The 1940 Superman Card With No PSA 9, No PSA 10, and Exactly One 8
230 Graded, One PSA 8, Zero Above It: The 1940 Superman #1
The first card of the first Superman set ever made has been through PSA 230 times. Six copies came back a 7. One came back an 8. Nothing has ever come back higher, and the best example anyone has actually paid for at auction was a 6.5, which brought $40,000 in January 2025.
This piece uses two kinds of source and keeps them apart. Population figures are PSA's, as read on the date of this article. Auction results are the auction houses' own, each one dated and named. Everything about what is listed today comes from this index's tracking of live listings, and is an asking price rather than a value.
One 8, and nothing above it
The PSA population report for card #1, titled simply "Superman", reads like this across the whole grades: 50 at PSA 2, 22 at 3, 23 at 4, 10 at 5, 6 at 6, 6 at 7, one at 8, and then nothing. Zero at 9. Zero at 10.
The half-point line adds 27 at 1.5, 16 at 2.5, three at 3.5, two at 4.5 and two at 6.5. A further 21 copies carry qualifiers, and 41 entries sit in the report's non-numeric columns, which are authenticity designations rather than grades. Add the three lines together and you get 230 submissions in total.
So of 230 trips through the grading room, exactly one produced a card better than a 7, and no submission in the card's entire graded history has produced a 9.
The top of the report has not moved in fifteen years
This is the part that makes the card unusual rather than merely scarce.
PSA's own set registry article, written when only 45 copies of card #1 had been submitted, reported one PSA 8 with nothing grading higher. Hake's described the census in November 2023 the same way: six at 6, six at 7, one 8. The report today says six at 7 and one 8.
Submissions have multiplied several times over since that first count, and the ceiling has not moved once. That is different from a card that is merely expensive. It is a card where the supply of high grades has been tested repeatedly and has refused to produce another one.
What the market has actually paid
The sales record for card #1, in the order it happened:
A PSA 7 sold for $2,310 at Greg Bussineau in January 2011. Another PSA 7 brought $13,394.40 at Mile High in 2020. A PSA 5 sold for $13,800 at Robert Edward in 2021, and a PSA 4 realised $9,900 in September 2023.
Then the market moved. In June 2024, Heritage sold one of the two PSA 6.5 copies for $36,250, which was reported at the time as more than double the previous high for the card in any grade. In January 2025, a 6.5 sold at Heritage again, this time for $40,000.
Note what that ladder does. A PSA 5 outsold a PSA 7 by four hundred dollars because it came up a year later. A 6.5 outsold every 7 on record by a factor of three. In a market this thin, the date of the sale matters as much as the grade on the flip, because there is no steady supply of any grade to anchor a price against.
So what is the 8 worth?
Nobody knows, and that is the honest answer.
We could find no public auction record of the sole PSA 8 changing hands. It has never, as far as the record shows, been tested against a room full of bidders. Everything above $40,000 for this card is inference.
What can be said is what sits between the last sale and that card. Above the $40,000 6.5 there are six PSA 7s, no 7.5s, and then the 8. That is seven cards on the planet, in known hands, standing between the current auction record and the top of the report. If one of the 7s came up tomorrow it would have a real number attached to it within the hour. The 8 is the only copy whose price would have to be discovered from scratch.
Why these Superman cards carry the numbers they do
The 1940 Gum Inc. set is 72 cards, catalogued as R145, and it arrived two years after Superman's debut in Action Comics #1. It is the first trading card set ever made about the character, at the moment he was becoming the most commercially significant creation in American publishing.
Three things then conspired to keep the graded population low.
The last 24 cards, numbers 49 through 72, are short prints and are harder to find in any condition. Card #1 and card #72 sat on the outside edges of the printing sheets, so they carried the flaws that come with that position. And the cards were owned by children who banded them together in stacks, which put the first and last cards of the run on the outside of the rubber band. The two most wanted cards in the set are the two the elastic was wrapped around.
The whole-set numbers show the result. Of 8,830 cards from the set graded by PSA as of mid-2024, only a little more than 1,700 reached a 6 or better. More than eighty percent of everything submitted came back below EX-MT.
That is why a mid-grade card from this set behaves like a high-grade card from any other. There is no top of the market to look up at.
What this index can and cannot tell you
Population figures come from PSA and change as more cards are submitted. Auction results come from the houses named above. Neither is something this site produces, and both are quoted here with their dates attached so you can check whether they have moved.
What this site does produce is what is listed right now across every grade of this card and the rest of the 1940 Gum Inc. set, updated through the day, along with an estimate of what a raw copy might grade with the reasoning written out. That estimate is our opinion and not PSA's. See how this index works.