Before the costumes settled into tights and capes, DC published a hero in a business suit, a fedora and a military gas mask. A CGC 5.0 of his debut sold for $53,155 in 2024, and a 4.5 brought $35,905 the next year.
Black Adam has carried a major film, and his first appearance sold for $186,000. That copy came out of the Promise Collection, the honest ladder underneath runs $90,000 for a plain 9.0 down to $2,650 for a beaten copy.
There have been at least three Blue Beetles and the famous one is not in this comic. The 1939 original is here, and two documented sales, a CGC 8.5 at $39,239 and a CGC 5.5 at $24,000, now cover both the top of the market and the middle.
Plastic Man, the Human Bomb and the original Phantom Lady all debut in this 1941 comic. A CGC 9.0 sold for $29,901 in March 2026, which is less than people expect for a book carrying three debuts.
Timely put Captain America, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner in one wartime title, and people who find a copy assume it is a reprint anthology. It is not, and a CGC 8.0 sold for $36,160 in 2025.
A two-page text filler in this issue, signed Stan Lee, is the first thing he ever published. He was eighteen. Three documented sales, a $90,000 CGC 8.0 and two recent mid-grade results, show how this book prices from the top to the middle.
The figure circulating for this book is about $65,000, reportedly from 2016. A CGC 9.4 sold for $132,000 in November 2024, and a 5.0 brought $14,400 nine months earlier. If the old figure is right, that is the same grade at twice the money.
Two CGC 7.5 copies of this book sold at the same auction house, three years apart. Neither carried a pedigree. The second brought $27,000 less, and that is about as clean a read on direction as this hobby offers.
In 1954 a senator held this comic up in a hearing and asked its publisher whether he considered it in good taste. The exchange helped end EC’s comic line. The big documented sales are publisher file copies, but a plain copy finally has a number too.
A bound victim, a raised hypodermic needle and Batman grabbing the man holding it, published in 1940 for children. Three documented sales, a pedigree copy, and a plain 6.0 that beat it three years later, on a book carried by an image a modern publisher would never approve.
