The Second Best Copy of Action #1

To cut right to the punchline here, this is the 2nd best known copy of Action #1.

Yeah, I was surprised, too.

What about the "other" high grade copy, you ask? This is it.

Let that sink in for a while.

Stephen Fishler emailed me last night alerting me to that (remarkable) detail. I've been discussing this stuff with people for years and no one has connected the two books before now. Some people even wondered if the Kansas city copy was the "other" book. We had the story about Dave comparing two books and keeping the Church copy and we had the 8.5 copy in front of us in the CGC Gallery. I always wondered where that "other high grade" copy was and who had it. I now know that it's been hiding in plain site this whole time.

He said:

I asked Dave about it recently. The book that was later graded 8.5 is the 2nd best copy he had ever seen. He compared it to the Mile High years ago. The Mile high was clearly better.

So the anecdote about the "new" book that Dave compared to the Church copy was actually referring to the 8.5 we know and love.

This new info, of course, changes the landscape significantly both for the Church copy (now, clearly the best copy and only known 9.+ copy) and the Kansas City copy that just sold. Depending on how nice the Larson copy is, the KC copy could be the third best copy in existence. Which makes $1,000,000 seem like less of a premium price- which is probably why he had the above conversation in the first place. Negotiating a $1,000,000 comic book sale is tricky business.

I'll be reworking the $100,000 club list today. I'm going to rework the the World's Most Valuable Comics article to reflect all of these new data points (no "other" copy, the All American 16 CGC 9.4, the new Detective 27 CGC 8.0 and the Kansas City Copy.)

What a crazy week.