Cover art for the ‘Superman’ comic book, 1930s.

NEW YORK (AP) — A rare copy of a Superman #1 comic book
that sold on newsstands for a dime in 1939 was purchased for
$2.6 million in an auction.

The comic showing Superman leaping over tall buildings on
the cover was sold Thursday night to a buyer who wishes to
maintain a secret identity, according to ComicConnect.com,
an online auction and consignment company.

The seller, Mark Michaelson, bought the comic in 1979 from its original
owner and kept it in a temperature-controlled safe.

Michaelson, now semi-retired and living in Houston, paid his way
through college by buying and selling comics.

MIKE GRACIA

Brace Beemer, center, with The Lone Ranger cast in the WXYZ radio
studios.

"The Lone Ranger" was aired on radio for the first time on this day in 1933. The show ran for 2,956 episodes and ended in 1955. The title character was played 
by George Seaton, Earle Graser, and Brace Beemer. Tonto was played by,
among others, John Todd and Roland Parker.

Francis Hamilton "Fran" Striker
(August 19, 1903 – September 4, 1962).

Fran Striker was a writer for radio and comics,
best known for creating the Lone Ranger,
Green Hornet, and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon
characters.     

    
Franklin Delano Roosevelt  (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945)   
(Last photograph of Roosevelt, taken the day before his death)
                                                    

Franklin Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR, served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member
of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and
became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th
century.

ROSS SIMPSON

On this day in 1978, Cult leader Jim Jones and hundreds of his
followers died in a mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana
in South America. It was the largest mass suicide in modern
history and resulted in the largest single loss of American
civilian life in a non-natural disaster until September 11, 2001.

Shown are bodies of members of the Peoples Temple who died
after their leader Jim Jones ordered them to drink Flav-R-Aid
laced with cyanide. 

Congressman Leo Ryan (above) was among five killed by Temple members at the nearby Port Kaituma airstrip (below).

The first successful sound-synchronized animated cartoon premiered
in New York on this day in 1928. It was Walt Disney’s "Steamboat
Willie," starring Mickey Mouse.

Walt Disney drawing “Steamboat Willie”.

Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur, or simply Prince Valiant, is a long-
running comic strip created by Hal Foster in 1937. It is an epic adventure
that has told a continuous story during its entire history, and the full stretch
of that story now totals more than 4000 Sunday strips. Currently, the strip
appears weekly in more than 300 newspapers in the U.S., according to its 
distributor, King Features Syndicate.

The full-page strip continued until 1971 when strip #1788 was not offered in
full-page format—it was the last strip Foster drew. The strip continues today
by other artists in a half page format.

Harold (“Hal”) Rudolf Foster
(August 16, 1892 – July 25, 1982)

The syndicated daily and Sunday comic strip Peanuts was written and illustrated
by Charles M. Schulz and ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000,
continuing in reruns afterward. The strip is the most popular and influential in
the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it "arguably
the longest story ever told by one human being". At its peak, Peanuts ran in over
2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was
translated into 21 languages. It helped to make the four-panel gag strip as the
standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz
more than $1 billion. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in almost
every U.S. newspaper.

Charles Monroe Schulz (November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000)