Superman's First Appearance Sells for Over $2 Million at Auction

A copy of Action Comics #1, featuring the first appearance of Superman, just fetched over $2 million in a recent auction.

As reported by Bleeding Cool, a CGC 8.5 copy of the famous comic book sold for $2,052,000 at Comic Connect auction last week. The sale marks the third-highest price ever paid for a comic book behind the $2,161,000 a copy sold for in 2011 and $3,207,852 in 2014. Both of those issues were rated CGC 9.0 and are part of the Impossible Collection of valuable, high-grade DC Comics owned by Vero co-founder Ayman Hariri.

The sale of this latest issue wasn't without a little bit of drama, however. The Comic Connect website experienced a glitch in the final moments of the auction that prevented people from entering bids before the auction closed. Because of the technological issues, Comic Connect decided to continue the auction the next day after receiving feedback from bidders. That re-opening of bidding led to the issue bringing in around $45,000 more than the faulty final bid.

In addition to being the third highest price ever paid for a comic book, this latest sale is also the third comic book sale to break the $2 million barrier and the seventh to break the $1 million barrier, though it is worth noting that among those seven is the previous sale of this same issue. It sold for $1.5 million back in 2010. That the price of the issue has more than doubled in under a decade is a testament to just how valuable authentic copies of Action Comics #1 really are for their place in comic book history.

Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who originally hoped to sell the character as a comic strip. Failing that, they complied a number of the strips together into a comic book and shopped it around to publishers, eventually landing at the publisher which would later become a household name as DC Comics.

What do you think about the impressive price this copy of Action Comics #1 brought at auction? Let us know your thoughts in comments below!