Green Lantern #59 Value: One Sale Holds the Roof Up

One sale on this comic is worth more than the next fourteen combined, and it happened once. Green Lantern 59 value depends entirely on whether you are anywhere near it.

It is the first appearance of Guy Gardner, from March 1968, introduced as the man who would have been Green Lantern if Hal Jordan had been slightly further away.

A first appearance that took twenty years to matter

Guy Gardner appears here in a single what-if style story and then essentially vanishes for two decades. He does not become a significant character until the late 1980s Justice League run, where the personality everybody remembers was invented.

That gap is why the comic stayed cheap for so long. For twenty years it was an ordinary issue of a mid-selling title, and it only became a key retrospectively.

It is a deep record for a book of this kind, with two hundred and fifty-eight documented sales, and almost all of that depth sits between 7.5 and 9.2 where the copies actually are.

To identify it: 12 cents, March 1968, no bar code. Later Guy Gardner series and one-shots are ordinary comics from the 1990s onwards.

One number, and then reality

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 $30,000 at the top is one sale, in January 2025, and there is nothing else at that grade in the record. The same month a CGC 9.4 brought $1,680, which is about one eighteenth of it.

That ratio should make anybody cautious. A single result eighteen times the next grade down is not a level; it is one determined buyer on one night, and I would not build a quote on it.

What the rest of the ladder does is far more useful. The 9.2 has twenty sales and the recent ones cluster: $1,650 in February 2026, $1,400 in June, $1,185 in July. The 9.0 has thirty sales and sits just under a thousand dollars.

The 9.4 in between is the only lane with real movement, from $1,680 in January 2025 to $2,200 in January 2026, up about thirty percent in a year while the grades either side stayed put.

The 8.0 and 8.5 lanes are worth reading together because they have converged. An 8.5 brought $850 in April 2025 and $554 that December; an 8.0 brought $660 in September 2025 and $660 again in July 2026. Half a grade now buys nothing at all.

That flatness runs a long way down this book. Between 7.5 and 9.0, four grade points, the whole range is roughly $360 to $1,000. It is a common comic and the record says so at every level except the one at the top.

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

Green Lantern #59 value, grade by grade

258 sales tracked back to 2005; 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 and 9.2 lanes carry thirty and twenty sales, which is unusual depth for a book at this price.

Three hundred dollars, with a hundred sales behind it

A hundred and one readable copies have traded since January 2025, so this is one of the best-evidenced mid-grade markets in the whole program.

From June to August 2026: two 6.5 copies brought $360 and $300, two 6.0 copies brought $330 and $255, two 4.5 copies brought $300 and $270, a 5.0 brought $320, and two 3.5 copies brought $180 and $160.

The 6.0 and 6.5 lanes overlap almost entirely, and a 4.5 sold for the same $300 as a 6.5. Two full grade points are worth essentially nothing here, which is what a hundred sales of a common comic look like.

Call any readable copy of this book two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty dollars and you will be right most of the time. That is as confident as I get on this site.

What a hundred sales actually buys you

A hundred and one readable sales in eighteen months is more evidence than most comics on this site will ever have, and it changes what a seller can do rather than just what a page can say.

It means you do not need an auction. The reason people consign is to discover a price when nobody knows what the comic is worth, and on this book everybody knows. A private sale at the documented number costs you no commission and no six-month wait.

It also means you can refuse a low offer with something concrete in hand. If somebody offers you a hundred and fifty dollars for a 6.0, the answer is that six comparable copies sold between $255 and $360 this summer, and that is not an opinion.

The flip side is that you will not get lucky either. A deep record cuts both ways: there is no plausible story where a readable copy of this comic surprises anybody, and a seller waiting for one will wait a long time.

That is a fair trade for most people. Certainty is worth more than the small chance of an outlier when the whole comic is worth three hundred dollars, and it is why I will make a firm offer on this book over the phone rather than asking to see it first.

Selling a Green Lantern #59

1. Twelve cents, March 1968, no bar code. Guy Gardner’s own series started in the 1990s and those are ordinary comics.
2. Do not price off the 9.8. One sale at eighteen times the next grade is a person, not a market.
3. Below 7.0 the grade barely matters. A 4.5 and a 6.5 have sold for the same money.
4. Grade only if it is exceptional. The evidence supports real money at 9.8 and nowhere else.

Send photographs and I will give you a firm number, because with a hundred readable sales behind this book the middle of it is about as well mapped as anything I write about.

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, nine years earlier.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics. And what each one really sold for.
• How grading actually works. And why on this book it only pays at the very top.

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.