The survival of a CGC 9.0 copy of Action Comics No. 1 is therefore not simply the product of careful storage; it is the product of remarkably careful storage across eighty-plus years, by owners who either recognized the book’s value early enough to preserve it or happened to keep it in conditions that did not accelerate the inevitable paper chemistry. Who those original owners were, and how the copy passed through the first decades of its existence, is not documented in the available accounts.
The concentration of surviving high-grade copies in the collections of dealers and serious collectors by the 1990s reflects a process of market discovery: as the comic book collecting market organized itself in the 1970s and 1980s, dealers and collectors with expertise in the Golden Age began finding the highest-surviving copies and acquiring them. This process drew surviving high-grade copies out of the casual possession of people who didn’t know what they had and into the hands of people who did. It was in this process that the Sotheby’s copy—the one that would become Cage’s and eventually be stolen and recovered—entered the visible market in 1992.
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CGC AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF AUTHENTICATION
The founding of CGC in 2000, the same year as the Cage theft, marked a significant shift in the comic book collecting market. Before CGC, grading comics was a matter of individual assessment: a dealer or collector would look at a comic and assign it a grade based on their experience and judgment, using the standards codified in the Overstreet guide. The grade was, inherently, a subjective opinion that could vary between assessors and that provided no objective record.