Siegel died in 1996. Shuster had died in 1992, the same year that the first major public sale of Action Comics No. 1 occurred at Sotheby’s for $82,000. Neither of them benefited materially from the transformation of their work into a property worth tens of millions of dollars. The negotiations between their estates and DC Comics and its parent company Warner Bros. eventually produced some form of settlement, the terms of which were not fully public.
The creator rights history is part of what Action Comics No. 1 represents as a cultural document. It is not only the first appearance of Superman; it is the site of one of the formative transactions in the history of intellectual property in popular culture, a transaction that demonstrated, in retrospect, how catastrophically inadequate the compensation structures of the era were for creators whose work turned out to have enormous long-term value.
Cage, as a genuine fan and student of comics, presumably understood this history. It does not change what the copy of Action Comics No. 1 meant to him as an object, but it is part of what the object means as a document.
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THE COMPLETE SEQUENCE OF A REMARKABLE OBJECT
The documented life of the specific copy of Action Comics No. 1 that Nicolas Cage owned, insofar as it is recoverable from the public record, runs as follows.
The copy was printed in 1938 among approximately 200,000 others, sold at the cover price of ten cents, and survived—through means and via owners not recorded in the available history—in extraordinary condition for more than fifty years. It entered the documented market at the 1992 Sotheby’s auction, where it sold for more than $82,000, then a record for any comic. Metropolis Collectibles’ Stephen Fishler subsequently acquired it and sold it to Nicolas Cage in the mid-1990s for $150,000. It was graded by CGC as 9.0, one of two copies at that grade level and the highest grade of any sold copy as of that point.