A Minnesota man stumbled upon pages from a rare copy of Action Comics #1 inside a wall of a home he was renovating — a find that is worth at least tenfold what he paid for the house itself.
David Gonzalez, 35, of Hoffman, Minn., was busy tearing out insulation in the garage of a $10,100 fixer-upper he purchased, when the home renovator noticed old newspapers and comic book pages lining the wall last January. Though he wasn’t exactly a comic book fan, the discovery looked valuable.
“I brought my wife’s auntie to see the house and she got excited, she said oh, look, this is worth money,'” Gonzalez told the News by phone from Minnesota. “I said, I know, don’t touch it, don’t touch it,’ and she kept grabbing it and grabbing it.
“Just leave it alone! Little pieces kept breaking off.”
It took him several months, but Gonzalez tracked down a collectables trader in Tampa Bay named David Alexander and drove down to Florida to have the issue appraised. His grab of the issue from his wife’s relative’s hands ended up downgrading the value on a 10-point scale from 3.0 to 1.5, but the issue has already drawn a high bid of $127,000 on the auction site, ComicConnect.com. The auction runs through June 11.
The quality of the comic book Gonzalez found isn’t high — 1.5 on a 10-point scale — but it’s still considered special because it’s an original. The ComicConnect site describes the edition as “the most important comic book in the history of comic books” and “the introduction of the archetype of all other heroes to come.”
In 2011, a pristine copy of the same comic book with a grade of 9.0 made headlines around the world when it sold for the record price of $2.16 million.
When first published back in 1938, the comic book sold for 10 cents.
I’m going to start tearing out the walls in my house right now!