Green Lantern #76 Value: The Record Is Sixteen Years Old

This is a comic that changed what a superhero book was allowed to be about, and it is also a comic whose headline price nobody has tested since 2010. The only CGC 9.8 in the public record sold that November for $37,344. Sixteen years later that number is still the one people quote, and green lantern 76 value deserves better than a figure that old.

In April 1970 Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams put Green Lantern and Green Arrow on the road through an America with slums, addiction and racism in it.

The comic that let comics grow up

The famous panel is an old Black man asking Green Lantern why he has helped everyone except the people on his own street, and the hero having no answer. Nothing in mainstream superhero comics had done that before.

The run that follows is short, and it did not sell especially well at the time, which is the recurring shape of important comics. The title was cancelled about a year later.

What it left behind is a book bought by readers rather than speculators, which shows in how it trades: steady, unhurried, and without the screen-driven spikes that move most of this era.

To identify it: 15 cents, April 1970, with both characters on the cover and the title reading Green Lantern. DC has reprinted the run in collections that name themselves inside.

A ceiling nobody has tested

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.

One 9.8 sale, in 2010, and nothing since. That is the whole top of this book. Any current valuation up there is an extrapolation, and anyone quoting $37,344 as today’s price is quoting a comic market that no longer exists.

The 9.6 is where the real evidence lives, and it has fallen steadily: $18,600 at Heritage in July 2023, $14,099 in July 2024, $13,200 that December, $11,400 in January 2025, $9,300 that September. Five dated points, one direction, roughly half the money gone.

The 9.4 followed it down, from $7,800 to a range of $3,499 to $4,799 across the past year. The 9.2, with eighteen sales, sits between $1,500 and $2,640 depending on venue and month.

Below that the book gets steady quickly. The 9.0 lane has twenty-eight sales and ran $1,098 to $1,300 this spring and summer, which is about as consistent as a Bronze key gets.

The practical reading: this is a book whose top is undocumented and whose middle is thoroughly documented. Sell from the middle, and treat anything above 9.6 as a conversation rather than a quote.

Those figures are Heritage results and completed eBay sales. GoCollect and PriceCharting track Green Lantern #76 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Green Lantern #76 value, grade by grade

267 sales tracked back to 2010; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Heritage rows are verifiable in Heritage’s public Green Lantern issue index; the rest are completed eBay listings. They run back to 2010, and the 9.0 lane alone carries twenty-eight of them.

A three-hundred-dollar comic that changed the medium

For all its importance, this is an affordable book in the grades most people own, and the record on that is deep and current.

This year: 8.0 copies brought $597 to $780, 7.5 copies $432 to $900, 7.0 copies $428 to $700, and 6.5 copies $400 to $525.

Lower still, 6.0 copies ran $335 to $399 this summer, 5.0 copies $280 to $340, and 4.5 copies $225 to $350.

One oddity to know before you list: between 7.0 and 4.5 this ladder barely separates. Eighty-one sales sit in that band and they run $225 to $900 with no reliable ordering by grade, so a 5.0 sometimes beats a 6.5 sold in the same week.

Below 4.0 the record thins but holds its shape: $181 to $250 at 4.0, $128 to $295 at 3.0, and a 2.0 at $154 last August. A beaten copy of this comic is still a hundred-and-fifty-dollar book.

Raw copies sit under that again, with August sales at $194 and $245. Thirty-seven ungraded sales are on record, so the raw price is well established rather than guesswork.

That is the honest headline for most owners: a readable copy of one of the most important comics of the seventies costs about the same as a nice dinner for four, and that has been true for years.

Why this book never spiked

Almost every Bronze key on this list ran up in 2021 and gave it back. This one barely participated, and understanding why helps you price it.

Speculative runs need a catalyst that reaches people who do not read comics: a film, a show, a casting rumor. This issue has never had one. Its importance is literary and historical, which moves critics and collectors but not markets.

The consequence is a book that is unusually safe to hold and unusually boring to trade. The 9.6 decline above is the market coming off a broad Bronze Age peak, not this comic losing its own audience.

For a seller that means timing matters less here than on almost anything else in this program. There is no announcement to sell into and no cancellation to sell ahead of.

It also means condition does most of the work. The gap between a 9.0 at about twelve hundred dollars and a 9.4 at four thousand is the entire decision on this book, and it is worth having a sharp copy looked at properly before it goes anywhere.

The 9.0 lane is where I would point a serious owner. Twenty-eight sales deep, most recently $1,098 in April and $1,150 and $1,300 in June, it is the best documented high grade on this page and the easiest number on the book to defend to a buyer.

One last thing that costs sellers money here. This issue has been reprinted inside DC collections and facsimile editions for decades, and the covers are close enough that photographs alone do not settle it. An April 1970 original says fifteen cents on the front and carries no collection or reprint notice in the indicia.

Selling a Green Lantern #76

1. Fifteen cents, April 1970. Collections reprinting the run name their edition inside.
2. Ignore the 2010 record. Nothing at 9.8 has traded publicly in sixteen years.
3. Readable copies are $300 to $800. The middle lanes are deep and current.
4. A sharp copy deserves a proper look. The 9.0 to 9.4 step is most of the money.

Send photographs and you will get a number built from this year’s sales rather than from a record set before most of these lanes existed.

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

• Green Lantern #40. The Silver Age issue collectors chase alongside this run.
• How grading actually works. The 9.0 to 9.4 step is where this book’s money is.
• The 100 most valuable Bronze Age comics. Where this issue sits on the list.

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.