Most Expensive Comic Book

Many people read comic books growing up as kids, but a certain few retain their passion and become meticulous collectors of expensive comic books. Other people think of comic books as juvenile superhero fantasies, but modern comic books, manga and graphic novels are beginning to change this perception. What is the most expensive comic book in the world?

Any serious comic book collector can tell you that the world’s most expensive comic book is DC’s Action Comics #1 (1938). Written by Jerry Siegel and illustrated by Joe Shuster, this book contained our first 12-page glimpse of the iconic superhero– Superman. One may wonder why this comic would outsell, say, the first appearance of Spider-Man, especially considering the recent success of the Spider-Man movie franchise and the box office flop that marked Superman’s return to Hollywood. The answer lies not in the fact that Action Comics #1 contains the first appearance of Superman, but that it contains the first appearance of the superhero.

All of the stereotypical devices of the superhero genre are combined for the first time in this issue; superpowers, secret identities, pseudo-scientific origins and, yes, even tights. Superman was the amalgamation of Greek myth with Flash Gordan and just a smattering of everyday life. Ultimately, it was the same combination that we still see today, to some extent, in the immensely successful Batman, X-Men and Spider-Man franchises.

According to Scoop, a comics newsletter, a Comics Guaranty (CGC)-certified 4.0 (”very good” condition) copy of Action Comics #1 was sold for $195,000 in May of 2006, out-pricing the 2004 expensive comic books sale of a CGC-certified 9.4 (”near mint” condition) copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, containing Spider-Man’s first appearance, by more than $70,000.

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