Amazing Spider-Man #121 Value: The First Half of a Pair

These two issues nearly always arrive together, and they do not sell for the same money. Gwen Stacy dies in this one and the Green Goblin dies in the next, and at CGC 9.8 the gap between them has been more than a thousand dollars this year. Amazing Spider-Man 121 value is best understood as one half of a pair that most sellers own both of.

The story runs across June and July 1973, and it is the point most people mark as the end of the Silver Age of Marvel comics.

Which half of the story you are holding

Issue 121 is the death of Gwen Stacy. Issue 122 is the Green Goblin dying two weeks later. They are one story split across two comics, and they were bought together by nearly everybody who bought either.

The market treats them as separate keys with separate prices anyway, and the split is not stable. This year the 9.8 lane on this issue ran $3,300 to $5,000 while its sibling had a single 9.8 sale at $3,827, so which one is ahead depends on when you look.

What that means for a seller is simple and worth stating: if you have both, do not let anybody price them as one lot at the number for the cheaper one. Get them assessed separately and then decide whether to sell them together.

To identify it: 20 cents, June 1973, Spider-Man swinging inside a ring of cast portraits under the word Turning Point. The Green Goblin cover with the glider is the next issue.

A top grade off a 2022 peak

No sale of this comic appears in CGC’s auction reporting, so no price below carries a link. Every row is a Heritage Auctions result or a completed eBay listing.

The 9.8 lane peaked at $8,400 in April 2022 and has six sales this year running $3,300 to $5,000. That is a little under half the peak and a wide band of its own, which is what a thin lane on an expensive book looks like.

The 9.6 came off the same peak from $3,360 and has four sales this year between $1,430 and $2,699. Four sales is not enough to call a level, and anybody quoting a single 9.6 figure on this book is being more confident than the record allows.

Underneath that it gets much busier and much steadier. The 9.2 lane has fourteen sales this year running $800 to $1,050, and the 9.0 lane fifteen running $715 to $1,000.

That is the useful part of this page. A sharp but not perfect copy of the death of Gwen Stacy is a seven-hundred-to-eleven-hundred-dollar comic on a deep and current record, and that is a far more quotable number than anything at the top.

Those figures are Heritage results and completed eBay sales. GoCollect and PriceCharting track Amazing Spider-Man #121 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Amazing Spider-Man #121 value in every grade

369 sales tracked back to 2015; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Heritage rows are verifiable in Heritage’s public Amazing Spider-Man issue index; the rest are completed eBay listings. Three hundred and sixty-nine sales going back to 2015. Most of them sit in the four grades from 9.0 upward.

What a reading copy brings

This was a twenty-cent comic bought by children in 1973, so most surviving copies are readable rather than sharp.

Across 2026: 8.5 copies brought $576 to $790, 8.0 copies $385 to $699, and the grades below that step down steadily rather than falling away.

Raw copies ran $101 to $799 across thirty-one sales this year, which is a wide band with a clear reason behind it. A complete flat copy sits near the top of it and a copy with a tear or a missing coupon sits near the bottom.

For most owners the honest summary is that a readable death of Gwen Stacy is a four-to-eight-hundred-dollar comic. That is a lot of money for a comic somebody read to pieces, and it is nowhere near the figure at the top of the table.

Selling the pair, and the coupon nobody checks

The first thing worth doing with these two is finding out whether the second one is in the box, because it usually is.

As a pair they reach the buyer who wants the whole story, and that buyer looks hard at condition on both. Split up, the weaker copy is the one that suffers, because somebody who already owns one half is negotiating rather than shopping.

The detail that costs people money on both issues is the Marvel Value Stamp. Marvel printed cut-out stamps in comics of this period, and a copy with the stamp cut out grades far lower and sells for a fraction. Open the book and check before you price anything.

On grading: at these numbers a submission is easy to justify on a copy that looks genuinely clean, and hard to justify below about 8.0. The spine and the top staple are where seventies Marvels lose the grade, and neither shows in a straight-on photograph of the front.

Selling an Amazing Spider-Man #121

1. Twenty cents, June 1973. The Green Goblin glider cover is the next issue, not this one.
2. Check for the second issue. They almost always travel together and price separately.
3. Open it and look for a cut stamp. A missing Marvel Value Stamp changes the grade.
4. A readable copy is $400 to $800. The 9.2 and 9.0 lanes are the quotable ones.

Send photographs of both issues if you have both, with one shot of an open interior page so I can see whether a stamp has been cut out.

Send photographs and I will place your copy in its grade lane against the same recent sales you can read above. Where you take it next is your call, and the options for selling in Southern California are worth knowing either way.

Related

• Amazing Spider-Man #1. Where the title began, and what the 1963 book brings.
• How grading actually works. Useful on a book where the stamp decides the grade.
• The 100 most valuable Bronze Age comics. Where this issue ranks against the era.

Cover images on this page are shown small, for identification, with the publisher credited in the caption. If you are a rights holder and want an image removed, contact me and it comes down.