Journey into Mystery #83 Value: The Cliff Below 9.0

In April 2022 a CGC 9.4 of Journey into Mystery #83 sold at Heritage for $432,000. In March 2023 a CGC 8.0 of the same comic sold at ComicLink for $42,000. Journey into Mystery 83 value grows out of that.

One tenth of the money, one and a half grade points down. Two grade points on this comic are worth roughly ten times the money, and that is not a figure of speech.

Six sales, and where they fall off

Follow the drops rather than the numbers. From 9.4 to 9.2, the money falls by about sixty percent. From 9.2 to 9.0 it falls by another forty. From 9.0 to 8.0 it halves again. There is no gentle stretch anywhere on this ladder, every step costs a large fraction of what is left.

The pair of 9.0 sales is the steadiest thing here: $80,265 in January 2024 and $91,500 in July 2026, two and a half years apart at two Heritage sales. Same grade, moving gently upward. If your copy is anywhere near that grade, those two numbers are the most useful on the page, and they are more reliable than either 9.4 because there are two of them and they agree.

The two 9.4 results are worth a note of caution. $432,000 in April 2022 and $350,400 nine months later is a nineteen percent drop at the top, and April 2022 was near the peak of the whole vintage market. I would treat the 2022 figure as history rather than as a target.

All six figures come to me through CGC’s reporting of auctions run by other houses. GoCollect and PriceCharting follow the same book from graded sales and raw eBay closes, and on a ladder this steep a second opinion is worth having before anyone commits to a number.

Check the price box before you check anything else

Every figure in that table belongs to a copy printed with 12¢ on the front. There is another version of this comic that says 9d, and it is not a fake, not a reprint and not a misprint. It is a genuine 1962 Marvel, and it is a different market with different money.

Marvel supplied the United Kingdom by running the tail end of the American print run with a substitute price plate showing ninepence. Same paper, same presses, same week, same everything except a small box on the cover. Collectors call them pence copies or UK price variants, and CGC grades and labels them as such rather than lumping them in with the cents copies.

Two tells beyond the price box, and they are useful because a price box can be covered by a sticker or clipped:

• The indicia. The small print block inside the front carries regional distributor details on a pence copy that a cents copy does not have.
• The cover date. On the pence run of this issue the cover date is missing from the front entirely.

Both of those come from the pence price variant issue guide compiled by Benjamin Nobel and Stephen Cranch, which is the most careful public accounting of these I know of. Its entry for issue 83 records 24 pence copies on the CGC census as of November 2018, against many hundreds of cents copies. That is the whole story in one number.

What that means for a seller is genuinely awkward, and I would rather say it than dodge it. A pence copy is rarer. It is also harder to sell in the United States, because the American buyers who set these prices mostly want the cents copy, and the British market that wants pence copies is small. Scarcer and cheaper are not a contradiction here; they are the normal outcome when demand is thinner than supply is short. Rarer does not mean more valuable, and this book is the clearest example of it I can point to on my whole Silver Age list.

Do not take my word for the direction. GoCollect keeps the UK price variant as a separate book with its own sales history, which is the plainest possible evidence that the trade treats them as two different comics. Read that page next to the cents entry and you will see the gap for yourself.

So: look at the price box first. If it says ninepence, everything above this section is about somebody else’s comic, and the honest thing for me to do is tell you that before we go any further.

What decides which side of the line you are on

Given that a grade point here is worth tens of thousands of dollars, it is worth knowing what actually decides one.

At the top of the scale it is almost never the obvious things. A copy in the 9.0 to 9.4 range has no creases anybody would notice, no tears and no missing pieces, if it did, it would not be up there. What separates those grades is a small number of tiny faults: a hairline stress mark at the top staple, a corner that is very slightly blunt rather than sharp, a spine that shows one white tick against the ink, page color that is cream rather than off-white.

Which means the difference between a 9.0 and an 8.5 on a book like this is often one defect nobody photographed, and it is why I am careful about giving a number off pictures alone on high-grade copies. On a beaten comic I can be confident from photos. On a comic that looks close to perfect, the money is riding on things a phone camera does not resolve.

The other half of it is that graders are looking at a sixty-four-year-old object printed on newsprint that was never meant to last a decade. Two copies that were handled identically can grade a point apart purely on where they were stored, because paper responds to heat and humidity whether anybody touches it or not.

There is no 1960s Thor #1, and that trips people up

A steady share of the calls I get about this book start with somebody telling me they have Thor #1. Almost always they have something else, and the reason is a quirk of how Marvel handled the title.

Thor never got a first issue in the 1960s. He took over Journey into Mystery, an existing anthology, and the book simply changed its name on the cover at issue 126 and kept the old numbering. So the character’s debut is #83 of a title with somebody else’s name on it, and the first comic that actually reads Thor #1 on the cover comes from decades later and is an ordinary modern comic.

The issues immediately after the debut are worth reading the numbers on, because they carry firsts of their own and they travel with #83 in the same boxes: #84 has the first Jane Foster, and #85 has the first Loki of this era. Neither is a $90,000 comic, and both are a great deal more than the fifty-cent bin they sometimes end up in.

If somebody in your family bought #83 new, they very likely kept buying. Check the spine numbers on everything in the box before you decide what is worth talking about.

Journey into Mystery #83 value, lane by lane

239 sales tracked back to 2002; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Journey into Mystery issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. 239 sales are on file. Three per grade keeps the table honest about which market is current.

Watch CGC 2.5, where 18 copies have traded: $4,549 in 2023, $6,051 in 2025, $2,825 in 2025, $6,900 in 2026. $6,900 in 2026 is both the newest mark and the highest.

Selling a Journey into Mystery #83

1. Confirm the issue. Journey into Mystery was a monster anthology for years before Thor arrived in it. It is number 83, August 1962, twelve cents.
2. If it looks high grade, get it graded before selling. On this book the certification is what separates $42,000 from $91,500, and no amount of description substitutes for it.
3. If it looks well read, that is fine and it is still a serious comic. The bottom of the documented ladder is $42,000.
4. Do nothing to it in the meantime. Pressing and cleaning are exactly the interventions that turn a high grade into a qualified one.

Send photographs and I will tell you which side of that line I think your copy falls on, and how confident I am about it. On the high-grade end that second half matters as much as the first.

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

• Tales of Suspense #39, the other 1962-63 Marvel debut where the top grades behave like a separate market.
• Selling a graded comic, since on this issue the slab is doing most of the work.
• 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.