Green Lantern #40 Value: The 9.0 Beat the 9.2

A lower grade outselling a higher one once is noise. On this comic it has happened repeatedly, with twenty sales in the lane doing it. Green Lantern 40 value does not behave the way a ladder should.

It is the first appearance of Krona and the origin of the Guardians of the Universe, from October 1965.

A crossover that mattered more later

This issue explains where the Guardians came from and introduces Krona, the renegade whose experiment created the anti-matter universe. Both ideas became load-bearing in DC continuity decades later, particularly in the Crisis storylines.

It is also the second Golden Age and Silver Age Green Lantern team-up, following a first in issue 45 of the previous run, which is a detail that occasionally confuses listings.

What matters commercially is that this is a mid-run 1965 issue with a large print run, so there are plenty of copies. Two hundred and thirty documented sales bear that out.

To identify it: 12 cents, October 1965, no bar code. Every later Green Lantern #40 is from a relaunch decades afterwards.

Twenty sales, and a ladder out of order

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.

The 9.2 line has been falling steadily: $1,200 in December 2023, $1,050 in March 2024, $930 in April 2025, $780 that June, $735 on eBay in April 2026. Down about forty percent in two and a half years.

The 9.0 line, with twenty sales, has not: $656 in December 2023, $720 in May 2025, $996 that August, $885 in December, $1,170 on eBay in January 2026. Up by roughly three quarters over the same period.

They crossed somewhere in late 2025, and by January 2026 the 9.0 was outselling the 9.2 by more than fifty percent. On any normal ladder that is impossible; here it is what twenty sales against nine sales looks like when one lane is liquid and the other is not.

The practical reading is that the 9.0 is the grade buyers are actually competing for on this book, probably because it is the best grade that comes up often enough to bid on. The 9.6 above everything, at $3,360 and $3,300, is steady and rare.

The 9.4 in between behaves normally and quietly: $1,740 at Heritage in August 2023, $1,440 in January 2025, $1,464 in April 2026. Essentially flat across three years, and comfortably above both the 9.2 and the 9.0.

So the inversion is specifically a 9.0 against 9.2 problem rather than a whole ladder out of order. Everything else on this book lines up the way it should, which makes the one exception more interesting rather than less.

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 Green Lantern #40 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Green Lantern #40 value across the grades

230 sales tracked back to 2003; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Green Lantern issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 9.0 lane holds twenty of them, the 8.0 sixteen and the 7.5 fifteen, which is unusual depth for a book at this price.

A hundred to three hundred dollars

Forty readable copies have sold since January 2025 and they are inexpensive throughout.

From May to August 2026: a 7.0 brought $250, a 6.5 brought $285, two 6.0 copies brought $205 and $75, a 5.5 brought $170, two 5.0 copies brought $182 and $176, a 4.5 brought $115 and two 3.5 copies brought $100 each.

The two 3.5 sales at exactly $100 apiece are the tightest pair here. The two 6.0 results, at $205 and $75, are the widest, and a 6.0 selling for less than a 3.5 is another symptom of the same thin-lane problem the top of the page shows.

Call a readable copy a hundred to three hundred dollars and check the photographs rather than the label, because on this comic the label has repeatedly failed to predict the price.

Which grade to actually chase

An inverted ladder makes the grading decision genuinely strange on this book, and it is worth being explicit about it.

If the 9.0 is outselling the 9.2, then a copy graded 9.2 is worth less than the same copy graded 9.0, which is an absurd sentence and is nonetheless what twenty sales against nine sales produce. You cannot choose your grade, but you can choose whether to submit at all.

The reason it happens is liquidity. Enough 9.0 copies come up that buyers who want a high-grade example bid on them regularly and know what they are worth. The 9.2 comes up rarely, so when one appears there is often nobody watching, and it goes cheap.

The practical version: on this comic a slab is worth having at 9.0 and above because that is where the bidding is, and the difference between the grades up there is not worth losing sleep over.

For anybody tracking this across the title, it is worth noting that the same thing does not happen on Green Lantern #59, where the ladder behaves normally all the way up. Two books from the same run and the same publisher, and only one of them has a lane out of order, which is a reminder that these patterns belong to individual comics rather than to series.

Selling a Green Lantern #40

1. Twelve cents, October 1965, no bar code. Later Green Lantern #40 issues are relaunches from decades afterwards.
2. Do not assume the higher grade sells for more. On this book the 9.0 has been beating the 9.2 for a year.
3. Aim for the 9.0 if you are grading. That is the grade with twenty sales and active bidding behind it.
4. Name Krona and the Guardians. Both reach collectors who are not searching by issue number.

Photographs matter more than the grade on this one, and I will tell you what your copy is likely to do rather than what the ladder says it should.

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 #22. Where the Silver Age Green Lantern begins, six years earlier.
• How grading actually works. And why a label sometimes fails to predict a price.
• 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.