Inside Nicolas Cage's Strange Connection to a Comic Book Heist
- - Inside Nicolas Cage's Strange Connection to a Comic Book Heist
Virginia ChamleeJanuary 16, 2026 at 12:15 AM
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Amy Sussman/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty; TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty
Nicolas Cage; Action Comics #1 comic book -
A rare Superman comic recently sold for a whopping $15 million
But perhaps even more notable than the sold price is the item's provenance
Originally published in 1938, the comic was once owned by Nicolas Cage and stolen from his home
The recent sale of an incredibly rare comic book is resurfacing the story of a heist involving Nicolas Cage, the origins of Superman and a cast member of Storage Wars.
Action Comics #1 — which marked the first comic book appearance of Superman — recently sold for a record-breaking $15 million in a private sale. But perhaps even more notable than its record-breaking sale price is its history of ownership.
Originally published in 1938, this particular copy of Action Comics #1 first gained national attention in a Sotheby’s auction in 1992, when it sold for $82,000 (then a world record).
In 1996, it sold again — from a company called Metropolis Comics and Comic Connect to Cage for a new record.
As Vincent Zurzolo, president of Metropolis Comics and Comic Connect, told Comics Beat, "In 1996, my partner, Stephen Fischler, sold this comic book to Cage for what was then another record at $150,000.”
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TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty
Action Comics #1
But in 1999, the comic (along with other collectible comics) was stolen from Cage's home during a New Year's Eve party. It wasn't until days later that a housekeeper noticed the book had been taken from its frame and, as a 2022 podcast detailed, there were signs that it was an inside job (the lockable frames holding the books were not forcibly opened, suggesting that whoever stole them knew how to deactivate the locks and alarms.)
Zurzolo told Comics Beat his partner, Fischler, assisted with the investigation.
"The book didn’t resurface, but Steve told Nic that sooner or later somebody would try to sell it,” Zurzolo told the outlet.
In 2011, someone did, contacting Fischler and Zurzolo with a photo of the comic — which they immediately recognized as the one owned by Cage.
“Steve flew out the very next day and met with a detective, and they put together a game plan for retrieving the book," Zurzolo told Comics Beat. "They went to do a meet to buy the book. The asking price was $1 million. The story was that somebody found it in a storage unit.”
The detective and Fischler then went to meet with the seller at an industrial park in Simi Valley, California, Zurzolo told Comics Beat: "And the representative for the book is a guy named Mark Balelo, who was part of a television show called Storage Wars. The guy who bought it in the storage unit was there, and he thought he was, you know, looking at this massive payday. And when the detective handed his business card over and explained the situation, the guy was very distraught and very sad."
Cage then sold the returned comic via a Comic Connect auction to an anonymous buyer for $2.2 million.
Cut to January 2026, when Metropolis Collectibles and Comic Connect announced they had brokered a deal for the private sale of the comic, for $15 million.
As Zurzolo told Comics Beat, the sale marked the first eight-figure comic book sale in history.
And while no longer the owner of the comic book itself, Cage remains a well-established Superman fan who even named his son Kal-El (the name the Superman was given at birth).
Cage was at one point set to play Superman in Superman Lives, a Tim Burton-helmed film planned for the late ’90s. Though the film about the superhero didn’t survive, photos of Cage in costume as the superhero did.
The actor was also briefly seen as Superman in a cameo in the 2023 film,The Flash.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
