AS THE WORLD’S FIRST SUPERHERO, THE MAN OF STEEL’S ORIGIN IS THE STUFF OF LEGEND, BUT THERE’S A CHAPTER OF HIS STORY YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW
By Robert Wilonsky
This issue of ‘Action Comics’ No. 1, graded CGC Very Fine+ 8.5, is one of the world’s finest copies of Superman’s debut.
Among its boundless treasures, Heritage’s April 4-7 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction offers two versions of Superman’s origin story, each historic in its own right.
First, there’s the tale even the casual observer knows by heart, in which an infant from a doomed, distant planet is rocketed to Earth and grows up to find he possesses “titanic strength,” which he uses to “benefit mankind.” That’s the brief outline offered on the first page of the first issue of Action Comics No. 1, published in the spring of 1938. Heritage has the honor of offering one of the world’s finest copies of Action Comics No. 1 in this historic event: one of only four pedigreed copies – this one, from the Kansas City Pedigree – and the highest-graded among the tiny, treasured lot, a CGC Very Fine+ 8.5 issue. Only two unrestored copies have ever graded higher.
When the hammer falls on April 4, this copy of Action Comics No. 1 will secure the title of most valuable comic book ever sold at auction – which it became in mid-March, just days after the auction opened for bidding.
COMICS & COMIC ART SIGNATURE® AUCTION 7369
April 4-7, 2024
Online: HA.com/7369
INQUIRIES
Barry Sandoval
214.409.1377
BarryS@HA.com
No less prized among collectors and historians is the three-page document that provides the Superman origin story you likely never knew, which was typed and signed in 1934 by Jerry Siegel, one of The Man of Tomorrow’s co-creators along with Joe Shuster, and then tucked away in a filing cabinet and, later, a lawsuit. Faded photocopies of the document about an infant sent back in time by “the last man on earth” have circulated online for years, accompanied by headlines such as “Meet The Superman You Almost Knew” and “What Might Have Been.” But this original document, which Siegel sent to Buck Rogers cartoonist Russell Keaton, has never been available publicly.
“Without Superman and Action Comics No. 1, who knows whether there ever would have been a Golden Age of comics – or if the medium would have become what it is today,” says Heritage Auctions Vice President Barry Sandoval. “But we couldn’t be more excited to have the genesis of the superhero genre as a centerpiece of what’s shaping up to be a historic auction.”
Without Superman and ‘Action Comics’ No. 1, who knows whether there ever would have been a Golden Age of comics – or if the medium would have become what it is today.”
–Barry Sandoval, Heritage Auctions Vice President
There are just 78 copies of Action Comics No. 1 in CGC’s population report, with the grading service estimating there are a scant 100 survivors of the comic book that launched superheroes into popular culture – 100 out of the 200,000 copies printed by DC Comics’ predecessor National Allied Publications! Little wonder copies are so coveted by collectors when they appear at auction. Look no further than Heritage’s September sale of an issue graded CGC 0.5 for $408,000, which leaped over the previous record in a single bound.
Scarcity is only one reason why copies are so intensely sought-after. As Dennis Dooley notes in his essay “The Man of Tomorrow and the Boys of Yesterday,” sure, there were “grown men dashing about in tights and in some cases even capes” before Kal-El crash-landed in Kansas. But those heroes – Buck Rogers, Zorro, Flash Gordon – existed on faraway planets or in the far-flung future. “Siegel and Shuster’s brilliant innovation – which seems ironically to have made their creation just a little too exotic for their contemporaries – was to make their hero an honest-to-God extraterrestrial and to set his wonderful adventures on the streets of a contemporary American city,” Dooley wrote upon Superman’s 50th birthday.
The Superman who first appeared in the spring of 1939 remains remarkably like the version still filling comic-shop shelves every week or awaiting yet another big-screen turn in writer-director James Gunn’s retelling of the tale. He was more violent than the Big Blue Boy Scout of the 1950s and ’60s, but that’s only because his creators wanted him to be “very serious about helping people in trouble and distress,” Siegel once said. And in the case of Action Comics No. 1, trouble and distress were not in short supply: In his debut alone, Superman squared off against “unjust imprisonment, spousal abuse, disarmament and drunken driving,” as Les Daniels summed it up in Superman: The Complete History.
Daniels’ book – and the hundreds of others written about Superman and his creators, both the sons of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants who escaped the pogroms in Eastern Europe – detailed Siegel and Shuster’s relationship, which began at Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1931. And their struggle to get Superman off the ground and into the sky is the stuff of legend at this point.
But history has paid little attention to the footnote that becomes a headline in this auction: Siegel’s efforts to find another collaborator when he believed – or hoped, anyway – that a well-known artist would help jump-start the duo’s stalled efforts to get Superman published as a daily newspaper strip. His 1934 letter to Russell Keaton might have remained forever hidden had it not been for publisher and artist Denis Kitchen, namesake of Kitchen Sink Press, whose collection of some 300 works of original art serves as another of this auction’s centerpieces.
The three-page letter in which Jerry Siegel outlined the concept for Superman to comic strip artist Russell Keaton in June 1934, nearly four years before Superman’s first appearance in ‘Action Comics’ No. 1
As Kitchen explains, in the 1980s, Keaton’s widow Virginia reached out to see if there was any interest in publishing a collection of her late husband’s Flyin’ Jenny comic strip, which launched in the fall of 1939 and lasted until 1946 – a year after Keaton’s death, at 34, from acute leukemia. Virginia saved everything of her late husband’s, including strips, letters and correspondence with fellow authors. Much of that appeared in the 1995 Kitchen Sink collection The Aviation Art of Russell Keaton.
At the end of one of their frequent visits, Virginia offhandedly told Kitchen that her husband was the first to draw Superman. In a hurry to catch a plane, Kitchen told her she must be mistaken, that Joe Shuster was the original Superman artist. She kept insisting; he kept pushing back.
“I was in my 40s, and, finally, she said, ‘Young man, I may be old, but I am not senile,” Kitchen recalls.
At which point she went to the file cabinet and pulled out Siegel’s June 12, 1934, letter to Keaton, in which he outlined a very different Superman origin story and asked the artist – who was then doing a daily aviation strip called Skyroads – to let him know “if you would care to work with me upon this strip.” Eventually, Keaton’s daughter also found some sample strips in the attic, where Keaton left them in the mid-1930s.
Siegel’s letter to Keaton was written at a time when he and Joe Shuster envisioned Superman as the hero of an ongoing comic strip, before the debut of the modern comic book format.
“It was mind-boggling to me,” Kitchen says. “That was the original connection.”
Kitchen was the first person outside the Keaton household to see Siegel’s proposed origin story, in which “the last man on earth worked furiously” to put an “infant babe within a small time-machine” before the planet exploded. The scientist sent this child to “the primitive year, 1935 A.D.,” where he was discovered by a passing motorist and delivered to an orphanage. There, the child – known as Clark Kent! – was a “physical wonder [who] playfully bent its metal bed out of shape.”
The child, “whose physical structure was millions of years advanced,” had “colossal strength.” He could leap over 10-story buildings, “raise unheard-of weights, run as fast as an express train, and … nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his tough skin.” As he grew older, Siegel wrote to Keaton, Clark Kent would decide “he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind. And so was created SUPERMAN, champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!” Keaton took that proposal and drew sample strips, which tell a slightly different story from the one that appeared years later in Action Comics and Superman.
Virginia gave Kitchen the letter to thank him for publishing that collection of her late husband’s work. Faded copies of the letter and some of the strips eventually appeared online, as they surfaced during Siegel and Shuster’s – and then their estates’ – long-running legal battles with DC over copyright and ownership. Kitchen provided the letter, but only a copy of a copy. This auction is the first time anyone has seen the original letter – or been offered the opportunity to own it.
“Neither she nor I thought the letter of value other than historical value,” Kitchen says. “Over the years, if anything, the historical significance has only grown as you see Siegel’s first thoughts about the Superman we know – and the one we almost knew. And keep in mind that Siegel was only 19 when he wrote that letter, making it all the more remarkable.”
ROBERT WILONSKY is a staff writer at Intelligent Collector.