Brave and the Bold #28 Value: A Private Record

The number attached to this comic is $750,000, and the part that gets left off is that nobody was in the room. It was a private sale, two parties, a price, no auction, no underbidders, no public record of how it got there. Brave and the Bold 28 value only makes sense from there.

That is not an accusation of anything. Private sales happen constantly at this level and there is nothing improper about them. But a private sale is a real transaction and a poor comp, and those two things are both true at once.

Why the distinction matters

When a comic sells at auction, the price is the product of a room full of people who all wanted it and one who wanted it slightly more. You can see the whole shape: what the underbidder was willing to pay, how many were still in at each level, whether the result was a fight or a formality. That is what makes an auction result usable as a comparison.

A private sale gives you a single point and no context. It might have been the seller’s minimum. It might have been a buyer who had wanted that specific copy for a decade and would have paid half as much again. There is no way to tell from outside, and no way to know whether the next copy would bring anything close.

The public record for this issue caught up eventually. In 2024 a CGC 9.6 sold at Heritage for $810,000, an auction, in the open, above the private figure. That result I would use. The earlier one I would mention and then set aside.

What the public record actually contains

Two auction rows and one raw sale. That is it. This is the thinnest public record of any book in the top ten of my Silver Age list, and it is a strange thing to say about the first appearance of the Justice League of America.

What that means practically is that I cannot build you a grade ladder for this comic, because one does not exist in public. I can tell you what the top of the market did twice, at one grade, and I can tell you what raw copies change hands for. Between $750 and $810,000 there is a very large gap and almost nothing documented inside it.

Anybody who hands you a confident figure for a mid-grade copy of this book is working from the same absence I am. I will tell you plainly when the honest answer is that nobody knows, and on the middle of this issue’s scale, nobody does.

Two places worth checking against me: GoCollect tracks graded sales for this issue and PriceCharting tracks raw eBay closes. On a book with a record this thin, a second and third source matter more than usual.

Why it costs less than people expect

People are often surprised that raw copies of the first Justice League trade in the hundreds. The reason is not scarcity, it is that scarcity and demand are different things, and this book has one of them.

The Justice League as a concept is enormous. The individual characters, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, carry their own first appearances, and those are the books that collectors chase hardest and pay most for. A team debut sits slightly outside that: it is historically important, it is genuinely scarce in high grade, and it competes for attention with five or six individual keys that people want more.

That produces exactly the shape the table shows. At the very top, where the buyers are completists assembling the best of everything, the price is enormous. In the middle and at the bottom, where the buyer is somebody who wants a nice copy of a famous comic, there is less competition than the book’s reputation suggests.

Brave and the Bold #28 value by grade

176 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 Brave and the Bold issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. 176 results are documented in all, and on a book this thin the newest ones carry nearly all the signal.

The 2.5 lane has 20 sales behind it: $2,985 in 2021, $3,000 in 2023, $1,550 in 2024, $1,464 in 2026. $3,360 in 2022 stands above the 2026 close of $1,464, and that gap is the correction.

Selling a Brave and the Bold #28

1. Check the issue number carefully. The Brave and the Bold ran for hundreds of issues and most are worth very little. It is number 28, cover-dated February-March 1960, ten cents.
2. Do not price off the record. Both six-figure results are 9.6 copies, and one of them was not even an auction.
3. Grading is worth considering here. With so little public data in the middle, a certified grade is what gives a buyer confidence, and on this book that is worth more than usual.
4. Keep 29 and 30 with it. The Justice League ran on in this title before getting its own book, and those issues carry value too.

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

• Showcase #4, the other DC comic that started something, and another book where the source of a number decides how much it is worth.
• Why price guides and real sales disagree, which is the same problem in a different form.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics, and what each one really sold for.

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.