This is the honest state of the public record: the comic was recovered, the investigation was conducted, and the question of who stole it remains, as of available information, unresolved. No culprit has been publicly named or charged in connection with the theft. This does not mean no culprit was ever identified through the investigation; it means that no identification has been made public in the reporting consulted.
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WHAT THE STORY TELLS US ABOUT COLLECTING
The Cage comic story is, at one level, a celebrity story—a famous actor whose valuable possession was stolen from him and eventually recovered. At another level, it is a story about collecting: about why people pursue rare objects, what those objects mean to them, and what happens when the objects enter the market after the original collector is no longer holding them.
Cage’s approach to collecting, as it can be inferred from the public record, was fundamentally about personal meaning rather than investment. He bought the things he wanted because he wanted them—the Superman comic because of his genuine connection to Superman, the dinosaur skull because of his genuine interest in paleontology and natural history, the properties because they satisfied some desire for specific places and architectural styles. The financial returns on these purchases were, in some cases, negative: the dinosaur skull returned nothing; several properties sold at significant losses. The Action Comics No. 1 returned a profit, eventually—but its entry into the profit column came only after it was stolen from him and recovered, and only when he chose to sell it rather than keep it as the heirloom he had initially described wanting.