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ELBOW LAKE, Minn. — A comic book found in the wall of a home being remodeled is being auctioned for nearly $130,000.
David Gonzalez, a contractor by trade, bought a house built in 1938 in Elbow Lake for $10,000. As he was remodeling the house, he found a comic book in the walls, acting as insulation, and he thought it might be worth something.
"I am a humble working guy, so I didn't get too excited when I found it with old newspapers stuffed in the walls," Gonzalez told The Minnesota Star Tribune. "Money won't buy you happiness."
The comic book, as it turns out, is a 1938 "Action Comics" #1, in which Superman makes his first appearance. After getting it appraised by a comic book auction house, he learned it was worth more than ten times the cost of the house in which he had found it.
With the help of an auction house, Gonzalez put the comic book on auction. As of Thursday afternoon, the current bid was $127,000.
"(The owner) has spent years tearing down old walls and putting up new ones for his home-renovation clients," the description on Comic Connect reads. "He's made a habit of leaving a quarter or dollar bill behind them, thinking that sometime in the future, someone will find his treasure and wonder who put it there. But the ‘hidden treasure' in the walls of the first home he'd ever purchased and renovated on his own yielded the most unusual find he could have imagined."
Despite a tear on its back cover, the comic book, said Comic Connect's owners, is attractive because it has only been owned by one person before Gonzalez. Its story and survival interests potential buyers.
"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," Vincent Zurzolo said. "It's pretty miraculous that it even survived and it's only had one owner."
