Nicolas Cage's stolen Superman debut comic found in storage locker

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

A copy of the valuable Action Comics No. 1, the comic book in which Superman first appeared, has been found in a storage locker. And this isn't just any Action Comics No. 1 -- it's Nicolas Cage's.

KTLA reports that the comic was discovered last month in a storage locker in the San Fernando Valley after the contents of the unit were purchased in an auction. The dealer who sold the comic to Cage was able to identify it.

Top-quality copies of the comic, published in 1938, are so rare that one sold in February 2010 for $1 million. It was the highest price ever garnered for a comic book.

The site ComicConnect.com mediated the deal; its co-owner Stephen Fishler told the Associated Press, “It is still a little stunning to see ‘a comic book’ and ‘$1 million’ in the same sentence.”

Less than a year earlier, another copy of "Action Comics No. 1" made headlines when it was sold in an Internet auction for $317,200. Although that now looks like it wasn't much, it turned a significant profit -- the seller had purchased it in the 1950s, used, for 35 cents.

Action Comics No. 1's million-dollar record didn't hold for long. Just days after it sold, Detective Comics No. 27, which features the first appearance of Batman, sold for $1,075,500.

Cage's copy of Action Comics No. 1 was stolen more than a decade ago. In the 1990s, Cage had been scheduled to play Superman in a Tim Burton movie.

For the record, 6:46 p.m., April 11: A previous version of this post said Batman's first appearance was in Detective Comics No. 1. It was Detective Comics No. 27.

RELATED:

Action Comics No. 1 sale pushes Superman to new heights

Million-dollar comics: first Superman, now Batman

First Superman comic scores a heroic price: $317,200

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The cover of Action Comics No. 1. Credit: Associated Press

Brian Walker on his new omnibus 'The Comics: The Complete Collection'

The new book "The Comics: The Complete Collection" combines two earlier books by Brian Walker -- "The Comics Before 1945" and "The Comics Since 1945" -- and includes more than 1,300 images.

At Hero Complex, Geoff Boucher talks to Brian Walker about the new omnibus edition. When he asked him for a comic artist who we might not know, Walker's answer is George Herriman, creator of "Krazy Kat." Walker says:

The best example of an artist who was under-appreciated in his time was George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat.“ Although intellectuals in the 1920s praised his work it was never popular with the general public and “Krazy Kat” only appeared in 35 newspapers when Herriman died in 1944. It has since become one of the most revered strips in comics history. There are many cartoonists represented in the book who were great talents in their time but are no longer household names. Among these I would include: “Tad” Dorgan, Cliff Sterrett, Billy DeBeck and Roy Crane.

Walker and Boucher's discussion -- and "The Comics: The Complete Collection" -- centers on the comics that appeared in newspapers. The perception of those comics, Walker says, went through a significant generational shift, by the time Gary Larson ("The Far Side"), Bill Watterson ("Calvin and Hobbes") and Berkeley Breathed ("Bloom County") decided to call it quits. Walker explains:

Larson, Watterson and Breathed all abandoned their successful creations during the same year — 1995 — so it’s hard to deny at least a casual connection. All spoke of burnout trying to meet the demands of producing daily features and refused to compromise the integrity of their work. The older generation of cartoonists thought of themselves as entertainers who were paid to sell newspapers. The generation that came of age in the 1980s described themselves more often as “artists” who were expressing a unique vision. This changing self-awareness might explain why these creators retired at the peaks of their careers.

Read the rest of Geoff Boucher's Q&A with Brian Walker about "The Comics: The Complete Collection."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Krazy Kat recolored Sunday page by George Herriman. This feature began appearing as a color tabloid page in the Hearst papers on June 1, 1935.

Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Tintin

British comedians Nick Frost and Simon Pegg first hit big with American audiences in the 2004 zombie film "Sean of the Dead." They've reuinted for "Paul," which the cowrote and costar in; "Paul" opens this coming weekend. But what us bookish types care about is their appearance in "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn," based on Hergé's Tintin series, directed by Steven Spielberg. It uses performance-capture technology similar to that used on "Avatar."

Rebecca Keegan spoke with them at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, for our scintinllating sibling blog, Hero Complex.

Spielberg first enlisted Pegg and Frost when Pegg was meeting with him about a writing job. Instead of the writing gig, Spielberg asked the pair to play Thompson and Thomson -- two bumbling detectives from the classic comic series by Belgian artist Hergé. On the set, they were among the first to see Spielberg -- who had never even shot in digital on a film -- as he learned to use new technology....

Pegg and Frost wore performance capture suits on the set, where a bunch of gray-painted chicken wire would stand in for a setting like a marketplace.

“It was like rehearsing a play, like when you’re a kid and you’re pretending that thing over there could be the Millennium Falcon,” Frost said.

The Reading Life: Joe Ollmann's 'Mid-Life' blues

On the acknowledgments page of Joe Ollmann's graphic novel, "Mid-Life," there's a portrait of the artist as an old man, talking to his young son. "Sam," he says, "I'm gonna draw myself old and fat in this new semi-fictitious comic book. Won't that be hilarious?" To which the kid responds (in a thought bubble only): "Oh, Lord."

What you make of such a moment pretty much predicts how you'll respond to Ollmann's graphic roman a clef. As for me, I laugh every time I read it, less in hilarity than in a kind of grimly comic solidarity.

"Mid-Life"  is exactly what its title promises: a portrait of the indignities of middle age. Through Ollmann's fictional alter ego, a 40-year-old photo editor named John, we experience all the petty degradations of adulthood, from parenting to the working life. When, in the middle of the book, John complains about the cat his twentysomething daughter has dumped on him, his plaintive wail -- "Why do I have to be the one to deal with everything? Why is this all my responsibility?" -- is that of every parent who has been left holding the bag. But it is her answer ("Because you're the adult here") that truly resonates, for this is one of the key tensions of Ollmann's story: that no matter how old John's kids get, he will never stop being Dad.

Ollmann knows this territory firsthand; like his character, he had daughters young, and then a son with his second wife. Yet by deciding to frame his book as fiction, he opens the aperture, highlighting the universal in the particular, and drawing us into the story's big concerns. These involve work and family, to be sure, but more to the point, they have to do with compromise and mortality, frailty and age. It's tricky territory because it could easily get self-indulgent, but Ollmann almost never falters, portraying a life that is no less fraught for being relatively mundane.

John laments the slow collapse of his body, his tendency to drink too much. He worries about his daughters' happiness and their ability to strike out on their own. He obsesses over his invisibility, the way women don't notice him anymore. It's all so common, you could almost overlook it as the substance of art, were it not for the acuity and grace with which Ollmann recreates John's world.

Eventually, John does something stupid, as we know he must, and the book shifts from a documentary account into more of a narrative.

Crime writer Ian Rankin pens comic

Crime writer Ian Rankin, known for his Inspector Rebus series, has written a comic for British graphic-novel magazine CLiNT titled "Someone Got to Eddie."

Although he's penned a graphic novel before, he tells the Guardian that working in the medium isn't easy.

Rankin admitted he found the experience hard work and challenging. "If you're a novelist and you're used to working on your own, this is a very different mindset, it's a very different way of telling a story. It's all geared to the visual, it's all geared to you explaining to the artist what you want to show.

"Being a novelist is a bit like being a scriptwriter, but if you're writing a comic book you're also the director -- you're deciding what angle you're going to see things from, what are the people going to look like, and you're also editing it."

CLiNT was launched by comics creator Mark Millar in the fall of 2010. Both Ian Rankin and Mark Millar hail from Scotland.

Millar, who has won many comics awards, was the creator of the comic "Kick-Ass," recently a screen hit.

His new magazine CLiNT, which includes his own comics and contributions from several others, is on its sixth issue. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: A page of Ian Rankin's "Someone Got to Eddie." Credit: CLiNT Magazine

Love is... back

The story goes something like this: it's 1967, and Kim Grove, a New Zealand-born waitress living in California, begins a relationship with a dashing Italian, Roberto Casali. According to one account, she was too shy to express her feelings directly and left him little love cartoons; in another, she sent him the cartoons in letters. Either way, those cartoons began to stack up -- an image of a cartoony version of Kim or Roberto or the two together with the words "Love is..." followed by another thought or idea or moment.

In 1971, Roberto got the message and married Kim; in 1974, he thought her cartoons might resonate with others. He brought them to the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, which snapped them up. Kim Casali continued to create her "Love is..." cartoons, which were  printed here at the paper, syndicated nationally and appeared in more than 60 countries.

The cartoons, of two usually naked figures (sometimes they wear overalls) were omnipresent in the '70s. "Love is... when he only wants to dance with you," "Love is... wearing something that turns his head," and "Love is... when you call a truce" are some of those that have made it into the new anthology "Love is... all around" from Abrams, all of which feature the cute cartoon couple. Depending on your point of view, they're adorable or sickly sweet, too much or entirely true. "Love is... weatherproof," "Love is... finding a rainbow in every shower," "Love is... more precious when you're far away."

Having differences of opinion on the "Love is..." cartoons has an actual legacy. In 1974, The Times ran a story titled, "Love is... Stirring up a Hornet's Nest." Reader Edith Zaslow had written in, finding one of the cartoons sexist and offensive to women -- including one which read, "Love is... cleaning the coffee table after him several times a day." We asked other readers to tell us what they thought, and most of the responses were along the lines of, "It really does put down women," and "I've always thought the cartoon one of the most insipid I've ever read." A few, however, stood up for Casali, writing, "The cartoons have always seemed to me to be a wonderful representation of what true love and marriage is all about."

Roberto Casali died of cancer in 1976; Kim Casali died in 1997. They had three sons; the eldest, Stefano, brought this book to publication. The youngest son, Milo, was born 17 months after his father's death -- Roberto, knowing he was ill, had banked his sperm for artificial insemination. That might be hard to explain in a cartoon, but it seems like it surely is love.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

 

 

David L. Ulin on Adrian Tomine

Adrian Tomine's "Scenes from an Impending Marriage: A Prenuptial Memoir" was first conceived as a party favor for guests at his wedding, or at least that's what we're supposed to think. Whether or not this is really true is beside the point, since either way, it offers a useful strategy for thinking about the book.

Tomine has always been a master of the small gesture, as anyone familiar with his work knows. Such encounters motivate the deceptively informal stories in his series "Optic Nerve," as well as his graphic novel "Shortcomings," which explores the limits of identity and intimacy. With "Scenes from an Impending Marriage," though, he seems almost willfully understated, tracing, in a series of offhand comics, the peculiar rigors of the wedding dance, from guest lists to seating charts to invitations and beyond.

That this is the perfect approach to an event that has become fetishized in our culture should go without saying: Tomine's point is not to play into (or even against) perceptions about marriage so much as to particularize his account. It's not even the wedding that's important (it does not appear here), but rather the interaction between Tomine and his fiancée Sarah as they try to create a ceremony that will have meaning for them.

"You need to stop approaching this like you're doing people a favor by not inviting them," Sarah tells Tomine about his reluctance to add to the guest list. "Okay," he replies, "but I also think you shouldn't use this as an opportunity to make amends or re-connect with everyone you've ever known." It's a vivid interaction, made moreso by its kicker -- "Boy ... People would really be appalled if they ever heard some of these discussions," which, of course, suggests the irony and revelation of the autobiographical form. And yet, for anyone who's ever made up such a guest list, the details resonate, highlighting the ability of such a story to extend beyond itself. That's what Tomine does so beautifully, here as in his other work, using his experience to create a portal into our own.

"Scenes from an Impending Marriage" is a short book, barely 50 pages, but it reverberates with an unexpected depth. This is a function not only of content but also of form, which, at times, reflects some unlikely antecedents. A one-panel strip called "Exercise" is reminiscent of the syndicated strip "The Family Circus," with its circular frame. Elsewhere, Tomine and Sarah cry out, "WAAAAAAAHH!!" in exasperation, their heads back and mouths open like Charlie Brown and Sally in "Peanuts."

That's part of the fun of the book, finding the points of reference, as it were. But more essential, Tomine has created a heartfelt, recognizable portrait of the anxiety that surrounds the public declaration of love. "My hero!" Sarah declares on their wedding night, after he goes out at 4 a.m. to bring back food. The two of them sit on their hotel bed, eating and looking at each other. "Holy ....," Tomine says. "We're married."

-- David L. Ulin

Bookstore of the week: Secret Headquarters

  Secret Headquarters is no secret. The boutique comic-book store, located on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, was named one of the world's 10 best bookstores in 2008 by the British newspaper the Guardian, alongside much bigger bookstores in Argentina, Japan and an 800-year-old converted Dutch church.

The store's interior, all warm browns with deep-chocolate wooden racks, looks something like a well-stocked home library crossed with a classic men's club. "We wanted the store to be inviting to anyone, not just people interested in comics," says co-owner Dave Pifer.

Pifer and David Ritchie, friends since high school in Florida, opened Secret Headquarters in 2005 (they later opened Vacation Vinyl, now located next door). Pifer says Secret Headquarters stocks an equal number of mainstream comics and independents.

Some indie picks he's currently enthusiastic about: Catch Me if You Can by local artist Martin Cedreda; Spotting Deer by Michael Deforge, a record album-sized comic that reads like a Wikipedia entry for a deer that doesn't actually exist; and the newly arrived, long-awaited Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham (who owns the bookstore and gallery Family on Fairfax -- but that's another story).

 "We weren't sure what kind of store we'd end up being," says Pifer. "Hipster people come in, and I'm expecting them to buy Harkham or more indie, but they're buying Marvel like they did when they were kids."

Those early brand allegiances are strong among comics readers -- Marvel fans stick to Marvel, DC Comics readers stick to DC, etc. -- but getting the younger generation enthusastic about any of them is a challenge. "These days," Pifer says, "little kids aren't picking up comics," he says. "Video games are more intriguing."

Simon's Cat trims the tree

British animator-director Simon Tofield is celebrating the holidays with a new Simon's Cat film, "Santa Claws." In the United States, the book "Simon's Cat" came out last year. "His understanding of feline psychology enables Tofield to make Simon's Cat the kitty everyone likes to think he has, just as Snoopy was the dog people imagined they owned before he too became too human," Charles Solomon wrote in our pages.

In Britain, a second book was published in October; "Simon's Cat: Beyond the Fence," will hit U.S. bookstores in spring 2011.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

 

David L. Ulin on Sergio Aragones

Sergio Aragonés is a pure cartoonist -- one who works in pictures, not in words. Since 1963, he has also been among the most prolific contributors to MAD Magazine, for which he has drawn tens of thousands of strips, many of them one or two panel gags, under the umbrella title “A MAD Look At …” In the front matter to “MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragonés, Five Decades of His Finest Works” (Running Press: 272 pp., $29.95), former editor Nick Meglin explains that although the artist’s first feature for the magazine, “A MAD Look at the U.S. Space Effort,” was bought as a “one-shot,” he “carved a niche for himself to create pantomime gags on any given subject.” That’s a good thing, or else my childhood (like many of yours, I suspect) would have been considerably poorer; I’ve been a fan of Aragonés’ skewed visual caricatures since I was 8 or 9.

“Five Decades of His Finest Works” begins with that first cartoon and traces Aragonés’ efforts up to the present, ending with “A MAD Look at Hard Times.” It’s a fascinating journey, both because of the constancy of his style and vision and what it suggests about how the world has changed. From the space race to hard times in 47 years: What better metaphor for the slow fade of American promise, the inexorable progression from the New Frontier to the end of the line? This is what MAD has long excelled at, that secret subversive vision, and with his pointed ability to pierce our illusions, Aragonés is a major reason why.

Aragonés is also a master of the visual gag. In “Pollution Alert,” a four-panel comic from the 1970s, workers investigate a pipe that’s leaking sludge into a stream; by the final frame, they have transformed the leak into a torrent: Job well done. In “A MAD Look at Sexual Harassment,” a flasher opens his coat to two young women, only to slink off in embarrassment as they laugh at him. Silly? Yes. Childish? Perhaps. But here we have the mission, for both Aragonés and MAD itself -- to make us think by highlighting the absurdity of everything, the iron fist in the velvet glove.

-- David L. Ulin

See a gallery of Sergion Aragonés cartoons.

Image: "The Vampire" by Sergio Aragonés. Credit: Sergio Aragones, from "MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragonés, Five Decades of His Finest Works" by Running Press.