$175,000 buys you a soiled Action Comics #1

If you're the person or people who bid on it, that is.  That Action Comics #1 we talked about a few weeks ago-- the one found in wall insulation-- sold for a nice $175,000.  Not too shabby.  Who wouldn't love to come across one of these key comics in a trunk in an attic or inside a the stomach tiger shark you're cutting open hoping to find the Kintner kid so you can reopen the beaches and salvage the summer?

My mom was born a couple of years before Action Comics #1 hit the newsstands of a grateful nation in need of distraction from the bad news in Europe and the economic travails of the Great Depression.  Keep in mind they didn't have Facebook and Twitter for the endless self-aggrandizement of incredibly boring idiots.  There were no Kardashians.  Even Amanda Bynes had yet to walk the earth.  So what did people do back then besides listen to Little Orphan Annie on the radio or sit around waiting for the Kardasians and Amanda Bynes to arrive?

Well, I don't know.  But it probably had something to do with Action Comics #1 because even banged-up copies sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  That's how important they are.

Anyway, my mom grew up in a world where Superman existed (when my dad was born in 1929, there was no such thing-- imagine that!), but she wasn't much into comic books.  She read real books from an early age.  A precocious reader of real prose, mostly involving the Bobbsey Twins.  Her best friend, however, did read comics and she kept them all.  On one of our visits to her hometown (Kings Mountain, NC), my mom told me about her friend's collection.  They had been born too late to have the first issues of Action or Detective Comics, but there was a small chance she'd owned Batman #1, which came out in 1940 when they were both four years old.  A very small chance.  In my mind, this morphed into a vivid image of all the most desirable issues in early comics history lined up on a shelf in a sunlit room, each book in mint condition.

I may have drooled a little at the thought.  I tell you this because I definitely am right now as I picture it again.