People find a MAD number one in a box and assume it is the famous magazine. The 1952 original was a ten-cent color comic book, and the two are worth wildly different money. Two documented sales at the same grade also measure exactly what a pedigree label is worth.
Everyone knows what Superman #1 is worth. Almost nobody talks about issue two, which is scarcer than people assume. It now has documented sales at both ends of the scale: a well-worn CGC 3.5 at $11,422 and a high-grade 8.0 at $78,000.
Rural Home published a handful of comics in the mid-1940s and vanished. One of them carries an L.B. Cole devil cover, and the only public sales are two Promise Collection pedigree copies: $102,000 in 2021, then $144,000 in 2023.
Two characters who have carried films and television shows for decades both debuted in the back pages of the same 1941 anthology, and neither was the reason anyone bought it. Nine documented sales show what it brings now, including two at the same grade that point plainly down.
Human Torch against Sub-Mariner, in 1940. Before this, heroes fought criminals. Everything Marvel has done since with heroes fighting each other traces back to these pages, and two recent sales show what mid-grade copies actually bring.
If you have a Phantom Lady, the first question is which one. Number 17 is the famous cover, the one reproduced in Seduction of the Innocent. This is the sister book, and it cleared six figures in the same auction.
A funny-animal comic from 1940 is worth more than most superhero keys of the same year, and almost nobody outside the hobby expects that. The record is eighteen years old and carries three separate asterisks.
Nedor was a minor publisher and this is a late issue of a title nobody collects. It is on the list of the hundred most valuable Golden Age comics because of one science-fiction cover that people have wanted for eighty years.
The first Robin has a record from 2005 that nobody should be quoting, and now a documented one to replace it: a CGC 8.0 at $132,000 in 2025. It also has something rarer: three copies at the identical grade sold across five years, and each one brought less than the last.
Timely published this in 1940 and it sold badly enough that surviving copies are scarcer than the famous first issues around it. A pedigree copy brought $132,000; a plain one at the same grade brought a third of that a decade earlier.
