Nick Fury #1 Value: A Steranko Key Under $500

Almost every copy of this comic in existence is worth a few hundred dollars, and a handful are worth thousands. Nick Fury 1 value is decided by one question and nothing else.

Jim Steranko wrote and drew this 1968 first issue, and his run on the character is the reason anybody collects it.

Bought for the artist, not the character

Nick Fury had already been an agent of SHIELD for three years in Strange Tales by the time this title started. So this is not a first appearance of anything, and the market has never treated it as one.

What it is instead is the start of Steranko’s solo run, and his work on it — the psychedelic layouts, the four-panel Chandler homage, the cover design — is what buyers are actually chasing. It is an artist key rather than a character key.

That distinction shapes the price. Artist keys tend to attract collectors who want a display copy rather than investors chasing a first appearance, which pushes demand into the very top grades and leaves everything else cheap.

Printing check: 12 cents, June 1968, no bar code. There have been several later Nick Fury #1 issues from relaunches and all are ordinary comics.

Seven to one, top grade to the next

No sale of this book has ever reached CGC’s auction reporting, which is why no figure below carries a link.

The 9.8 line has four sales and every one is higher than the last: $3,360 in June 2022, $3,399 in June 2023, $3,600 in January 2025, $5,000 on eBay in March 2026. Up about fifty percent over four years.

The 9.6 immediately below it went the other way: $1,000 in July 2024, $900 in February 2025, $690 that December. Down about a third over eighteen months.

So the gap between the top two grades has widened from roughly three-to-one to more than seven-to-one in two years. Two tenths of a grade now separates a five-thousand-dollar comic from a seven-hundred-dollar one.

Everything under 9.6 is cheap and getting cheaper. A 9.4 brought $600 in August 2026, a 9.2 brought $405 in July, a 9.0 brought $315 in May. Those are not typos and they are not damaged copies; that is simply what this book costs.

The depth behind those figures is what makes them trustworthy. The 9.0 lane has twenty-eight sales, the 9.2 twenty-two, the 9.4 twenty-one. That is more evidence than most books on this site have across their whole ladder, and all of it points at the same conclusion.

It also means the 9.8 figure is the one to be careful with rather than the cheap ones. Four sales support it, against seventy-one supporting the three grades below, and a single strong result up there would move the apparent value of the top grade a long way.

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 Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Nick Fury #1 value in each grade

245 sales tracked back to 2022; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 9.0 and 9.2 lanes carry twenty-eight and twenty-two sales, and neither has cleared $500 recently.

Two figures, most of the time

The readable grades are the cheapest on my entire Silver Age list. Thirty of them have traded over the past eighteen months.

From January to June 2026: a 6.5 brought $125, another $109 and a third $78, a 7.0 brought $120 and another $89, a 6.0 brought $77, a 3.5 brought $101, a 4.0 brought $90, a 5.5 brought $40 and a 4.5 brought $35.

A slabbed CGC 4.5 of a 1968 Marvel sold for thirty-five dollars. The grading fee on that copy was several times what it fetched, and whoever submitted it will never get that back.

For a buyer, though, this is about as cheap as a genuinely good comic gets. If you want Steranko on your shelf and do not care about the label, a readable copy costs less than a modern trade paperback.

Selling a Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1

1. Do not grade below 9.6. The fee exceeds what the comic will bring at every grade under it.
2. Twelve cents, June 1968. Later Nick Fury relaunches are ordinary comics and their dates give them away.
3. Sell Steranko, not Nick Fury. The artist is what buyers are searching for; the character already had three years of appearances.
4. If it might be 9.8, get it graded. That is the only grade on this book where the money is, and the gap is seven to one.

Photographs will settle whether your copy has a shot at the only grade that pays on this comic, and I will tell you what it is worth if it does not.

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

• Strange Tales #135. Where Fury actually became an agent of SHIELD, three years earlier.
• How grading actually works. And when the fee makes sense, which here is one grade only.
• 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.