10 Amazing Comic Books That Should Have Flopped
1. Action Comics #1
It shouldn’t have worked.
Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster’s “Superman” had been rejected by every studio in town. Legendary creator Will Eisner revealed in an interview that he told the pair that they “went ready for prime time” because Shuster’s art was so crude and juvenile. But National Allied Periodicals, the company that would later be DC Comics, was in a bind and they needed content.
National’s publisher Jack Liebowitz was looking to build on the success of Detective Comics and tasked editor Vin Sullivan to create the company’s fourth title. Having no time to solicit new work, the book would have to be made from pages that the company already had in inventory. Sullivan asked his friend and comic creator Sheldon Mayer for help, and it was Mayer who found the Superman comic strip. Sullivan told Seigel and Shuster that if they could cut the strips into 13 comic book pages, the company would buy it.
The first issue had a print run of 200,000 copies, which sold out. Seigel and Shuster were paid $130 for their work. The series soon reached one million copies per month. A copy of Action Comics #1, which originally sold for 10 cents, was sold for $3,207,857 in 2014. The comic passed its 1000th issue in 2018 and continues to be published today.