The acquisition of Action Comics No. 1 was the centerpiece of that collection. The CGC account of the copy’s history gives the purchase year as 1996; the ABC News contemporaneous report from 2011 cites Fishler as saying he sold the comic in 1995 and describes it as having cost considerably more than its original dime. A later account in the article from the 929nin.com coverage gives the year as 1997 and the price as $150,000. The Gulf News coverage from 2026 also cites the purchase as 1996 for $150,000. The exact year of the transaction is not established with certainty across all sources—the ABC News account and the CGC account differ—but the purchase price of $150,000 and the seller, Stephen Fishler of Metropolis Collectibles, are consistent across multiple sources.
At $150,000, the comic was already among the more expensive individual items in Cage’s collection. That it later turned out to be an undervalued purchase does not mean that was obvious in 1995 or 1996 or 1997. The market for Golden Age comics in high grade had not yet reached the levels it would achieve in the 2000s and 2010s. The price was substantial, but it was a purchase made primarily for the meaning of the object rather than for its investment potential.
Cage has described himself as someone who collects objects with personal resonance rather than as a pure investor. The dinosaur skull he purchased in 2007 for $276,000—a Tarbosaurus bataar skull that was later discovered to have been illegally exported from Mongolia and was surrendered to the Mongolian government in 2014, resulting in no financial recovery for Cage—was in the same category: an object with personal meaning, acquired at significant cost, lost at cost. The specific irrationality of paying $276,000 for an object you might have to give back is the irrationality of a collector rather than an investor. For collectors, the meaning of an object is prior to its monetary value, even when the monetary value is considerable.