The comic was retrieved, held as evidence in an LAPD safe, and identified as the copy that had been taken from Cage’s home. Detective Hrycyk confirmed the recovery to the press in April 2011. The investigation into the original theft, however, remained unresolved. The man who had bought the storage locker had not, on the available evidence, stolen the comic; he was someone who had purchased the locker’s contents through a legal auction process. He said he could not identify the exact locker he had bought. Police were still checking his account as of the time of contemporaneous reporting.
Cage, through a publicist, issued a brief statement. “It is divine providence that the comic was found,” he said, “and I am hopeful that the heirloom will be returned to my family.”
That the statement used the word “heirloom” was not incidental. The comic was not, strictly speaking, an inherited possession—Cage had bought it in the 1990s. But the language of inheritance reflects something real about how he understood his relationship with it: the book was not a financial instrument, or not only a financial instrument. It was a cherished object with deep personal meaning, one he had wanted, sought, and acquired for reasons that went beyond investment.
This is the story of that comic, that theft, and that recovery—and of the long chain of people and events, from a Cleveland high school in the 1930s to a San Fernando Valley storage locker in 2011, that made the story possible.