cage is one of the few who put his name where his mouth is.
It’s almost as if former United States attorney general Merrick Garland had changed his name to Matt Murdock. These days, he might be considering doing just that.
