The opening of Donner's 1978 SUPERMAN movie is weird. It begins, in black and white, with a little boy reading ACTION COMICS but not the actual comic book and then it cuts to an old movie of Superman but not an actual old movie (as far as I know), before it goes off into outer space.
But even though this ACTION COMICS didn't exist in the real world--not in 1938--the physical prop had to exist in the movie. I wonder how that came to be. They had to have artists draw the panels in the comic book and make a comic book from that. I wonder if this was just something the prop department threw together or if they got it from an outside source.
And after they shot that scene for the movie, what did they do with the prop comic book? Was it destroyed? Or does someone still own that comic book?