Batman #251 Value: A Top Grade That Cannot Settle

Four CGC 9.8 copies of this comic sold in the space of eight months, for $26,400, $41,480, $32,330 and $26,840. Same grade, same book, same year, and a fifty-seven percent spread between the highest and the lowest. Batman 251 value depends more than usual on which lane your copy is in, because only one of those lanes behaves this way.

Neal Adams drew the Joker for the first time in five years on this cover, and Denny O’Neil sent the character back to killing people inside it.

The cover that restarted the Joker

The Joker had spent the late sixties as a harmless television prankster. “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge”, September 1973, put him back to murdering, and the Adams cover is the image the whole modern version of the character descends from.

That matters to the market in a specific way. This is not a first appearance, so it does not attract the completist buyers who chase debuts. It attracts people who want that cover, which is a smaller and more emotional pool, and emotional pools bid unevenly.

It is also a genuinely common comic. Three hundred and twenty-three documented sales, most of them in the middle grades, and copies turn up in nearly every Bronze Batman run I am shown.

To identify it: 20 cents, September 1973, Adams cover with the Joker holding a playing card. DC has reprinted this story in collections that name their edition in the indicia, and the cover has been homaged many times since.

One grade, four sales, a fifty-seven percent spread

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.

Read those four 9.8 rows in date order and there is no trend in them at all: down, up hard, down, down again, all at the same auction house inside eight months. Nine 9.8 sales exist in total and the lane has never settled.

The reason is thin supply meeting uneven demand. When only a handful of copies reach that grade, each sale is decided by whoever is in the room, and the room changes.

One step down the picture is different. The 9.6 has ten sales and a readable direction: $5,280 in July 2025, $5,040 and $5,700 that December, $4,148 in March 2026. Softening, gently, no drama.

The 9.4 has twenty-four sales and is calmer still: $4,000 in February, then $2,425 to $3,000 across four sales this spring and summer. The 9.2, with thirty sales, held $1,560 to $1,755 over the same weeks.

So the honest summary is that this book has one volatile grade and eleven orderly ones. If you own a 9.8 you own a lottery ticket; if you own anything else you own a quotable comic.

Those figures are Heritage results and completed eBay sales. GoCollect and PriceCharting track Batman #251 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Batman #251 value in every grade

323 sales tracked back to 2014; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Heritage rows are verifiable in Heritage’s public Batman issue index; the rest are completed eBay listings. The 9.2 and 9.0 lanes carry fifty-seven of them between them, which is where most sharp copies of this book actually land.

What most copies bring

The middle of this ladder is dense, current and easy to quote, which is the opposite of the top.

Across this summer: 9.0 copies brought $1,549 to $1,750 across four sales, 8.5 copies $830 to $1,101, 8.0 copies $824 to $925, and 7.5 copies $750 to $865.

Further down it stays orderly. The 6.5 lane ran $528 to $679 in June and July, the 5.5 lane $440 to $520, and the 4.5 lane $333 to $450 over the same period.

Even the rough end holds three figures: 3.5 copies brought $300 to $397 this summer, and a 3.0 reached $351 in July. A beaten Adams Joker cover is still a three-hundred-dollar comic.

The ungraded tier runs forty sales deep and lands lower, with August results at $148, $200, $220 and $350. That gap between raw and slabbed is the widest thing on this page after the 9.8 lane, and it is worth understanding before you sell.

Why raw copies of this book sell short

A raw copy of this comic reliably brings less than its graded equivalent, and the reason is not condition doubt alone.

This is a cover people buy on sight. Photographs of a raw copy show the image, which is the emotional part, but not the corners, the spine roll or the page color, which is the priced part. A buyer looking at a phone photo discounts for everything they cannot see.

The graded lanes are also unusually well populated here, so a buyer who wants certainty has plenty of slabbed copies to choose from and no reason to gamble on yours.

None of which means grade everything. At $148 to $350 raw, a submission plus postage is most of the proceeds. The line sits around a genuine 7.0: below it, sell raw and photograph honestly; above it, the slab pays for itself and then some.

One thing worth checking before any of that: this cover has been homaged and reprinted repeatedly, and DC collections carry the story. The indicia on a real September 1973 copy says Batman, 20 cents, and nothing about a reprint. Thirty seconds settles it.

Selling a Batman #251

1. Twenty cents, September 1973, Adams cover. Reprints and collections name their edition in the indicia.
2. The 9.8 lane is a lottery. Four sales in eight months ranged fifty-seven percent.
3. Everything below 9.6 is quotable. The middle lanes are dense and current.
4. Grade above 7.0, sell raw below it. Raw copies of this cover trade at a real discount.

Send photographs and I will tell you which of this book’s two markets your copy is in, priced against sales from this summer.

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

• Batman #1. Where the Joker started, and what the 1940 book brings.
• Detective Comics #27. The first Batman, for the collectors chasing the whole story.
• 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.