Houston man held on to a Superman comic for years. Then he sold it for a record $2.6 million

For 15 years, Sara Michaelson was clueless to what her husband kept tucked away in a cardboard box.

Mark Michaelson hadn’t meant to keep it a secret — he’d had the rare, Superman #1 comic book since scoring it on the cheap from a Houston oil executive in 1979. It was "a coup,” Michaelson would later joke, that came with one simple, but heartfelt, request from the book’s then-owner: “Cherish it for forty years, like I did.”

And so he did, and told no one - until last month, when he surprised his wife, a fellow collector whom he met through a shared love of comics, with the protective-encased first edition of DC Comics’s Superman. She stared in shock as she sat at the dining room table of their north Houston home.

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An expletive and brief moment of speechlessness later, the weight of the surprise dawned on her.

“I’m not touching that,” she half-joked as she edged away from the table, her husband giggling in the background and recording with his phone. “Put it back.”

She had good reason to keep it pristine: On Thursday, it sold for $2.6 million at an auction, the final sale price jumping by $400,000 in the final hour of bidding.

It’s a record for Superman #1, and the latest seven-figure sale in an industry that’s boomed as its been swarmed by outsiders who, after years of volatility in the housing and stock markets, now see comics as safer investments.

“I am just very fortunate,” Mark Michaelson said Friday as he and his family headed to a Japanese barbecue spot for a celebratory lunch.

Rare form

Sold for a dime in 1939 by the company that’d become DC Comics, Superman #1 is not the first time that the Man of Steel appeared on pulp. That came a year prior, in Action Comics #1, a copy of which recently sold for $3.25 million.

The full-color, 64-page book is, however, the first full-spread introduction of Superman and, with it, a genre that would redefine the entertainment industry. Only about 150 are known to still exist, and most are all-but destroyed or have been refurbished.

“Most of the copies that I have seen are literally disintegrating,” said Stephen Fisler, an expert on comic sales and head of the auction website ComicConnect. “Unless you basically don’t touch it at all, it starts to disintegrate.”

Michaelson’s copy was particularly well-preserved, scoring a 7 on the 1-10 scale that the industry uses to grade conditions. Fisler immediately knew the comic could fetch north of $2 million at auction, and was encouraged to see bidding reach $1.8 million within only a few days of opening.

Such prices would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, before the comic book trade became a magnet for well-to-do investors fleeing traditional markets after years of crashes and volatility. But now, as anonymous investors continue to pump cash and competition into the market, six- and seven-figure sales are almost unremarkable.

“People throw around million dollar figures for comic books seemingly at will these days,” said Fisler, who helped auction the first $1 million comic in 2009. “Now, people have sort of gotten used to it.”

Even before the Superman sale, the industry had been lucrative for Mark Michaelson. He was paying his way through University of Houston in the 1970s when, after unexpectedly netting $300 in sales at a local comic book event, he realized there was money to be made in the flourishing, but still relatively new, trade.

He went on to work as a health care executive, collecting comics as a fun, side hustle over the years.Today, the semi-retired 67-year-old often serves as a liaison between sellers and collectors, and is used to handling comic stacks that can cost more than most cars.

That much was clear on a recent Monday, as he sat near his antique radio collection and sifted through a pile of early-edition Marvel comics that a client had requested that morning.

A quick Google search priced just one of the books at between $100,000 and $300,000.