Amazing Spider-Man #3 Value: Doc Ock Beats Spidey

A CGC 8.0 of this comic sold for $9,150 in April 2026. Another 8.0 sold for $9,150 a month earlier. Not close to each other, the same number twice, five weeks apart, at two different venues.

That is not luck. It is what a thick sales record looks like, and it is why Amazing Spider-Man #3 value is one of the few Silver Age keys I will quote to the dollar instead of hedging with a range.

Doctor Octopus debuts here, and he beats Spider-Man so thoroughly that Peter Parker spends the back half of the issue considering whether to quit. For a villain that central, the book trades more affordably than owners expect, and the reason is simple arithmetic: a lot of copies survived, and a lot of them sell.

Amazing Spider-Man #3 value, priced without the hedging

263 sales tracked back to 2003; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Amazing Spider-Man issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. There are 263 in total; the table shows the freshest three in each grade because those are the ones worth pricing against.

Read across the middle of that spine and you will see the point. The 8.0 lane has three recent results inside a few hundred dollars of each other. The 8.5 lane repeats a figure exactly. The 6.0 and 4.0 lanes each have three sales inside the last eight months. When a grade has traded three times in a year, nobody has to guess what the fourth one does.

That density is the whole argument for this page. On a book like Silver Streak Comics #6, where twelve sales cover twenty years, honest pricing means saying out loud that the number is uncertain. Here it means the opposite: I can tell you what your grade has been bringing, and I can point at the three sales that say so.

What a real one looks like

There is no facsimile edition of this issue that I can find, which surprises owners who assume every Marvel key has one. Issues 1 and 129 have facsimiles; issue 3 does not appear to. So the identification job here is short.

The original carries 12 cents on the cover and a July 1963 cover date, and it went on sale at the end of June that year. It is 36 pages, and it has no bar code, because Marvel did not print them for another decade. The story itself has been collected many times over in Marvel Tales, Masterworks and Essentials volumes, and every one of those names itself on the cover and in the indicia.

If your copy says twelve cents and carries no bar code, you are holding the book this page is about.

Selling an Amazing Spider-Man #3

1. Get the grade right before anything else. On a book with comps this dense, the grade is very nearly the entire number, and the table above shows what each lane is paying.
2. Do not anchor to Amazing Spider-Man #1. That book lives in a different market. Issues 2, 3 and 4 are each other’s comparison.
3. Leave it alone. No pressing, no cleaning, no tape. Anything that reads as intervention moves the copy out of the market this table describes.
4. Say if it was ever repaired. Grading finds it regardless, and disclosure at the start is worth money at the end.
5. Keep the early run together if you have it. A buyer who wants #3 usually wants #2 and #4 in the same conversation.

Send photographs and I will tell you which lane your copy sits in, using the same three sales you can read above. Where you take it from there is your call, and the options for selling in Southern California are worth reading either way.

Related

• Amazing Spider-Man #2, the first Vulture and this issue’s closest comparison.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics, and what each one really sold for.
• How grading works, since every lane above is a grade.

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.