GREAT FIND: FIRST SUPERMAN COMIC BOOK WAS USED AS INSULATION

A Minnesota man stumbled upon pages from a rare copy of Action Comics #1 inside a wall of a home he was renovating — a find that is worth at least tenfold what he paid for the house itself.

David Gonzalez, 35, of Hoffman, Minn., was busy tearing out insulation in the garage of a $10,100 fixer-upper he purchased, when the home renovator noticed old newspapers and comic book pages lining the wall last January.

Though he wasn't exactly a comic book fan, the discovery looked valuable. "I brought my wife's auntie to see the house and she got excited, she said oh, look, this is worth money,'" Gonzalez told the News by phone from Minnesota. "I said, I know, don't touch it, don't touch it,' and she kept grabbing it and grabbing it.

"Just leave it alone! Little pieces kept breaking off."

It took him several months, but Gonzalez tracked down a collectables trader in Tampa Bay named David Alexander and drove down to Florida to have the issue appraised. His grab of the issue from his wife's relative's hands ended up downgrading the value on a 10-point scale from 3.0 to 1.5, but the issue has already drawn a high bid of $113,111 on auction site comicconnect.com. The auction runs through June 11.

"Superman is the man, he's a hero," said Gonzalez, laughing. "It's so hard for anyone to fathom that, in this day and age, you could still discover a comic book that nobody has known about because this book was in a wall of a house for more than 70 years,"

"It's pretty miraculous that it even survived and it's only had one owner." A near-mint copy of Action Comics #1 leaped expectations in a single bound and sold for $2.16 million in 2011.

To read the complete article, see: Man finds priceless copy of Action Comics #1, first Superman comic book, hidden in walls of a house (www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/man-finds-priceless-comic-wall-home-article-1.1352018)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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