In April 1954, at a Senate subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency, a senator held up a comic book and asked the publisher sitting in front of him whether he considered the cover to be in good taste.
The publisher was William Gaines of EC. The comic was Crime SuspenStories #22, with a severed head on the front. Gaines answered that he did, for a horror comic, and the exchange became one of the most quoted moments in the history of the medium.
Within about a year the Comics Code existed, EC’s horror and crime line was finished, and this cover was permanently out of bounds.
What I can document, and the problem with most of it
| Copy | Result | Where and when |
|---|---|---|
| CGC 9.4, Gaines File Copy pedigree | $90,112 | ComicConnect, March 2023 |
| CGC 9.4, Gaines File Copy pedigree | $90,000 | Heritage Auctions, September 2024 |
| CGC 9.0 | $72,000 (reported) | reportedly January 2023 |
| CGC 8.5 | $52,800 (reported) | reportedly November 2022 |
| CGC 6.0 | $10,370 | Goldin, August 2025 |
| Fine condition | $2,058 (2020 guide value, not a sale) | — |
Nearly everything I can document on this book is publisher file copy, which makes the record real and the comparison bad.
A Gaines File Copy never reached a newsstand. It came off the press, went into the publisher’s office, and stayed there — which is why the pedigree exists at all and why CGC prints it on the label. Buyers treat those copies as a separate class of object, and on this title the provenance carries an extra charge: the publisher’s own copy of the exact issue he was questioned about under oath.
The file-copy record now has two chapters. A Gaines File 9.4 brought $90,112 at ComicConnect in March 2023; in September 2024 a Gaines File 9.4 brought $90,000 at Heritage. CGC’s coverage does not say whether that is one comic changing hands twice or two of the file copies — Gaines kept multiples of each issue — and I will not claim what I cannot check. Either way, the pair is useful in exactly one narrow sense: eighteen months apart, the top of this market printed essentially the same number twice. Whoever paid ninety thousand dollars in 2023 was not out on a limb.
So the ceiling is documented twice over, and both numbers belong to copies nothing ordinary can be compared with. I would rather tell you those numbers are a bad comparison than hand them over as though they were a price.
The two reported figures underneath are more representative if they are accurate — $72,000 for a 9.0 and $52,800 for an 8.5 — but I could not open a source for either, so they stay labeled.
What this page could not show until recently was a documented sale of an ordinary copy. Now there is exactly one: a plain CGC 6.0 brought $10,370 at Goldin in August 2025. One sale is one point, not a ladder. But it is the first number here that describes a comic somebody might actually find in a longbox, and it says a mid-grade copy of this book clears five figures with no pedigree doing the work.
Why EC books are scarce in high grade
EC had a devoted readership and an unusually adult one for the period, which helps survival. What hurts it is what happened next.
When the Code arrived, EC’s crime and horror titles were canceled outright. There was no wind-down, no reprint program for decades, and for a long stretch the material was treated as slightly disreputable. Copies were not being preserved by a collector market that did not yet exist.
The result is a title with real demand and a small high-grade population, which is exactly the condition under which a handful of top copies set prices that ordinary copies cannot approach. The documented spread on this page — ninety thousand dollars in the pedigreed 9.4 sales against $10,370 for a plain 6.0 — is partly grade and partly provenance, and most surviving copies sit nearer the plain end.
What the hearings actually did
It is worth being precise about this, because the story gets told loosely and the details affect what the comic is.
The Senate subcommittee did not ban anything. It had no power to, and it did not try. What it did was apply enough public pressure that the industry regulated itself, and the publishers established the Comics Code Authority within months. Distributors then refused to carry comics without the Code stamp, which achieved through commerce what legislation never attempted.
For EC the effect was terminal. The Code explicitly banned the words horror and terror from titles and prohibited most of what EC published well. Gaines canceled the line, kept only MAD by converting it to a magazine outside the Code’s reach, and left the comic business.
So this issue is not just a comic that got mentioned in a hearing. It is a specific artifact of the moment American comics were forced to change, and that is what the collector market is actually pricing.
Selling a Crime SuspenStories #22
- Check for the pedigree label. If a copy is slabbed and carries Gaines File Copy, that changes everything about how it should be sold.
- Otherwise, treat the file-copy numbers as out of scope. An unpedigreed copy is competing in a different market — the documented plain sale is the 6.0 at $10,370.
- Grade matters enormously here. The spread between high grade and Fine on EC horror is among the steepest on my list.
- Keep the EC run together. Pre-code EC titles are collected as a body of work, and a run rarely arrives with only the famous issue in it.
Send photographs and I will tell you what I think a plain copy does, and how confident I am — one documented plain sale is better footing than none, but on this book it is still less than usual.
Have a copy?
Send three photos: front, back, and the small print. That is all I need to tell you where your copy really sits.
Related
- MAD #1, the EC title that escaped the Code by becoming a magazine.
- Phantom Lady #17, the other book on this list that ended up as evidence.
- The 100 most valuable Golden 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.
