The most recent documented transaction involving a copy of Action Comics No. 1 is the January 2026 private sale for $15 million, publicly disclosed on January 9, 2026, which set a new record for the highest price ever paid for a comic book. The Gulf News account of this sale, dated January 11, 2026, identifies Metropolis Collectibles and ComicConnect as the intermediaries. The buyer and seller both wished to remain anonymous.
The Gulf News account describes the sold copy as “in the best condition of the roughly 100 surviving copies” and notes that the previous comic book record was $9.12 million, for a copy of Superman No. 1 sold the previous November. The insidehook.com account of the same sale identifies the seller as Nicolas Cage—or describes the copy as one that “actor Nicolas Cage… had owned”—and the buyer as a private collector.
The characterization of Cage as the seller requires caution. The insidehook.com account says the “seller” is Cage, while the Gulf News account says both parties wished to remain anonymous. The Cage copy was sold at the November 2011 ComicConnect auction to an anonymous buyer; subsequent sales would be by that buyer or their successors, not by Cage, unless Cage had repurchased it. The sequence of transactions after November 2011 is not fully documented in available reporting, and the identity of the January 2026 seller is not established with certainty from the sources consulted.
What is established is the book’s provenance as it is described in public accounts: Cage bought it in the mid-1990s for $150,000; it was stolen in 2000; it was recovered in 2011 from a San Fernando Valley storage locker and returned to Cage; Cage sold it at the 2011 ComicConnect auction for approximately $2.16 million; subsequent owner or owners sold it at escalating prices culminating in the January 2026 $15 million private transaction.