1ST Superman comic price

An original Superman comic, sold for 10 cents at a West Virginia newsstand in 1938, was purchased at auction Sunday night for $3.2 million, making it the most expensive comic book ever sold.

The copy of Action Comics No. 1, which features a caped Superman lifting an automobile, was sold on EBay by Darren Adams of Pristine Comics in Federal Way, Wash. The previous record for a comic book was $2.1 million, for another Action Comics No. 1, sold by the actor Nicolas Cage in 2011.

Superman was the brainchild of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, both North American-born sons of European Jewish immigrants. Their creation is widely credited as the beginning of the superhero genre. The comic book had a print run of 200, 000 copies, but only 100 or so survive today, and most of those have had some restoration work done to them.

“This book is like a museum piece, ” Adams told the Washington Post. “It’s a freak-of-nature work.” The colors are especially vivid on both the covers, and interior pages, which show a baby Superman (in diapers) lifting furniture over his head, and Superman as a young man wearing a business suit and leaping over a skyscraper.

Adams describes the comic book’s provenance in a YouTube video. Purchased off a newsstand by a man from West Virginia in 1938, the comic book was stored in a cedar chest “at high altitude” for four decades. When the man died, a collector purchased it from his estate.

A couple of owners and more than 30 years later, Adams purchased it. He first saw the copy in a bank vault. “It wasn’t just a copy of Action Comics No. 1. It was the copy, " he said. "I was floored. The emotion was overwhelming.” Adams paid seven figures for it.

On the CGC comic book grading scale, it rates a 9.0, the highest rated of any of the three dozen known, unrestored copies in existence.