Fantastic Four #12 Value: Two Characters, One Cover

Some comics are wanted by the people who collect the title. This one is wanted by the people who collect two of them, and that changes how it prices. Fantastic Four 12 value comes from being on two want lists at once.

It is the first meeting of the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, from March 1963, and the Hulk is the one on the cover.

A Hulk book that is not a Hulk title

The Hulk’s own series had been cancelled after six issues by the time this came out. For a stretch afterwards he appeared as a guest in other people’s comics, and this is the first of those and the most prominent.

That means it competes for two groups of buyers: people building the Fantastic Four run and people building an early Hulk collection who cannot afford Incredible Hulk #1. Books with two audiences hold their prices better than books with one, and the ladder below shows it.

It is not, however, an early Hulk appearance in the sense a first-appearance premium attaches to. Hulk #1 through #6 came first, and a listing that implies otherwise is overselling.

Check the price box for 12 cents and the small print for March 1963. No bar code. Both modern reprintings of this issue declare their edition where that date sits.

What each lane has done

Three of these were reported by CGC. The lower half of the table is where the recent evidence sits.

The 9.6 line spans fourteen years and does not move in one direction: $65,725 in February 2012, $36,000 in March 2020, $45,700 in August 2023. Down, then part way back, with eight years between the first two.

The 9.2 line is tighter and more recent, $16,200 in January 2024 and $12,000 that December, which is a quarter off inside a year. The 9.0 line did the same thing more slowly, $13,200 in October 2025 to $8,800 on eBay in February 2026.

What that says is the high grades of this book have softened over the last two years, and the softening reached 9.0 most recently. If you have a comp from 2024 it is now too high.

The 8.5 at $4,680 in July 2025 is the last rung with a reported sale behind it, and it is the cleanest anchor on the page for a copy anywhere in the eights.

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 Fantastic Four #12 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Fantastic Four #12 value, grade by grade

255 sales tracked back to 2007; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Fantastic Four issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 7.0 and 8.5 lanes below carry twenty and nineteen sales respectively, which is where the depth is.

The band with two sets of buyers in it

The lower half of this ladder is busy: seventy-eight sales below 7.0 since the start of last year, holding up better than the same grades of most books this age.

Between May and August 2026: a 6.5 brought $2,033 at Heritage, another $1,641, another $1,586, a 6.0 brought $2,150 and another $1,586 at Heritage, a 5.5 brought $1,500, a 4.5 brought $1,595, two 4.0 copies brought $999 and $985, and a 3.5 brought $700.

Three 6.5 sales inside four months between $1,586 and $2,033 is a usable cluster, and the fact that a 4.5 brought $1,595 within that same range tells you demand here is not fussy about half a grade.

That flatness is what having two audiences looks like. A Fantastic Four collector and a Hulk collector will both take a readable copy, and neither is waiting for a better one, so the middle of this book does not sag the way single-audience books do.

Selling a Fantastic Four #12

1. Twelve cents, March 1963, no bar code. Milestone and Facsimile reprints of this issue both name themselves inside.
2. Sell it to both audiences. Say it is the first Fantastic Four and Hulk meeting, because that reaches twice the buyers a run listing does.
3. Do not oversell the Hulk angle. His own first six issues came earlier, and a buyer who collects him knows it.
4. Refresh your comps. Every grade from 9.2 down has come off in the last two years, so a 2024 figure will be too high.

Send photographs and I will price it against the past year rather than the peak, and tell you which of the two audiences your copy is likely to sell into.

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

• Incredible Hulk #1. The Hulk’s own first issue, and the book collectors buy this one instead of.
• Fantastic Four #1. Eleven issues earlier, and a different order of money.
• 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.