Captain Marvel #1 Value: The Third Book People Mean

Three different comics get called the first Captain Marvel, and this is the one people are least often actually holding. Captain Marvel 1 value depends first on establishing which of the three is in your hands.

Marvel gave Mar-Vell his own title in May 1968, six months after he had already debuted somewhere else.

Which Captain Marvel is this?

Mar-Vell first appeared in Marvel Super-Heroes #12, in December 1967. Carol Danvers, who carries the name today, first appeared in Marvel Super-Heroes #13 the following issue. This comic is neither of those. It is the first issue of the solo title that followed them.

And before any of them there is the Fawcett Captain Marvel, the one who says Shazam, whose first appearance is Whiz Comics #2 in 1940. Two unrelated characters, one name, three decades apart.

That matters commercially, because the solo first issue is the cheapest of the four and the one most likely to be described as a first appearance by somebody who has not checked.

To identify it: 12 cents, May 1968, no bar code, Mar-Vell in the green and white costume rather than the red and blue one he wears from 1969 onward.

A ladder with no cliff in it

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.

Everything under the 9.8 behaves, and that is unusual enough to be the headline. The 9.6 has five sales between $1,020 and $1,500, the last of them in July 2026. The 9.4 has nine, most recently $880 and $600. The 9.2 has twelve, running from $775 in early 2023 down to $408 last September.

The 9.0 is where the real evidence sits. Twenty-nine sales stretching back to 2022 and not one of them outside $216 to $600, with four in 2026 alone at $261, $415, $425 and $292. Four results in six months inside a hundred and sixty dollars is about as firm as a number gets on this list.

What is missing is a cliff. Most books here have one step where the price triples; on this comic the drop from 9.6 to 9.4 to 9.2 to 9.0 is roughly a third at each stage, smoothly, with no grade doing anything dramatic.

The single 9.4 at $2,200 in May 2022 is the exception, and it is four years old and more than three times the two most recent sales in its own lane. That is a peak-market result rather than a current one.

For a seller the consequence is good news. This is one of the few comics where a grade estimate translates almost directly into a price, because the lanes do not overlap and none of them is empty.

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 Captain Marvel #1 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Captain Marvel #1 value in every grade

241 sales tracked back to 2022; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Captain Marvel issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 9.0 lane alone holds twenty-nine of them, which is why it is the most reliable figure on the page.

What a readable copy brings

Below 8.0 this comic gets cheap quickly, and the record there is thick enough to be certain about it. The 7.5 lane has eighteen sales, the 7.0 has eleven, and 6.5 down to 3.5 add another sixty-odd between them.

Recent 7.5 results: $180 and $198 in October 2025, $150 that December, then $149 and $108 in January 2026. The 7.0 beneath it ran $100 in December 2025, $80 in March 2026, $95 in June and $125 in July.

From 6.5 down the whole spine sits between about $45 and $150 with no reliable ordering inside it. A 5.5 sold for $145 in January 2026 and a 6.5 sold for $115 two months later.

Raw copies are cheaper still. Forty ungraded sales are on record and most of the 2026 ones landed between $14 and $63, which is roughly what an ordinary 1968 Marvel comic brings.

The arithmetic of sending this one in

Because the lanes on this book are so evenly spaced, the grading question has an unusually clean answer, and it is not the answer most people want.

A submission with postage both ways is a real cost. The 9.0 lane sits comfortably under four hundred dollars and the 8.5 beneath it has traded from $100 to $400 across seventeen sales. If your copy lands anywhere in that region, the fee eats a serious fraction of the proceeds and you have gambled a couple of hundred dollars on the grader agreeing with you.

It starts making sense at 9.4 and above, where each half-grade step is worth several hundred dollars and a raw copy of the same quality would be lucky to bring a fifth of the graded figure.

The problem is that almost nobody can call a 9.4 from a shelf copy. A 1968 Marvel with sharp corners and white pages is scarce, and the things that knock it down to 9.0, a color break at the top staple or a faint spine tick, are exactly the things an owner does not see.

So on this particular comic I would send photographs first and decide afterwards. It is cheap enough that guessing wrong is not a disaster, and good enough at the top that guessing right is worth several hundred dollars.

Selling a Captain Marvel #1

1. Check the issue number before anything else. Marvel Super-Heroes #12 and #13 are different and more valuable comics.
2. Twelve cents, May 1968. The Fawcett Captain Marvel is a 1940 book with no connection to this one.
3. Do not grade below 9.2. The fees are a large share of what the comic brings.
4. Expect three to four hundred dollars for a sharp copy. Twenty-nine sales in the 9.0 lane say so.

Send photographs of the cover and of the small print at the bottom of the first page. Half the calls I take about this book turn out to be about a different one, and that is worth five minutes to settle.

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

• Marvel Super-Heroes #13. The first Carol Danvers, one issue after Mar-Vell arrived.
• Whiz Comics #2. The original Captain Marvel, from 1940 and a different company.
• 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.