Three Brothers Crack Open an Attic Box — And Up Comes the Most Expensive Comic Ever Sold
A dusty attic, a forgotten box, and a 1939 Superman No. 1 that just shattered the comic-book price record.
Three brothers in San Francisco thought they were clearing out a life, not unearthing a fortune. Dust, newsprint, a sagging attic floor. Then a stack of comics surfaced from a forgotten box their mother once hid for “safekeeping.” Inside it: a 1939 copy of Superman No. 1 so clean it might as well have leapt out of a time portal.
Last week it sold for $9.12 million.
The family is staying anonymous, but their story spills out like a film reel. Their mother bought the book when she was nine, scraping together dimes with her older brother. Decades later she tucked it into the attic, meaning to pass it down. Time swallowed the memory. The book stayed sealed in San Francisco’s cool air, untouched by heat, light, or ambition.
When Heritage Auctions’ specialist flew in to examine it, he found a 9.0-grade survivor—crisp pages, fierce colors, the Man of Steel staring back as if no years had passed. One of the Action Comics issues in the same attic hit a 9.4.
It’s a record-shattering sale, but that isn’t what the brothers keep repeating. For them, the attic was a trapdoor into their mother’s childhood—two kids in a tiny apartment, short on money, long on stories. That box carried their world forward without making a sound.
Sometimes the past waits for the right moment to knock.
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