Action Comics #1 goes on sale at a Dallas auction house this week and is expected to fetch a record-breaking bid.
The comic that will be sold as part of Heritage Comics and Comic Art Auction is not an ordinary issue; rather, it represents Superman’s first debut more than eight decades ago.
“This has always been one of the grails. Back in the 70s, this was the first comic where anybody had ever paid $1,000 for and then at some point it became the only one that was worth $100,000, then worth $1 million, then gone up from there,” said Barry Sandoval, vice president of Heritage Auctions, per FOX KDFW.
Bidding for the iconic issue already stands at over $5 million.
The previous record for any comic book sold at auction, The Amazing Fantasy No.15, which introduced Spider-Man, sold for $3.6 million in 2021. This comic initially sold in 1962 for 12 cents, per The New York Times.
Perhaps even more impressive, however, was the single page of artwork from a 1984 Spider-Man comic that sold for $3.36 million in January 2022, as previously reported by The Dallas Express. That sale, like the forthcoming Superman auction, occurred in Dallas.
Despite the sky-high value of the first issue of Action Comics, the creators of Superman, Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster from Cleveland, were only paid $130 for the rights to the character by Detective Comics, which would later rebrand as DC Comics. Decades later, DC eventually awarded a hefty payout to the creators, acknowledging past mistreatment.
The auction runs from April 4 to April 7. In addition to Action Comics #1, over 1,500 other items are available to bid on, like Batman #1, which has a current bid of $115,000.