As some Superman scholars note:Īmong the things that made Superman popular was his fight for social justice, rather than law and order. An alien stranded on earth, Superman was raised by human parents to desire the attainment of social justice.
The rise of Superman’s importance in popular culture, evidenced by Action Comics No.1’s sale, is indicative of a broader ideological trend - the valorization of the outcast martyr. Siegel’s father was killed in an armed robbery, and Schuster was refused from military service due to his horrible eyesight. Each, too, had personal stories that contributed to Superman’s inception. As two young Jewish men in the American midwest during the early stages of WWII, Siegel and Schuster aimed to create a just and powerful embodiment of their frustration with a world that they perceived as unjust and unlistening to the plights of the powerless. After five years of failure and waiting, Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster published Action Comic’s No.1 through National Allied Publications. Hell, auction house Christie’s online hub places the upper end of the price filter for paintings at $600k.ģ. Roughly tripling the past highest paid sum for a comic book, the purchase puts comic books in the big league. 1’s sale marks an important step in elevating a medium to high art: someone paying a boatload of money to acquire a piece of it.
Separately, as many who witnessed comic books’ maturation as a medium are now grown up, academia and other ‘elite’ cultural arbiters have started to treat comic books with some intellectual respect, instead referring to them as ‘graphic novels.’ Action Comics No. But, with the conceptual treatment of mass-produced art in the pop art movement, some artists (like Roy Lichtenstein) took style elements from the medium’s early practitioners and elevated it through their own critically-acclaimed work. For much of their history, however, comic books have been regarded and treated as a low-brow form of children’s literature. Long before recent ventures into new formats, comic books were one of the first popular forms of multimedia art, combining elements of literature and visual art in one medium. As trust in online purchasing burgeons and apprehension dissolves, the internet’s democratization of information will have increasingly populist effects on e-commerce, providing a relatively level playing field for any who aim to sell their wares to the internet’s vast audience.Ģ. 27 (1939), which features the first appearance of Batman, exceeded Action Comics No.1's sale price, going for $1.08m.Ĭ‘s big sale is indicative of a broader trend toward trusting non-big brand e-commerce sites, a sentiment ushered in by trailblazers like eBay and innovated by upstarts like Threadless. Shortly after I wrote this post, Detective Comics No.
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