A Record-Setting Superman Comic Leapt Over $3 Million in a Single Bound

An initial investment of a dime just paid off for $3.2 million, and it only took 76 years.

A really improbably-well-preserved copy of "Action Comics 1," which contains the first appearance of Clark Kent, Superman, and Lois Lane, set the record for most expensive comic ever sold, selling for $3,207,852 on eBay yesterday.

It received the highest grade ever for an "Action Comics 1" from the comic-grading authority, CGC, as the copy is so well-preserved, that the pages aren't even yellowing. As the eBay ad copy explains, it's like "the aging process has yet to begin."

You can either see the whole thing on the CGC website, or watch this video of someone flipping through it. You'd think no one would buy something they could just read online, but whatevs. As you can see, it looks good:

How did this copy escape the ravages of time—the Kryponite of us all—when so many have fallen? According to Joe Mannarino, the second of now five owners, this copy owes its white whites and flat binding to spending some 40-odd years in a cedar box in the mountains.

Comics dealer Joe Mannarino found the copy in "a small town at the top of what was probably the Blue Ridge Mountain range" in the late 1970s. The original owner had died, and his family had responded to Mannarino's want-to-buy ad for comics that he had put in the paper.

Mannarino maintains that the family knew that a copy of "Action Comics 1" was valuable, and they were asking for thousands of dollars for it. When he arrived they showed him a cedar box where their father kept a small number of comic books. The books weren't in plastic or anything; they were just stacked in there. But at the top of the mountain, where humidity was low, the temperature was cool, and in the dark of a cedar chest, it seemed to keep from aging.

Those conditions are pretty much exactly what experts at places like the National Archives and the Library of Congress recommend: "60-70 degrees F; 40-50 percent relative humidity (RH); with clean air and good circulation."

Mannarino bought the comic, rated it "Near Mint," and bought another cedar box to keep it in before selling it a few years later. The buyer held onto it for 30 years, before taking it from a bank vault and selling it to Darren Adams of Pristine Comics, who put it up for auction.

The $3.2 million winning bid blew past the record price fetched by a comic, $2.1 million for another copy of "Action Comics 1" in 2011. That copy, which had once been stolen from Nicholas Cage, and its auction broke a record set by yet another copy of "Action Comics 1," for $1.5 million in 2010. That's a hat-trick of record-setting comic sales for this title.

But I guess that's understandable. It's the comic book that launched Superman, who pretty much launched the superhero genre. There are only around 34 unrestored copies of "Action Comics 1" left after three-quarters of a century, and words seem to fail the comic book guys attempting to convey how impressed they are with this one. Fortunately, money talked for them.