Whether that story added meaningful monetary value beyond what the condition and rarity of the copy would have commanded on their own—whether Fishler’s claim that “the theft greatly boosted the comic’s value” is accurate in a specific quantitative sense—is difficult to establish without a counterfactual: a sale of the other CGC 9.0 copy (if one exists and was sold in comparable conditions) that could serve as a point of comparison. Such a comparison is not available in the public record. What is available is the trajectory of the prices paid for this particular copy, which rose from $150,000 in the mid-1990s to $2.16 million in 2011 to whatever it commanded in the private transactions between 2011 and January 2026 to $15 million in January 2026.
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THE QUESTION OF WHAT CAGE KNEW AND WHEN
One aspect of the Cage comic story that is not fully addressed in the available reporting is what Cage himself understood about the comic’s significance at the time of his purchase. Did he know, when he bought it in the mid-1990s for $150,000, that he was acquiring one of the two highest-graded surviving copies of the most important comic book in existence? Did he think of it primarily in those terms, or primarily in terms of its personal meaning to him as a Superman fan?
The public record doesn’t provide a direct answer. What it does provide is the context of his collecting practices and his public statements. His collection, as documented, included multiple important first appearances in addition to Action Comics No. 1—Detective Comics No. 27 (Batman’s first appearance), Fantastic Four No. 1, Green Lantern No. 1. These were not purchases by someone who happened to have money and wanted impressive objects; they were purchases by someone who knew the comic book market and its most significant issues. The $150,000 he paid for Action Comics No. 1 represented sophisticated knowledge of what the book was and why it was valuable.