How do you track down a priceless artifact when fakes are everywhere and the owner isn't even sure it's missing? In this excerpt from a Star Dispatches eread, Sandro Contenta looks at the seedy underbelly of the comic book black market.



One February morning in 2000, Los Angeles police detective Don Hrycyk pulled up to the Tudor-style mansion that actor Nicolas Cage called home. It was a sprawling hilltop estate in Bel Air, the kind of opulence Hrycyk, head of the LAPD's art theft unit, normally encountered while investigating stolen Picassos or Rothkos. But this was no typical case.

Cage's living room was an exuberant jumble.

He collected everything from rare cars to dinosaur fossils. “It looked like an adult kid's playground, “ Hrycyk says, noting that it included a big robot, two well-groomed dogs fussed over by their handler and a vintage sports car smack in the middle of the room.

“I couldn't figure out how they got it in there, “ he says of the 1955 Jaguar D-Type. “It looked like they built the house around it.”

Cage was shouting angrily from behind a closed door. The property manager appeared and led the officer to the scene of the crime, a dimly lit smoking room on a lower level of the mansion.

Hanging on the walls in locked, bulletproof display cases were “dozens and dozens” of vintage comic books from Cage's prized collection. It was a shrine to superheroes. There were rare copies of Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, Hourman, Hawkman, The Hulk and many more.

But three of the display cases were empty.

Gone was Detective Comics No. 1, the series that gave DC Comics, the publishing company now owned by Warner Bros., its name. Far more valuable was the stolen Detective Comics No. 27, the 1940 issue in which Batman first appeared. The real heartbreaker, however, was the disappearance of Action Comics No. 1, the 1938 book that unleashed the Man of Steel, the one and only Superman, upon the world.

Cage wasn't even sure when the comic books were stolen. He learned they were missing in late January. Several big parties at the home, topped by a celebration of the actor's birthday in January, would have given thieves ample opportunity in the previous weeks. Hundreds of people had been in and out of the mansion during that time.

In three decades of police work, Hrycyk had never investigated a comic book caper. He soon realized that to the Academy Award-winning actor, comics meant more than the large sums collectors are willing to pay. Cage was distraught.

“He had a real attachment to the comic books, “ Hrycyk says - especially the one that gave birth to Superman.

More than money

It's difficult to overstate Superman's impact, both in fiction and real life. Academics have fussed over him almost as much as adolescents. “He possesses the characteristics of timeless myth, “ wrote Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotician. That's one reason this comic book character has so far lasted an extraordinary 75 years.

Superman was the template for superheroes. He spawned a franchise so lucrative it enticed The Walt Disney Company to spend $4 billion in 2009 to buy Marvel Entertainment. That gave the company film rights to Spider-Man, The Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and others. Most of those characters appeared in last year's The Avengers, the third-highest-grossing film of all time at more than $1.5 billion (U.S.) worldwide.

The daddy of them all has been the star of long-running radio and TV series, a Broadway play and seven feature films, including Man of Steel, which cost at least $175 million to make and was released in June by Warner Bros.

The movie came as some questioned Superman's relevance. He's too good and pure, they say, for a culture more attracted to the brooding and conflicted vigilantism of Batman, who surpassed Superman in popularity some years ago in both movies and comic books.

Yet no superhero is more iconic. Superman embodies the values - “truth, justice and the America way” - that many die for. He's the infant sent to Earth from a dying planet, origins that echo the stories of Moses, the Hindu warrior Karna and Jesus. He's the man-god with an implacable destiny, the saviour who will set things right.

“His brand has always been that he is the answer to our prayers, “ says Toronto artist Ty Templeton, who illustrated Superman for DC Comics in the late 1980s.

It's perhaps not surprising that a brand so elevated has people fighting over its control. Lawsuits over the rights to Superman have raged, on and off, for much of the character's existence. They consumed his creators - Toronto-born illustrator Joe Shuster and Cleveland writer Jerry Siegel - and continue to this day.

“Literally everybody wants a piece of this thing, “ says comic book expert Brad Ricca. “It's certainly about the money, but we've also assigned this huge cultural value to Superman.”

It all started with Action Comics No. 1. It hit the stores with a 10-cent sale price in 1938, two months before the June date on its cover. It compiled the adventures of different characters, including Marco Polo. The cover shows Superman, his red cape aflutter, holding a car above his head and smashing it against a boulder while amazed and terrified villains run for their worthless lives.

A year after his creation, Superman was appearing in a comic book named after him and selling 800,000 copies a month. And as superheroes proliferated in popular culture, Action Comics' reputation as their progenitor made its first issue a valuable but rare commodity.

Of the 200,000 copies printed 75 years ago of Action Comics No. 1, only 100 are believed to survive today. And Nicolas Cage had one of the finest unrestored copies known. It received a “near mint” rating by CGC, the independent agency that grades comic books.

Its history at auction began in 1993, when Sotheby's sold it for $86,000 to an unnamed buyer. Stephen Fishler, a Manhattan comic book dealer, then bought it in 1996 for $135,000. Months later, Cage contacted Fishler about starting a comic book collection.

At the time, Cage had signed on to play Superman in a film by director Tim Burton, which never got made. In interviews he gave about the film, he called Superman one of America's “most precious icons.” In 2005, his second son was born. Cage named him Kal-El, Superman's birth name on his home planet, Krypton.

Fishler sold Cage about 400 vintage comics. One of them was the Action Comics No. 1 with the Sotheby's pedigree. “Action Comics No. 1 is the holy grail of comic books, “ Fishler says.

In 1997, Cage paid $150,000 - a comic book record at the time. Three years later, it was gone.

No criminal mastermind

Stephen Fishler is a commanding 46-year-old with a booming baritone voice. He grew up in Brooklyn and by the age of 10 he had taken a cue from his older brother and begun collecting and selling comic books. He started his own company, merging it in 1999 with that of another dealer, Vincent Zurzolo. Together they own Metropolis Collectibles and sister company Comic Connect, an online auction site.

Their Manhattan office is on Broadway near Union Square. It stores some of the 100,000 comic books the company owns, stacked in boxes from floor to ceiling. Fishler pulls out a Detective Comics No. 27, the one that introduced Batman. It has no cover, yet Fishler estimates it will fetch $20,000 at auction.

“If I cut out a page, someone will give me $1,000 for it, “ he says.

On a rainy day in June, Fishler's Comic Connect was auctioning a low-grade copy - 1.5 on the CGC's 10-point scale - of Action Comics No. 1. It belonged to Minnesota contractor David Gonzales, who found it while renovating a home built in 1938. He smashed through a wall and out it popped, having been placed there with newspapers as insulation.

During an argument with his wife's aunt about the comic book's worth, Gonzales accidentally ripped the back cover. That took $75,000 off its market value. After 51 bids it sold on June 11 for $175,000.

The value of vintage comic books skyrocketed after the 2008 economic meltdown. When it seemed as if banks and the stock market could no longer be trusted, some hard assets became more attractive.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Sales from Fishler's company tell the tale. In 2008, an Action Comics No. 1, graded six on the 10-point scale, sold for $317,200 - a world record at the time. Two years later, a new record was set when an eight-graded Action Comics No. 1 sold for a cool $1 million. A month later, another Action Comics No. 1 was bagged for $1.5 million.

That last one was graded 8.5. Nicolas Cage's stolen copy was a nine.

It didn't take long for the Det. Don Hrycyk to figure out that the caper was not necessarily the work of an evil genius. Cage liked to rearrange his extensive collection, switching comics from one locked display case to another. For convenience, he kept the key handy and in plain sight.

“Anybody could have walked up to it, opened it up, taken it out, closed it and then walked away with it, “ Hrycyk says.

Possible sightings and leads

One of the first panicked calls Cage made when he noticed the comics were missing was to Fishler. Thinking Cage might have simply misplaced them, Fishler flew to L.A. and searched the actor's enormous home. Then he notified comic book storeowners in the area to be on the lookout for someone trying to sell the three books.

In 2002, word spread that someone in Memphis was selling the highly prized Batman and Superman issues, perhaps the ones stolen from Cage. Hrycyk notified local police, who got a search warrant for the safety deposit box the comics were kept in. They turned out to be fakes.

“The seller was a con man, “ Hrycyk, 62, says over the phone from L.A. “He had taken laser-coloured copies of the covers of a real Superman comic and he sandwiched the front and back to a catalogue for women's lingerie.” He was flogging them in sealed plastic bags, warning potential buyers against exposing them to air.

There were other possible sightings and leads, but none went anywhere. Cage had bought his comics before the grading system was standardized and before each comic book assessed was given an ID number.

“One of the problems you have with something that was never meant to be a unique item is, how do you identify it?” Hrycyk says. “If someone said there's a Superman comic being sold in Toronto, without flying an expert up there, how could we determine this was the right comic? It was kind of a nightmare scenario.”

The lax inventory skills of Cage's staff didn't help. A fourth comic reported stolen during the theft turned up in the house. In 2001, Cage reported a second theft of two dozen comics. He then told Hrycyk to forget about it - those too had turned up. The case went cold.

In the spring of 2011, 11 years after Cage's comic books went missing, Dan Dotson, a well known auctioneer in Los Angeles, was approached by one of his clients, Silvestre Lozano.

“He showed me this Superman comic book, “ says Dotson, a regular auctioneer on the TV reality show Storage Wars. “It said 1938 on the cover but it was in such good shape, I thought it was probably a reproduction.”

It was an Action Comics No.1.

Lozano lives in Simi Valley, just outside L.A. At the time he made a living buying storage units that people abandoned or could no longer afford, then selling their contents. He told Dotson he found the comic book in one of those units.

Dotson introduced Lozano to Mark Balelo, another auctioneer on Storage Wars, who said he knew the biggest comic book dealer in the U.S. Balelo contacted Stephen Fishler. He sent Fishler a scan of the comic book and a sale price of $1 million.

“In a third of a second I knew that was the stolen book, “ Fishler says. One distinguishing mark was a tiny white spot on the book's blue banner, left during the original printing and unique to that copy.

Fishler called Hrycyk and they decided on a sting.

They set up a meeting for April 6 at Balelo's Simi Valley warehouse. Hrycyk posed as Fishler's associate. Police officers hid outside as backup. Balelo, who was expecting a big commission from the sale, struck Hrycyk as a “wheeler-dealer.”

“He was loud-talking and wearing these loud sunglasses indoors, “ Hrycyk says.

The sellers presented the comic book in a transparent Lucite case. Fishler examined it and secretly signalled to Hrycyk that it was the stolen Cage book. Then Hrycyk gave the men his LAPD business card. Their faces dropped.

“You can see (Lozano) melt in the chair, “ Fishler says. “He turns white. He goes from being, ‘I'm getting a million dollars, maybe, ' to ‘I'm getting nothing.'“

Hrycyk produced the police report for Cage's stolen book and confiscated Lozano's copy for analysis. Forensic experts compared it to a picture Sotheby's had of the copy from when it sold it in 1993. There were 15 exact matches of defects in the original printing. It was the same comic book.

“It is divine providence that the comic was found, “ Cage said in an April 2011 statement, “and I am hopeful that the heirloom will be returned to my family.”

The recovered Superman comic book belonged to the insurance company that settled Cage's claim when the books were stolen. The comic sat in Hrycyk's work area while Cage negotiated a return of the claim payment to regain ownership.

“It was nerve-wracking for us because we had this in the squad room with people wanting to look at it and you think, ‘Hey, this thing's worth a huge amount of money, ' “ he says. “You don't want someone to suddenly stick their coffee cup on it or tear it and say, ‘Oops.' So we had to watch out and make sure nobody put their grubby hands all over it. Then we wrapped it up and put it in the safe in our evidence room.”

After he got Action Comics No. 1 back, Cage put it up for auction on Fishler's site. On Nov. 30, 2011, it sold for a record $2,161,000.

The full version of Sandro Contenta's Superman: Everyone wants a piece of his legend is available through the Star's weekly ebook program, Star Dispatches . Simply go to stardispatches.com and subscribe for $1/week. Single copies are available for $2.99 at starstore.ca and itunes.com/stardispatches