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A NOTE ON HOW THIS KIND OF STORY GETS TOLD
Celebrity theft stories have a particular narrative structure in popular media: an important person loses an important thing, the thing turns up in dramatic circumstances, the case is resolved and the object returns to its owner. The structure is satisfying because it has a resolution. But it also tends to flatten the parts of the story that are more complicated: the unresolved theft, the uncertain provenance during the missing years, the legal complexity of an object that has been through insurance settlement and then recovery, the distinction between the person who found the book and the person who may have stolen it.
The Cage comic story has been reported in ways that reflect this flattening tendency. The version in which a thief put a stolen comic in a storage locker, lost the locker to an auction, and the comic surfaced when an innocent buyer went through his purchase and found something valuable—this version is the one that most lends itself to satisfying narrative. It may be true; the available evidence is consistent with it. But it is not established by the public record, and an honest account of the story has to acknowledge the difference between what is consistent with the evidence and what the evidence actually establishes.
The role of the LAPD Art Theft Detail, and Detective Hrycyk specifically, is also sometimes reduced in popular tellings to a background function: investigators confirm the recovery, but the real action is in the dramatic discovery in the storage locker. In reality, the investigation that maintained the case for eleven years and the expert network that enabled Fishler to recognize the comic and report it are the mechanisms of recovery. Without both, the comic might have been sold through channels that didn’t intersect with the people who knew it was stolen.