Scooby-Doo #1 Value: Two Sales, Same Week, Same Price

Two copies of the same comic in the same grade sold within days of each other for exactly the same money. On a book with a record this short, that pair is the most reliable thing I can show you. Scooby-Doo 1 value rests on it.

Gold Key published this first issue in 1970, a year after the cartoon started, and it is a genuinely hard comic to find in high grade.

A children’s comic that children destroyed

This was bought by and for small children at the height of the cartoon’s first run. It was read, folded, colored in and thrown out, and Gold Key’s production quality did not help: the paper is thin and the covers scuff easily.

The result is that a hundred and ten documented sales across four years is the whole record, and high-grade copies are genuinely rare rather than merely uncommon. The market for it is real and the supply is not.

It is also the top of a long, cheap run. Later Scooby-Doo comics from Gold Key, Charlton, Marvel and Archie are ordinary comics worth a few dollars, and the first issue is the only one carrying serious money.

To identify it: 15 cents, 1970, Gold Key on the cover. No Comics Code stamp and no bar code anywhere — spot those two absences and you have a Gold Key original.

The pair that anchors the book

CGC’s auction reporting has never covered this comic, so none of these prices is a link. eBay and Heritage supplied all of them.

Two CGC 9.0 copies sold on eBay in August 2026, both at $10,999. Same grade, same venue, same month, same figure. On a book with this little history that pair is worth more than any single result could be.

The 9.2 above them brought $12,600 at Heritage in November 2022, so two tenths of a grade is worth roughly fifteen hundred dollars up there, which is a sane and readable relationship.

Then the ladder drops off a cliff. The 8.0 line has three sales, $2,939 in April 2023, $3,950 in January 2024 and $3,999 in February 2025, so a full grade below the 9.0 pair is worth about a third as much.

That is a steep step, and it is what you would expect on a book where high grade is genuinely scarce. Between 8.0 and 9.0 there is very little documented, and I would treat anything in that window as a negotiation rather than a lookup.

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 Scooby-Doo #1 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Scooby-Doo #1 value across the grades

110 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 Scooby-Doo issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. Forty-three of them are in the readable grades, which is where the depth is on this book.

A thousand dollars, remarkably consistently

For a comic with barely a hundred sales behind it, the readable grades here are unusually well behaved. Forty-three have traded over the past eighteen months.

From March to July 2026: two 5.0 copies brought $930 and $907, a third brought $963, three 4.5 copies brought $1,100, $1,028 and $1,000, a 5.5 brought $1,147 and another $930, a 4.0 brought $850 and a 7.0 brought $2,850.

Look at the 4.5 line: $1,000, $1,028 and $1,100 across three months. Three sales inside a hundred dollars of each other is as tight as anything in this program, and it means I can quote a mid-grade copy of this comic to within about fifty dollars.

Note also that a 5.0 sold for less than three separate 4.5 copies. Half a grade is worth nothing here; what matters is whether the copy presents well, because the buyers are people who watched the cartoon rather than grade collectors.

Selling a Scooby-Doo #1

1. Fifteen cents, 1970, Gold Key. No Comics Code stamp and no bar code identifies a Gold Key original.
2. Only the first issue carries money. Every later Scooby-Doo comic from any publisher is worth a few dollars.
3. Grading pays above 8.0. The step from 8.0 to 9.0 is roughly three times the money on this book.
4. Photograph the cover carefully. Gold Key stock scuffs, and mid-grade buyers here are buying the look rather than the label.

Photographs get you a number on this one, and on a readable copy I can be more precise about it than on almost anything else 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

• Star Trek #1. Another Gold Key first issue where the cover stock decides the grade.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics. And what each one really sold for.
• Are 90s comic books worth anything?. Why a cartoon tie-in from 1970 is scarce and one from 1993 is not.

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.