Stealing Superman: Episode Two – Four Empty Frames

speeds instead of you know, dial up. eBay was also becoming a hot market for comic books. Before eBay, if you wanted to buy a rare comic, you'd have to go to an auction in person, or attend a comic convention or by a trade publication and scan their list of comics. Then may you and in order with a check. But Eva was changing all that. It was democratizing the buying and selling of collectibles. That's important to know in

order to understand what happens next. As you'll recall, comic book dealer Stephen Fishler got a frantic phone call from Nicholas Cage, who explained his three most prized comic books, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen. Action Comics number one, Detective Comics Number twenty seven, and the lesser valued but still important Detective Comics Number one vanished without trace from his house in a gated community in

bel Air. No leads, no suspects, just a despondent cage staring at empty wall frames that had once housed the debuts of Superman and Batman. Stephen, of course, was key bring an eye on the collector's community, looking for any sign of the stolen books coming onto the market. He owned his own place, Metropolis Collectibles in New York, but the chances of the thief strolling into his business were slim. Still,

Stephen kept looking. Hope was the only currency he had at the moment, and look optimism is a defining Superman trait. One day, a collector showed Stephen one of his newer acquisitions. It was a copy of Marvel Mystery Comics number seventy one, dated April. The original human Torch is flying through the air. A number of characters from ancient Egypt are shocked by his appearance. His young side kick, Tora, who is also

on flare, is sacking someone in the gut. Another man appears to be reviving Cleopatra from her sarcophagus, injecting her with a strange serum. It's your typical Golden Age comic cover, lots of disparate elements stitched together to compel a kid to spend his one and only dime to see how the hell any of this made sense These days. It's a desirable comic, though not one of the most sought after. Some people chase it just because the cover is cool,

A dynamic composition by Golden Age artist Alex Schomberg. What's with the Egyptians? Well, it was just after World War Two and comics needed new villains to employ. But something else about it seemed strange to Stephen. Not just the fact that to self immolating heroes were punching ancient Egyptians. Besides that, here's Stephen to explain. He showed it to me. It's a well known collector in New York, and I went, weird, you get this book? And then you said, I got

it from this woman, and I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it. This is impossible. I sold this book. How could Stephen possibly know that there were hundreds of copies of Marvel Mysteries number seventy one out there that had survived being thrown away by parents. But this one was different. Inside on the first page was a handwritten sequence of numbers and letters seven eight four one dash D dash three to zero. It's an old comic book. Kids wrote or drew all kinds of things on them

before they realized. Some of them could put their kids through college. But this isn't just a doodo. It's legendary in the comic book collector's community because it means the comic belonged to the d collection, one of the most comprehensive ever assembled. It's a pedigree like a fingerprint. The person who bought this comic book and thousands of others wrote a code on the first page of everyone he

bought as a teenager and young adult. There's only one Marvel Mystery Comics number with those numbers inside, and it once belonged to a collector. Stephen Fishler knew, well, this was exactly a book that I had sold Nick that somehow left his house. Someone hadn't stolen three comics from Nicholas Cage. Someone had stolen four for I Heart Radio. This is stealing Superman I'm your host, Danis Schwartz, and

this is episode two, four empty frames. As soon as Stephen got a look at the Marvel Mystery, it was his turn to call Cage and a near panic. It was possible he was somehow mistaken that he misremembered selling it to him, that maybe it wasn't the d copy Cage had bought, but no Cage confirmed it. He had had a Marvel Mystery and now it was gone somehow. In the chaotic aftermath of the heist, he hadn't noticed it missing. Everyone's attention had been on the Big Two,

Action number one and Detective number twenty seven. No one had noticed the weird Egypt meets Marvel comic had vanished too. Nick had a run of Marvel Mystery and the only Marvel Mystery missing from the house it was Marvel seventy one. He had one through ninety two, I believe, but missing the seventy one. And I said, well it was the seventy one was taken out of the house. We're a book, I went, that's it was a pedigree book with very

unique markings. It's the same book. So who was this woman on eBay had sold the book to his collector friend. eBay seller profiles usually have scant information. People can be as anonymous as they like. For the most part, you might buy something, even something worth thousands, and not have any more information about the seller than that their screen name is Biceps Due. There's just one exception. An eBay

profile usually offers up the user's city and state. The seller, the one with cages book was in Connecticut and obviously connected it to the theft. There's no way if I sold in this book that a woman in Connecticut would have ended up with. But that's how it happened. So that was the only lead that I had. Somehow, in the span of just a couple of months, this book had been taken from cages home and been delivered miles

away and then wound up on eBay. A few fouls it a monumental book on its own, but it just was a book that I told them. There was just one thing to do. He asked the buyer for more information about the seller, and so he gave me the person who got it from and that's how that we began. This isn't as strange as it sounds. The rare comics collecting community is small Plenty of people buy and read comics, sure, but not that many deal in rare, high priced books

from the nineteen forties. Stephen is among the most well known dealers of such paper treasures. The collector was from New York, where Stephen lived. They had done business before, so the comic finding its way to Stephen wasn't far fetched. Most desirable comics made their way to him eventually, and the man, whom Stephen prefers not to name, trusted him, and so he told him that the seller was a she,

a woman named Kimberly. He gave Stephen a phone number and an email, so Stephen began dialing, wondering if the person who would pick up the phone knew that the comics she had sold had been taken from the home of Nicholas Cage. I had contacted the woman asking how she got it, and she was very worried and defensive. Kimberly did not wish to discuss where her Marvel Mystery number seventy one had come from. Stephen kept trying left

her phone messages but got no response. Maybe she was just unsettled by the question, maybe she had no idea it was stolen. But then the buyer told Stephen another detail, a detail that didn't do anything to convince him. Kimberly was an innocent bystander. He had bought the comic in person, an in person swap money for the Marvel Mystery. This is the kind of thing people may do on Craigslist,

but on eBay, even back then, it was unusual. The whole point of eBay was to find items you couldn't find locally, and with relative anonymity, you could purchase them safely without risk of being lured into someone's basement. But Kimberly preferred a personal meeting, and the collector didn't mind. Connecticut was a short drive. He had no idea the comic was well questionable, and no idea why Kimberly wanted to keep it offline. A cash transaction didn't leave much

of a paper trail. If Kimberly didn't know the comic was hot, why insist on meeting up in person? Why the Cloak and Dagger stuff? Stephen pondered, whoever took the Marvel Mystery had taken the other books, the very rare, very valuable com x. It stood to reason Kimberly probably knew something about the others. So he sat down and began typing another message. This one was more to the point.

I sent a letter quietly to this woman who somehow had one of the other stolen books, the Marvel seventy one. Sent her a letter and I said, you know you might have gotten books. This is my only lead. I said, you may have been in possession of books that could be stolen, But the owner really just wants to get his book back. So I said, here's a picture of a book that was stolen. If you have this book,

I will give you ten thousand dollars. There's no questions, asked finders a reward for returning this book, Thinking you know she got this cheaper book, Stephen was essentially offering her a finder's fee if she could procure the real treasure, the action number one or the detective number twenty seven or both. He mailed the letter and wait did And while he waited, he thought about something else, something else that was strange about seeing this comic on eBay. When

it disappeared from Cages House. It had been raw. That's what collectors called a book that hadn't been graded by a third party company, hadn't been assessed for its condition, for blemishes, for an objective ten point rating of how well it aged, since it was first on the stands in the system. All changed in two thousand when what's now called the Certified Guarantee Company or c g C started looking at comics. For a fee of roughly twenty dollars.

C g C would take your rare comic, examine it, and put it in a protective plastic case so it would be forever sealed against further wear. It solved the problem of a dealer and buyer having different ideas of what a comics condition was. It was perfect for eBay when you had to buy items site unseen. C g C really took off in the early two thousand's mostly because of eBay. That's Paul Lytch primary grater for c g C. Back then he was the secondary greater. So

what CDC really did. It really gave buyers the level playing field to say, no, c g C, this third party, independent, impartial company gave this book that you're selling me an eight five, so I'm only going to pay the eight five price. C g C could make sure a comic was unrestored, hadn't been messed with and they graded down to the tenth of a point, from point five to nine point two to rarely a ten point Oh, this Marvel Mystery scored very very high, a nine point four,

close to perfect. Once a book is slabbed, it's protected against a lot of things that age old comics which were never printed to last, Cheap ink and cheap paper degrade. So with the micro chamber paper in there, it will help aging of the book and it will help it with environmental storage problems that may happen down the road depending on how you store your comics. So that comic is then placed into an inner well. In the inner well we have many, many different sizes that are custom

made for comics. That inner well is sealed on all the edges and then it is placed in the outer acrylic folder, which is just an acrylic plastic, very sturdy, and that is sonically sealed and welded shut. And so you have a tamper evidence very what's the word. I'm looking for safe way to store your comics and archipe a nice archival way to protect your comics and protect them from any kind of other damage that could happen

just with life. So someone had thoughtfully taken Cage's stolen comic and decided it deserved archival protection, at which point it was sent to c g C for grading before being auctioned on eBay. Someone wanted to squeeze every last dollar out of its value, which was contrary to most stolen goods, where getting a fraction of an item's worth

is usually good enough. This was well bold. Imagine swiping a painting from a wall and then going to get it appraised in the hopes word hadn't yet reached the expert about the art going missing, or going to a framing store with a swiped van go to pick out the perfect frame for your wall. Kimberly either didn't know it had been stolen, or knew but figured it was one of many Marvel Mystery comics. She didn't seem to have any idea it was a D copy, one instantly

recognizable someone had slipped it. Suggested that the thief knew enough about comics to grab the most valuable ones, but wasn't that much of an insider to know about the D collection. It revealed something else too. The comics were taken from Cage's home just days before c g C officially opened for business just days c g C began accepting submissions from the public on January first, two thousand.

It's possible that whoever took Cage's comics wanted to get ahead of c g C, ahead of Cage, possibly submitting his valuable books to be slabbed and therefore making them harder to steal. Each slabbed c g C comic carries a certification number. There would be no way of reselling it in its c g C case without someone realizing it had been stolen. Someone would have to take it out, crack the slab, make it a raw book again. It

would be harder. Whoever took the comics may have been knowledgeable enough to know that if they waited any longer, the comics might be off to c g C for submission. Than in case and trackable, we have helped our chatboards. Dealers have listed books and the serial numbers and the grades that have been stolen from their shops, and our comic book community has helped find them. And it has helped, but unfortunately still some tests do happen. But it also

presented another avenue for Stephen to explore. Anyone submit to c g C had to provide a name and return address to get their comic book back from their office in New Jersey unless they submitted it through a participating dealer. So Stephen reached out to a contact at c g

C to see if he could learn anything else. In fact, Stephen had actually helped get c g C off the ground, helping map out what the ten point grading system should look like, and he discovered something very interesting about Kimberly. She apparently called c g C and said, the c g C g about personal information about who it's a grade. It's something about that. Whole situation looked pretty bad. Kimberly from Connecticut was definitely getting worried. She didn't know Stephen

had already gotten her information from the buyer. C g C, for the record, didn't provide any further details about Kimberly to Stephen, but what they had done was confirmed what he already knew to be true that the comic he sold Cage was undoubtedly part of the d collection. If Stephen had any doubt before c g C provided authentication, they always noted a comics pedigree on their label. Kimberly had taken steps to guarantee that it was Cages comic

beyond all doubt. So out of those four comics, why had this one, the least valuable, least important, come up first. Why wouldn't the person who grabbed it from Cage's home try to cash in on the action number one for two hundred thousand dollars? Why not in case that one in a C G C slab and shoot for the stars. It's a marvel mystery mystery. So we asked someone who might know. We asked an art thief. Well, what did

she want? Attitude is I never give anyone the benefit of the doubt, and God everyone is despicable as each other. And if you go into these things with that attitude, you normally can't go far wrong. Okay, so let's be clear. We asked a reformed art thief, a man named Paul Hendry. Paul is from the UK, and for years he made a dishonest living as a knocker. That's a person who would find reasons to get inside someone's house and assess

their belongings for anything worth stealing. If he found something good, he'd rope in some co conspirators, the people doing the actual liberation of the goods. Well, yes, I was born in Brighton on the South Coach of the UK in nine and was adopted. And then when I was twelve, I went out on the knocker, which is something where you knock on people's heals you try to buy antiques.

I moved swiftly up the food chain and started organizing thefts from country houses, and then I became very, very successful in the nineteen eighties, and then I gave up the business early nineties when my son was born, and I went to university and got a BA honors degree in American Social Studies and a master's degree in contemporary history. And I now commentate on art related crime because I've

seen it from both perspectives. Paul has helped the FBI, foreign Law Enforcement, and local bureaus find and recover stolen artworks. He's well versed in what happens when someone steals one of a kind pieces and then tries to figure out what to do with them. Well, yes, people call me the art crime on Bardsman. So really, when I see wrong doing, whoever's doing it, whether it's law enforcement, the insurance industry, private art detect chie's themes handless whoever, I

call everyone out. So to be honest with you, I upset everyone at some point each time, and the fact that the Marvel Mystery, the least valuable comic in the bunch, was the first to surface, doesn't surprise him one bit. Like obviously the person put it on eBay testing the water. It's a test balloon scene whether it can slip through

the market without coming on top without being discovered. Remember, two of the four comics were the two rarest The other two the Marvel Mystery and the Detective Number one, weren't. The Action Number One was worth at least two hundred

thousand dollars, the Marvel Mystery about a thousand dollars. To be honest with you, because of the large discrepancies in value, I will be leaning towards they took those to use a test balloons and the proof of putting in that is, the first comic that surfaced in Connecticut was the lesser valued one, right, So I would actually look towards that as Yes, they took one very valuable one and one less valuable one, one very valuable one, one less valuable

one to use as bargaining chips as a test balloon. If the Marvel Mystery had gone undetected. It was entirely possible that the more valuable comics would have surfaced soon after the Action number one and detective number twenty seven. Maybe they'd be in shiny new c g C slabs ready to be framed or displayed. Maybe they already were c g C. After all, couldn't possibly be suspicious of every comic that was submitted to them, or treat the submitter as though they were a thief. But the Marvel

Mystery did not go undetected. Stephen detected it. This was a real lead, tangible, verifiable proof that at least one of the comic was out there, and proof that the comics weren't taken as a prank or had some home been misplaced. Whoever had taken the comics had not done so for their own personal pleasure to have some kind of illicit comic book collection for their eyes only. The Marvel Mystery was put up for sale for money. You have to remember art, be a comic, a painting, a sculpture,

or anything. He's just a commodity, and that they steal them because they pan and then they try to monetize them. Now, comics are like say, musical instruments, they're quite unique and knee market for them, and collectors market is a very

very small market. The majority of art crime is against personal householders where they have art and antique stolen with values ranging from say a thousand dollars up to ten tho dollars and maybe a hundred thousand dollars, and those things happened every day of the week all over the world.

Every now and again you get a big heist from a museum where paintings worth millions and tens and hundreds of millions of dollars stolen and then either ransom back to the insurance company or victims, or they're held as collateral and used within the underworld in drug deals because the moving of money around the world is much more difficult because of money laundering laws. So these comics, including the Superman ones and all of them, are just a commodity.

If you put it in a safety deposit box, you can give the person that you're going to borrow some money off, or you're going to get some narcotics off. You give them the key to the ux and access to it as collateral, and then when you sell the drugs to pay the money back, you can then get the access back again when the cage books went missing. When any art goes missing, there's always a question of whether it was an impulsive crime, something done at a

spur of the moment, or something premeditated. And if it were premeditated, whether the thief knew exactly where the comics were going to go, whether they had a buyer already lined up. If not, how else could one of them get from Los Angeles to Connecticut so quickly. If this would a carefully playing theath, then the people would have eva had someone that they were going to sell them too straightaway already sold it out, or they would at least know where they were going to monetize them or

what they were going to do with them afterwards. Bob Whitman x FBI Art Crime Team Boss, he's got a good saying, you know, aren't Thieves are very good at steam in art, but they're terrible businessmen and terrible at trying to monetize the art once they've stolen it. Were it not for that infernal decollection marking, the Marvel Mysteries could have passed unnoticed. Comics have the benefit of being printed in multiples. Most art is one of one and

therefore much harder to return to a legitimate market. Well, a lot of art theft, you see, is opportunisty or even those that are planning right, they put a lot of planning into the actual ceiling of the artwork, but not so much planning there's what they're going to do with them once they've stolen them, and then they find that it's even in the art world, it's a very very exclusive club and it's very very difficult if you don't know the right context to know what to do

with these things, unless, of coursehip was something like, I mean there's a gang in the UK. Then they raised stately homes. Now they sold a solid gold toilet that was being exhibited at Blenheim Palace. And this solid gold toilet ways, it's something like a hundred and twenty teals, and they ripped it out of where it's been exhibited. They cut it up and they put it in the melting pot for five million dollars and it was insured

for six million dollars. But it got mounted down, you see, so that the work of art that could just literally be monetized because of the material that it was made by it there was also place where there was a diamond tr in Portland, Tiara that was stolen worth millions of dollars. They just popped all the big diamonds out of it and melted down the frame and sold the stones for a few hundred thousand dollars. So there are

different things. I mean with this comic, you couldn't do anything like that because it's an an animal object, something that you can't change it into anything. But again, it needs something that could be used as collateral by the underworld. But you've got to get it into the underworld, and from what I can see, I don't think they ever really reached the underworld with this. Unfortunately, this was no golden toilet, but it was altered in a way when

it was stolen from Cage's house. It was raw. Now it was slabbed. Kimberly may have wanted to give the comic a fresh start, have it appeared to be something other than what had gone missing. Some art is stolen for ransom, kind of a Lindberg baby situation, a kid nothing. The intent isn't to try to move it on the market, but to tempt the owner with it if some kind of agreement can be made to dangle the art in front of the nose of the victim and promise it's

safe return in exchange for a fee. Stephen Fishler had essentially done that in reverse. He proactively offered a reward to the mysterious Kimberly from Connecticut. The question was would she bite guilty or not? Kimberly was not playing it cool. She had phoned c g C in a panic, hoping they wouldn't give out her personal information. She refused to speak to Stephen, and when Stephen offered her a monetary reward that was virtually ten times with the Marvel Mystery

was worth, she never responded. But Stephen wasn't out of options. In addition to offering Kimberly a reward, he reached out to Los Angeles Detective Donald Harrisik, the man who was leading the investigation into the heist. Stephen expected harre sick to do something. Make a call, contact the Connecticut police, follow the only lead anyone had. Maybe not kicked down her door, but something. I got a feeling from what

I heard about this woman's reaction. Who I contacted asking how she got this Marvel mystery, she got very panicky, so I said to the police, she's acting like she contacted the company graded the book for her and was worried that they would reveal her information. And when that's somebody who knew that book was questionable. According to Stephen, Detective Harrisick wasn't as enthusiastic as one might expect. Well. He was annoyed that I contacted the woman directly and

now she won't talk to him. You're the police, I said, call her up and see who you are. You know, I don't think police work. Ended with the notion of she won't talk to me. When Kimberly refused to talk to her, Sick, it seemed as though he just well gave up her re Sick was less than curious. Stephen knew that Cage had his own security personnel working on things, so he reached out to them to let them know that a woman named Kimberly in Connecticut was in possession

of one of Cage's comics without question or doubt. The d copy. Yeah, I had spoken to Oh, absolutely, just give me an update, I said, I have found a book that left Nick's house and it was transacted off the v Bay by a woman in Connecticut. Well, they found it interesting, but I'll be honest, it seemed a bit like they were being annoyed by me. Why Nick had a purity person I cannot remember his name in place. A little bit after that and I all right, we'll

have the security person follow up on this. Why am I doing this? And the security person didn't seem to be bothered by trying to track this down. I mean, I found it a little frustrating talking to Nick's people when something's not let me just makes sense here, like I could have been talking to somebody who stole it, like they didn't want to deal with it, and maybe they had. I don't know, to be honest, I just

don't know. There was some weirdness going on. Instead of wow, Steve's really trying to find the book, it became wow, Steve's really annoying us. I said to myself at the time, I said, this is bizarre. It is bizarre. And Paul Hendry has a theory about that too. The police will go out to Shay the person in Connecticut and try to track it back from there. The fact that I didn't do it makes you wanted a lot about this, Like, well, initially I think We've got a look that behavior, and

any investigator would look at that behavior. Has perhaps Nicolas Cage has some idea of who stole these things and the reason that they stold them, because, to be honest

with you, you know what celebrities are like. If this was just a genuine theft and Nicolas Cage is a victim of this theft, it would have been all over the news and it would have given interviews because you know, in that world, Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity, and this would have given a platform for Nicolas Cage to say he's a victim of an art theft. We've seen it before when

famous people have been robbed. I mean they've gone out and they said, we'd like the things back, and they contact the police. But at this point, Cage had still not gone public with the theft, and neither the police nor his security seemed enthusiastic about pursuing the Kimberly situation. Cages people did send a letter to her, and according to what Stephen was told, Kimberly sent a letter back

insisting they were harassing her. So it's possible Nicholas Cage didn't want to be perceived as someone who was ordering his staff to bother a strange woman who may or may not know anything about his stolen comic books. That's a weird National Enquirer worthy headline. But she was the only link to the heist, So why didn't anyone make more of an effort to question her? I think, as we've gone through the whole story, it really is a Russian dole. You're opening more and more layers, You're peeling

back the onion and every kind of stop. There is something there that doesn't smell right, it doesn't taste right, and doesn't look right. And in the normal world of things, this is not only what would happen, from the theft of it to the handling of it to the surfacing Stephen Fishler agrees. And I gave the police this lead and they were really just not doing much with it, and I said, all right, well, here's the book that

he from Nick's house. This is my only lead. The police don't seem to have the wherewithal to really follow it up or the motivation, and I just became like the crazy uncle who was still trying to find these books. And the detective zombie as a sort of a nuisance. But that was then and this is now. Time has passed and you're probably thinking, well, why not try to find Kimberly today. There's one hurdle to overcome. Kimberly's full name is not uncommon. In other words, a lot of

people named Kimberly live in Connecticut. So we needed more to go on a town a phone number, information that has in the intervening years slipped through Stephen Fishler's memory. But it is the kind of information c g C would have recorded back in two thousand when they accepted the Marvel mystery number. Seventy one escape end of the comic still exists. So we typed in the certification number

into the c GCS database. The registrate Paul Lytch was talking about the one given to the comic back when it was graded. It's a ten digit number that gives a person general information about the comic, like the data was examined and any grader's notes like catch up staying on third page. But the c g c S database couldn't find the certification number. It seemed to have disappeared from their system entirely. That was unusual. Had c g C scrubbed the number after Kimberly called to complain, or

was it just a glitch? So we asked Paul Lynch. According to Paul, the number not coming up means the comic may have been resubmitted at some point. Some collectors do this in the hopes c g C might wind up giving their comic a more favorable grade. If that happened, then the old label and number would have been destroyed. I don't see why we wouldn't. It's got to be here somewhere. But as far as to submitted it that's above my pay grade, you'd have to, I don't know.

That's one of the head hunchos. Paul told us to talk to someone higher up in the c g C hierarchy to see what we could find out. We had a full name and a state, a non working certification number, and a question about a comic submitted that had been stolen. Could they help us find Kimberly from Connecticut? We went to the head hauncho to find out Harsh and Patel, vice president of the c g C. We explained the situation,

and harsh And understood, but however, noble our intentions. The c g c has a commitment to protecting the privacy of their customers. Harshin told us that the only way he could hand over that kind of information would be with a subpoena. That was dead end number two, so we tried something else. In two thousand two, that same copy of Marvel Mystery Number seventy one went up for sale via Heritage Auctions, one of the largest auctioneers in

the industry. Auctions like these are always private. No one but the auction house knows who the buyers or sellers are. It's possible the seller was the same person who bought it from Kimberly, but again, Heritage couldn't reveal their identity. Strike three. For now, the location of the elusive Kimberly remains a mystery, but maybe not for much longer. There's one more thing to try. Stay tuned, But what about that Marvel Mystery Number seventy one. Shouldn't it have been

returned to Nicholas Cage. Shouldn't the New York buyer have forfeited what he knew to be stolen property? Well he would have, except Cage wasn't asking for it back because the main thing was trying to figure out the Action One trying to undertake him. I had mentioned to Nick about this lead, and if Nick said to me, that's my book, I wanted back. It was more about the lead versus getting it back. By this point, Cage's insurance company had paid out on all four books. He had

been financially, if not emotionally, compensated for their loss. The Marvel mystery was in some ways small potatoes, even though the fact that it had materialized in Connecticut means someone had crossed state lines and technically made a Los Angeles robbery a federal crime. And maybe it was someone Cage knew, Well, maybe someone Cage already considered a suspect, which made looking into Kimberly less of a priority. To find these comics, someone was going to have to take the initiative. The

problem was there was no analog for this heist. There were plenty of art thefts, but not many comic book thefts. It makes you wonder if anyone had ever been bold enough to steal an Action number one before Cage's copy went missing, if any crime had been an inspiration for this one, if it had been a kind of copycat comic heist. It turns out the answer is yes, and

it happened in of all places, Connecticut. Stealing Superman is written by Jake Rawson, sound design scoring by Josh Fisher, additional editing by Jonathan Washington, Mixing and mastering by Baheed Frasier. Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by Jake Rawson and Austin Thompson, with production support from Lulu Philip. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our executive producer is Jason

English and I'm your host Danish words. If you're enjoying this show, check out Haileywood and Noble Blood and give us a nice review. We'll see you next week. Stealing Superman is a production of I Heart Radio.