Up, Up and Away: What Superman’s $9.12M Sale Says About Comic Values Going Into 2026

In late 2025, a dusty cardboard box in a California attic quietly rewrote the record books. Inside was a copy of Superman #1 from 1939 – the Man of Steel’s first solo title – that went on to sell for $9.12 million at Heritage Auctions, the highest price ever paid for a comic book. CGC graded it a 9.0, one of the best-preserved copies known, and the result smashed the previous record for the comic industry: a $6 million sale for Action Comics #1 in 2024.

From Attic Find to Blue-Chip Asset

As someone who spends most of my time thinking about collectibles at VeVe, numbers like that are wild but not completely shocking. Superman has been here before. His debut in Action Comics #1 in 1938 is widely credited with kicking off the Golden Age of comics and essentially inventing the superhero genre as we know it. This new Superman #1 sale feels like an echo of that first impact: almost a century later, Superman is still telling us how culture is being priced.

There are clear reasons this particular copy soared. High-grade Superman #1s are incredibly rare; a 9.0 from 1939, sitting under newspapers in a family attic for decades, is basically a statistical anomaly. It’s also not just any Golden Age book – it’s Superman’s first solo title, part of the same tiny pantheon as Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27. Add the story of three brothers clearing out their late mother’s house and stumbling onto one of the most important comics ever printed, and you’ve got the kind of myth that collectors and auction houses both understand instinctively. That narrative – family, memory, luck – gets baked into the value as surely as the paper and ink.

At this point, Superman #1 isn’t behaving like a “normal” collectible. It’s behaving like blue-chip art. Research into comics and original comic art shows that high-end pieces can function as an alternative investment class, with long-term returns that sometimes rival or beat more traditional assets.

Is the Comic Book Industry Actually Growing?

That’s the extreme end of the spectrum. The obvious follow-up question is: what does this mean for the comic book industry as a whole? Zoom out from one attic in California to the global market and the picture is more nuanced but surprisingly positive. Recent reports put the worldwide comic and graphic novel market in the mid-teens of billions of dollars in 2024, with forecasts that more or less double that figure by the early 2030s. However you slice it, the broad answer to “is the comic book industry growing?” is yes – just not in a straight line.

Kids’ comics and graphic novels, in particular, have been on a tear. The strongest growth is in formats and price points that feel accessible to new readers, not just long-time Wednesday warriors. From where I sit, the healthier question isn’t “are comic book sales down?” but “who’s actually reading?” Collectors at the very top skew older and wealthier – you don’t casually impulse-buy a $9 million book – but the base of the pyramid is getting younger and more diverse. A big chunk of kids now grow up with comics and graphic novels as their default reading format, whether that’s Dog Man, manga, webtoons or something they tap through on a phone.

Movies, Hype and the Real Impact on Comics

That’s where the conversation about movies comes in. On paper, a decade of superhero cinema should have turned every filmgoer into a regular Wednesday customer, but reality is more complicated. Films and series like James Gunn’s upcoming Superman are still huge global events and push the character back into the cultural foreground, yet studies of sales data and retailer reports tend to show short, sharp spikes in interest around specific key issues and trades rather than a permanent, line-wide lift. Screen stories are incredible at creating awareness; they’re not a magic switch that guarantees long-term reading habits. What they do very well is send people on a discovery journey. We see fans watch something, fall down a search rabbit hole, and end up buying a digital comic or collectible on VeVe because it’s a low-friction, low-risk way to get closer to that world.

What Superman’s Sale Signals for 2026

So can we expect more records after this Superman #1 sale? I’m not going to make price predictions, and this obviously isn’t investment advice, but I think the ingredients are there. The macro forecasts for the comic book industry and graphic novels are pointing up, with digital access, manga, kids’ titles and international expansion all doing work. High-end collectibles in general are firmly on the radar of ultra-wealthy buyers looking for things that are both culturally resonant and scarce. And digital platforms like VeVe have proved there’s a global appetite for licensed digital comics and collectibles that behave, psychologically, a lot like their physical counterparts.

What I don’t want anyone taking from Superman’s $9.12 million moment is the idea that comics only “matter” if they’re a lottery ticket. If you’re searching “how to value comic books,” the fundamentals haven’t changed in decades: condition, scarcity, cultural significance and real demand still do the heavy lifting. A book doesn’t need to be a Golden Age grail to be meaningful, and the vast majority of great reading experiences will never see the inside of an auction house.

My own view, heading into 2026, is that we’re living in a kind of productive paradox. At one end, high-grade keys like this Superman are behaving more and more like fine art. At the other, the grassroots audience is getting younger, more global and more digital, drifting in through kids’ graphic novels, manga, webcomics and platforms like VeVe. Somewhere between those two poles, the next generation of Superman-level stories – and maybe the next record-breaking books – are already being minted.

_{Everything you read here is written by fans, for fans. This article was created by VeVe and is not officially affiliated with or approved by any licensor. All content referenced belongs to their respective rights holders.}