SuperBird

Action Comics 56! I picked up this cool cover on eBay one Christmas season, as a present to myself. I believe it's the only Superman comic with an actual Hitler story, but could be mistaken.

All of these, really.

I keep waiting for prices to drop. Hasn't happened yet on anything I usually watch. (doesn't mean it won't, as nobody knows the future)

Action Comics 57! The second third Lois Lane cover! I have questions: who collects Lois Lane? Who seeks out Lois Lane covers? I bought this copy from a Comic Connect auction a few years back, a stack of books slabbed by "that other company" which I guess Metropolis prefers to use? They seem to carry a lot of that competitor's slabs.... they had graded it a 3.5, and CGC disagreed by a half point.

They're only... 80 years too late.

Prediction: this doesn't sell through Sotheby's, and is later either auctioned off piecemeal, or sold direct to a dealer.

There is. He owns a complete run of ALL DC's.

That's insane. Will we ever find out the sale price?

Action Comics 58: Slap-a-Jap! This is one of the most desirable covers in the run, and probably the hardest to replace should I ever sell it. My wife, who is Asian, is displeased with the cover art; but not nearly as much as she is with my MOKF collection. So I guess it's safe for now. I was fortunate to have found this one on the boards from someone who'd bought it as a raw VF-, then rage-sold it to me when it came back a 3.5. Apparently the cover was attached on purchase, but came off somewhere in the encapsulation journey. I wonder if he'd have been happy with a VF- PLOD? hmmmmm....

Superman 14 is the ultimate classic cover. Past that, all of the "in action" WW2 covers: Superman 17, 18, 23, and 26; Action 43, 44, 48, 53, 54, 58, 59, 63 Aside from those, my favorites are Superman 32, 45 and 50, Action 26 and 41.

Action Comics 59! The one that started it all. There was some version of the Big Apple Comic Con, or NY Comic Con, or something, in downtown NY 15 years ago, before it moved to where it is now, across from Penn station. This was back when comic shows were actually about buying comic books. I had started going with @Point Five, whom I have worked with at a design and advertising firm for perhaps 2 decades, and he was big into GA. I think I wasn't really collecting at that point, and was more of a reader, into mostly Vertigo and the like. After following him around for a while, I started digging into the same boxes and came across a copy of Action 59 for $100. It had some issues— a detached cover being the obvious one—but it was cheap and looked great. I set it aside and wandered on. Seeing a Superman 11 at Metro's booth for $100, Jon explained that "brittle was bad!" I had never even heard the term. $100 was twice as much as I'd ever spent on a comic to that point, after dropping $50 on a "rare" issue of Cerebus 21 and a counterfeit 1 a few years back to complete my run on that title. I gritted my teeth, dropped the money, and you know what happened next.... This was the last issue in my Action collection that I sent to CGC, hoping to have what I suspected as color touch to be removed, and a spine roll fixed. I know it seemed a waste on a low grade book such as this one, but my copy looked great, and it's actually one of the harder ones to find, and I had not bought a replacement for mine in all my years collecting the run. CGC replied that the cover was married as well, so they wouldn't touch it, and sent it back unslabbed. I later sold it on eBay for $550, and it ended up in one of those gigantic oversized slabs after the new owner submitted it. (bullet dodged, as I would never want to own an oversized slab) I replaced that copy with this one, bought raw for Ted at Superworld as a VG.

IMO there are specific things they seem to mark down for, and others they forgive, which one might otherwise not agree with.

Action Comics 60! The "other" one where Supes is busy helping our troops, instead of taking the fight to the Axis. This is from highly-sought-after "Peg Hill" collection, as signed in the upper portion of the cover. Bought raw from Metropolis with some Atlantic City blackjack winnings as a Fine-. I went down here one weekend with some friends, my first and only real gambling experience. We sat at the table 'til 4am, sucking down free drinks and just betting what the dealer told us to. Which was good, 'cause he knew what to bet, and I was drunk as a skunk. I left with $600 in my pocket, and left him a $50 tip in return.

Action Comics 61: wow! What a cover. Definitely one of the most dynamic of the run, and one of my favorites. It used to be the "atomic radiation cover", but I guess the Overstreet designation changed at some point? This copy is one of many I bought raw from Metropolis Comics ten or more years ago when they had their downtown office, with the gallery of classic movie posters hung on the wall, including a one-of-a-kind gigantic Frankenstein 6-sheet. I probably went there a couple dozen times; it was just 1 subway stop from me. Our office later moved uptown, but Metropolis followed us! Their new office was even closer, just a block away. (The classic movie posters went into storage, replaced with a monster of an OA collection.) Bought as a VGF, CGC gave this great looking copy a 4, probably due to the tape, which in hindsight I should have had removed.

Action 62 (and 60) both show Superman not fighting in the war directly, but instead bringing aid to our soldiers. There are apparently 2 versions of the cover, with different amounts of blood soaking through the bandages. DC definitely shied away from overt bloodshed and violence, a huge contrast with what Timely/Marvel was doing during the same time period, and I suspect the change was made due to that. You can watch @nearmint's discussion on the differences here: I picked up this nicely-presenting copy from Comiclink, the source of perhaps 1/4 of my collection.

No hijack at all! The "Superman, You're Dead... Dead... Dead" is actually the story in the book I liked best. It also came with an awesome Neal Adams cover.

Those are the only 2 I am aware of, so yeah!

Action 63, the end of the line of the "serious" Superman covers in Action. From here on out they started getting a bit silly—a big turn from this one, which is one of the last WW2 covers in the series. 66 and 76 qualify, but the issues in between are a big leap away from the "action" orientated covers of 1-63, especially this one; it seemed a logical place to stop my run. One of the 2 GA issues I can think of where Superman is angry, here ready to smash a Japanese pilot, in one of the most vibrant covers. All the WW2 covers are more in demand than the surrounding issues, and 63 is no exception. For a while I had a G- with a detached cover, but this copy came available here on the boards, raw, and I pounced.

toilet paper. i collect toilet paper.

It's a bird. It's a plane! It's Superman: From the 30s to the 70s. The book that started an obsession, and ended up becoming my mission. I'm sure my father bought it for me, but I have no idea why I obsessed over the thing. The art was mostly crude. The stories were universally terrible. (If he had given me the Batman: From the 30s to the 70s book I probably would have gotten into Batman.) But something about the history of the thing, those early covers with their bold colors and dynamic layouts pulled me in. I never read the stories, but would go back to that dusty hardcover again and again and flip through it, stopping at each double page spread of covers, from the early issues up through the 1970s Neal Adams ones. My kid brother at some point got a hold of the thing and destroyed the cover, then went to work on the pages with a magic marker. I kept it anyway. When @Point Five pushed me to buy an old, crappy copy of Action Comics 59 at a New York comic con 15 years ago, I should have known better. The cover was detached. It had color touch. I later found out that the cover was married. It didn't matter. In what was to become a decade-plus journey to complete a run of golden age Action Comics, all CGC'd. At first there was no plan. It just kind of happened one day, a few years into collecting them, when I realized I had a dozen. Then 2 dozen. Then 3.... My journey ended about a month ago, when I finally received the last book I needed to complete Action Comics 15-63, Action 23, courtesy of @Cosmic Boy. Getting that book back from CGC was a saga unto itself. But it will have to wait. I spent nearly 5,500 days building this collection. I'm gonna take 49 days to post them here. One book a day; each book a story.

A few Wonder Woman pages by Daniel Warren Johnson. Thanks Felix!

Thanks! The end issue is easy: after 63 the Action covers become pretty hokey. As for the starting point, I was lucky enough to have bought a nice copy of 15 more than a decade ago, and was never really able to collect issues lower than that, so it became my default beginning. Could have gotten a 14 easily enough, but lower than that the $ gets exponentially larger.