Avengers #4 Value: Where Captain America Came Back

Avengers #4 is where Captain America came back. He had been out of print for most of twenty years, and this is the issue that put him into the Marvel age and into the team that would carry him. Avengers #4 value starts there.

It is also the Silver Age Marvel most likely to be a reprint in somebody’s hands, and the tell is easy once you know it.

The Golden Record reprint, and how to spot it

In 1966 a set of Marvel comics was packaged with vinyl story records, and Avengers #4 was one of them. The reprint reproduces the cover closely enough that it fools people at a glance.

Two tells settle it. The reprint carries no cover price and no issue number on the front, where the original says 12 cents and Avengers #4. The reprint also has no interior advertising, because it was never sold on a newsstand.

It is not a forgery and it has a small following of its own, but it is not the comic in the table below, and the gap between them is enormous.

Three sales at the top that disagree

One auction house, one grade, three results, and they do not agree with each other.

The 9.8 line has sold at Heritage three times: $143,400 in May 2017, $132,000 in September 2023, $108,000 in January 2024. That is the record going down over seven years, through the biggest bull market this hobby has had. Four months separate the last two, and $24,000 separates them too.

The 9.6 line does the same thing harder. $50,788 in July 2012, $38,400 in April 2025, $25,200 three months later. A grade that has lost half its money in thirteen years while the comic itself became a household name through the films.

That combination, famous book and softening high grades, is the single most common thing owners of this issue get wrong. Captain America coming back from the ice is a story everybody knows; it does not follow that the comic is climbing. The record says the opposite, twice, in two separate grades.

The 6.5 at $1,712 is on the list for scale. That is the same comic, seven grade points down, at roughly one percent of the 9.8. Most surviving copies are far closer to that row than to the ones above it.

As with everything on this site, those figures come through CGC’s reporting of other companies’ auctions and Heritage’s own published results. GoCollect and PriceCharting track Avengers #4 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Avengers #4 value, three sales per grade

300 sales tracked back to 2002; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Avengers issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. 300 results in all. Anything before the rows above is background rather than a benchmark.

26 documented copies sit at CGC 9.2: $2,588 in 2002, $7,768 in 2013, $11,400 in 2024, $10,000 in 2026. $2,588 to $10,000, with the 2024 peak at $16,800.

Where most surviving copies sit

A hundred and one readable copies have changed hands in the past eighteen months. Against a 9.8 that has traded above a hundred thousand three times, this is the part of the ladder worth knowing.

The 4.5 lane sold three times in July 2026: $1,281 at Heritage, $1,500 on eBay, $1,600 on eBay. A 4.0 brought $1,050 and $1,529 in the same month, a 6.0 brought $1,725 in August, and a 6.5 brought $2,499 in July.

What that says is that between 4.0 and 6.5 this comic runs from roughly a thousand to roughly twenty-five hundred, and the biggest single influence inside that range is not the tenth of a grade, it is whether the copy sold to a collector who wanted it or into a quiet week. Two 4.0 sales five hundred dollars apart in the same month make that point better than I can.

It is a strong, steady result for a comic that most people first hear about through a film, and it is a long way from the numbers at the top of this page.

Selling an Avengers #4

1. Look for the price and the issue number on the cover. Missing both means the 1966 record reprint.
2. Twelve cents, March 1964. A modern facsimile edition also exists and names itself in the indicia.
3. Check Avengers 1 through 5 together. The early run carries value across every issue, not just this one.
4. Say if it was ever pressed or repaired. It surfaces at grading regardless, and disclosure at the start is worth money.

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

• Avengers #1, where the team starts.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics.
• How grading works.

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.