A copy of Superman #1, first printed in 1939 and sold for 10 cents at the time, recently sold for just over $2.6 million in an auction that concluded Thursday night.
The comic book was published one year after Superman's comic book introduction in Action Comics #1, which showed the hero lifting a car on the cover.
The comic sold Thursday on ComicConnect.com, an online auction and comic marketplace, shows Superman performing one of his famous feats: leaping over tall buildings in a single bound.
The website also sold a copy of Action Comics #1, published in 1938, for $3.25 million in April, which was the record for a comic book auction price at the time.
"Now you look at the comic books and you go, 'superheroes everywhere.' You look back in the '30s, there was no such thing. So this was literally the first superhero," said ComicConnect CEO Stephen Fishler.
The description of the Superman #1 sold Thursday says the copy was sold twice: once off the newsstand in 1939 and once in 1979 when Mark Michaelson, who says he paid his way through college buying and selling rare comics, bought the comic and kept it in a temperature-controlled safe ever since.
The all-time record for comic books was broken in September, when a near mint condition copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, the 1962 comic from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko that introduced Spider-Man to the superhero landscape, sold for $3.6 million.
The Amazing Fantasy #15 was graded by the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), the leading third-party quality grader of comic books and other memorabilia, as a 9.6, the fourth-highest grade an item can receive.
At the time of the sale in September, only four editions of Amazing Fantasy #15 had a 9.6 grade, with no 9.8 versions in existence, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Collectible sales have ballooned in profitability in the last several years, with several records being set in comic books and sports trading card auction prices.
The highest sports trading card auction price is a Honus Wagner card that sold for $6.6 million, according to The Action Network, a sports gambling website.
Superman, created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, is a pioneer of the superhero genre, and comics featuring the Man of Steel have netted super prices recently.
Fishler said what really makes the copy sold this week notable is that it is very difficult to find high-quality copies of Superman #1.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
A 2020 graduate of Kent State University with a Bachelor's degree in Journalism, Aaron has worked as an assigning editor ... Read more
