—
THE STORAGE LOCKER: WHAT IS AND ISN’T KNOWN
The mechanism by which the comic ended up in a San Fernando Valley storage locker is not established by anything in the public record. What the available reporting documents is the endpoint: a man bought a storage locker’s contents at auction, found the comic in it, and brought it to a dealer. The path from Cage’s home in 2000 to that locker at some point before 2011 is not documented.
Storage locker auctions are a legal commerce in California and throughout the United States. When a renter of a storage unit fails to pay the monthly fee for a specified period—the length varies by state, but California law requires a minimum lien period before auction—the storage facility can move to auction the unit’s contents to recover what is owed. The auctioning of the unit’s contents passes to the buyer whatever the renter left behind: furniture, boxes, tools, clothing, and, occasionally, objects of significant value whose presence the original renter may or may not have been aware of.
The man who bought the locker in this case told investigators he could not identify the specific locker he had purchased—an account the police were checking as of the time of contemporaneous reporting. This claim is plausible in the context of how storage locker auctions work. Buyers at these auctions typically visit multiple facilities, bid on multiple units, and may process the contents of many lockers across a buying season. Identifying, months later, which specific unit among several yielded a specific object is genuinely difficult.