Three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic struck gold when they found an old comic book.
A Superman No. 1 comic from 1939 was hidden in a cardboard box beneath layers of dust and old newspapers in their mother’s San Francisco home.
The comic sold for $9.1 million at a Texas auction house this month, breaking the previous record for the world’s most expensive comic book.
The brothers said their mother had told them about her valuable comic collection, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale.
The comic is one of fewer than 500 copies still in existence from the original print run of 500,000.
“It was just in an attic, sitting in a box, could have easily been thrown away, could’ve easily been destroyed in a thousand different ways,” Lon Allen, vice president of comics at Heritage Auctions, told the Associated Press. “A lot of people got excited because it’s just every factor in collecting that you could possibly want all rolled into one.”
Heritage Auctions said the comic sat in the attic of a Northern California, and the region's cool, dry climate helped preserve the comic.
