If you hadn’t heard already, the first comic book featuring Superman was sold for $317,200 in an Internet auction!

The winning bid for the 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1 was submitted Friday evening by John Dolmayan, the drummer for the rock band System of a Down. He is also a dealer of rare comic books.

It’s one of the highest prices ever paid for a comic book, a likely testament to the volume’s rarity and its excellent condition, said Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the auction site ComicConnect.com and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles.

Dolmayan said he acquired the Superman comic on behalf of a client he declined to identify.

"This is one of the premier books you could collect," Dolmayan said in a telephone interview. "It’s considered the Holy Grail of comic books. I talked to my client, and we made the move."

Dolmayan said the client has "a small collection, but everything he has is incredible."

The price was one of the highest ever paid for a comic book, a likely testament to the volume’s rarity and its excellent condition, said Stephen Fishler, the co-owner of the auction site, ComicConnect.com. Only about 100 copies of Action Comics No. 1 are known to exist, and they seldom come up for sale.

"Maybe in a booming economy, it would have done a hundred grand more, but in this economy, I think the price is great," Fishler said.

The man who previously owned the book purchased it in a secondhand store in the early 1950s when he was nine years old. He paid 35 cents.

The book, which features Superman lifting a car on its cover, remained in the man’s possession for the next six decades, despite occasional offers from collectors promising several thousand dollars.