Posted in: Comics, Vintage Paper | Tagged: action comics, nicholas cage

First Superman in Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0 Goes For Record $15 Million

The census-topping Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0, once owned by Nicolas Cage, has just sold for an all-time record $15 Million, Metropolis/ComicConnect has announced.

Metropolis/ComicConnect has just announced the sale of an Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0 for an all-time record $15 Million, the highest price ever paid for a comic book. This private sale was negotiated on behalf of the anonymous owner by Metropolis Collectibles/ComicConnect of New York. The buyer is also currently anonymous.  While the seller has not been identified here, in 2016, this copy was part of billionaire businessman and comic book collector Ayman Hariri's Impossible Collection, which Bleeding Cool viewed and photographed during its exhibit at the St. Pancras Hotel in London that year. This sale surpasses the record set just weeks ago in November 2025 by the highest graded copy of Superman #1 CGC 9.0 which sold for $9,120,000.   Published in 1938, Action Comics #1 features the first appearance of Superman from DC Comics, by creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.  This copy is one of two CGC 9.0 copies at the top of the CGC census.

The $15 Million record-holding copy of Action Comics #1 has quite a fabled history, as Bleeding Cool was the first to tell you in 2011. It was sold by Sotheby's in 1992 for $82,500, and sold to Nicolas Cage in 1997 by Metropolis / Comic Connect's Stephen Fishler for $150,000.  Then, in 2000,  this Action Comics #1, a copy of Detective Comics #27, and a copy of Detective Comics #1 were stolen from Cage's home.  Cage, a well-known comic book fan and at the time the owner of a jaw-dropping vintage comic book collection, was extremely disheartened by the theft and subsequently sold his entire collection with Heritage Auctions.  The announcement of the sale became infamous late-night talk show and gossip mag fodder because Cage married Lisa Marie Presley just days after announcing that he was selling his comic books.  Fishler went on the record in detail about the original particulars of the theft in 2006 on the Collector's Society message board, in an effort to flush out information on another comic stolen during the incident:

In 2000, Nicolas Cage called me, slightly frantic and quite upset that 3 comic books had been stolen from his house in Los Angeles. I asked him if the police had been contacted and he informed me that they had not. I immediately placed a call to the L.A. police who arrived on the scene within 20 minutes.

Here are the facts:
3 books- A VF Action Comics #1 (unrestored), a VF Detective #27 (unrestored except for a tiny sealed tear on the back cover/sold in the 1992 Sotheby's auction) and a 3rd book that I will not disclose for the time being, were missing. These books had been placed in high security frames on a wall. Those frames were now empty. However, it was nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly when the potential theft occurred. Mr. Cage had a party at his house the week before. It could have happened then. It is also possible that it had could have happened prior to the party. There was no way to know for sure.

A number of household employees were interviewed about the theft. Unfortunately, nothing of substance had come from those interviews.

Several weeks later, I spent a number of hours combing through the house in the hope that the books were somehow still in the house. Misplaced? Hidden by a thief in an out of the way location with the notion of retrieving them at a later date. I came up empty. The books had fallen off the face of the earth.

In, 2000, I had spent considerable time quietly contacting comic book stores in the L.A. area in the hope that the books would be sold for some quick cash. Several days after the initial report of the theft, a store owner in the L.A. area informed me that he had recently received a phone call requesting pricing information for Action #1 and Detective #27. I was very hopeful that this tip would lead to a potential recovery of the stolen books but unfortunately, the store owner received no further phone calls. However, I was not discouraged in that I knew that the books were out there – somewhere.

Several months later, there was a another break. On ebay, I spotted an auction for the D copy of Marvel Mystery #71 in a CGC holder. The same Marvel #71 that I had sold to Cage two years earlier. I contacted Nick abouthe book but unfortunately he was out of the country at the time. I emailed the ebay seller with questions regarding the book but received no response. One week later, I found out that a good friend of mine had purchased the Marvel #71 from the seller on ebay. That transaction had been done in person and was completed in cash. Thankfully, I was able to secure the name and address of the ebay seller. Left a phone message for the seller and again,did not receive a response.

And indeed, it turned out that Nick's Marvel #71 was missing. With the Action #1 and Detective #27 in the spotlight, the fact that the Marvel #71 was missing had just been overlooked. Why someone would also take the #71 is anybody's guess.

I handed over the information to Nick's people who assured me that they would take it from there. To be honest, I feel they dropped the ball. For some reason, they did not want to get the police involved. They contacted the seller of the Marvel #71, a person living in CT, and received a legal letter in return claiming harassment. Because they could not connect the person in CT to a person who had access to Nick's house, they just seemed to let the matter drop. It was infuriating for me to watch all this transpire, but at the end of the day it was not my book and it was not my investigation.

The loss of the books was upsetting to Nicolas Cage. Extremely upsetting. And it was something that he has never gotten over.

The Action Comics #1 from this theft was recovered by Los Angeles police in April 2011 after being discovered in a San Fernando Valley storage locker. As news broke of the recovery in April 2011, Cage told ABC News that he would seek to have the comic returned to him.  Though there was extensive debate in the vintage collecting community as to whether Cage would be able to recover the comic due to possible insurance claim issues, and Comic Connect has never divulged the identity of the seller of the book in this auction, the Hollywood Reporter subsequently ran a story which stated "Comicconnect is selling it for the current owner, which is still believed to be Cage."

This copy is one of two CGC 9.0 copies sitting at the top of the CGC census, the best copies ever graded by CGC.  It previously became the first comic book to break the $2 Million barrier, selling for $2,161,000 in 2011, after being recovered by police that year. The other CGC 9.0 copy sold for $3,207,852 in 2014.  Both of those CGC 9.0 copies were part of the Impossible Collection when Bleeding Cool viewed the exhibit in 2016. In the interest of completeness, it should be noted that the Action Comics #1 Edgar Church copy, part of a treasure trove of high-grade comics purchased in 1977 by Mile High Comics owner Chuck Rozanski, has been sitting ungraded and virtually unseen in the hands of a private collector for decades.  No decent scan or photo of the Church copy, widely considered the most valuable comic in existence, has ever been made public on the internet, though the few knowledgeable individuals who have seen it claim it is undoubtedly the best copy known to exist. With this $15 Million sale, the top of the sales record charts, including sales that surpass the $3M barrier, currently looks as follows:

• Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0 January 2026 $15,000,000
• Superman #1 CGC 9.0 November 2025 $9,120,000
• Action Comics #1 CGC 8.5, April 2024 sale for $6,000,000.
• Superman #1 CGC 8.0 January 2022 $5.3 million. (note: this copy is now graded CGC 8.5)
• Amazing Fantasy #15 CGC 9.6 September 2021 sale for $3,600,000.
• Action Comics #1 CGC 8.5, April 2021 sale for $3,250,000.
• Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0 April 2014 $3,207,852
• Action Comics #1 CGC 6.0 Rocket Copy January 2022 $3,180,000.
• Captain America Comics #1 CGC 9.4 April 2022 $3,120,000.

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