Sgt. Fury #1 Value: One 9.4 Sold for $78,000

A CGC 9.4 of this comic sold for $78,000 at Heritage in July 2025. The next graded copy down, a 9.0, brought $26,400 two months later. Sgt. Fury 1 value is decided almost entirely at the top of the ladder, and hardly anybody owns a copy up there.

Nick Fury first appears in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #1 in May 1963, as a cigar-chewing sergeant in a Second World War comic, two years before Marvel moved him into a spy agency.

The first Nick Fury, in the wrong genre

Marvel launched a war title in 1963 and handed it to Lee and Kirby, which is how the first appearance of one of the company’s most filmed characters ended up in a series most collectors never read.

Fury becomes the S.H.I.E.L.D. director in Strange Tales #135 in 1965, and that book has spent decades being sold as the first Nick Fury by people who should know better. It is not. This is.

The genre shaped the supply as well. War comics were bought by a different audience, read harder and kept less, so surviving copies skew low. Eighteen documented sales sit at 2.0, more than at any grade above 5.0.

To identify it: 12 cents, May 1963, no bar code. Marvel has reprinted the first story several times and the reprints name their edition inside the front cover.

The series itself ran to 167 issues and lasted into 1981, and almost none of the rest of it carries value. Issue 13 is the exception, with a Captain America and Bucky crossover that keeps a little demand under it. If a whole run has come out of a garage, the first issue is carrying essentially all of the money, and the rest is a reading collection.

Where the money actually is

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.

The step from 9.0 to 9.4 is worth about fifty thousand dollars, and it rests on one sale at each grade. That is the shape of a census-top book: a single copy at the head of the population report sells for a number nothing else can check.

Beneath it the ladder is more honest. The 8.5 at $17,400 and the two 8.0 results at $8,700 and $7,500 roughly halve at each step, and the 7.5 lane has four sales running from $6,800 in 2023 down to $4,148 at Heritage in May 2026.

The 6.5 is the best-documented lane above the middle, with eight sales. Three of them landed within a few hundred dollars of each other in August 2023 at $2,160, $2,280 and $2,400, and two more came in at $2,600 each in June 2025.

The 5.5 shows the direction clearly and it is downward: $3,600 and $3,399 in 2022, $3,120 and $2,400 in early 2023, then $1,700, $1,500, $1,680, $1,895 and $995 across 2024, and $1,400 in December 2025.

The honest summary is a comic that has fallen by roughly half in the middle grades since 2022 while producing one enormous result at the top. Both statements are true, and they describe two different books.

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

Sgt. Fury #1 value in every documented grade

163 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 Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. Most of them sit at 4.0 and below, which is where a 1963 war comic tends to have survived.

What a low-grade copy is worth

This is the rare book on the list where the bottom of the ladder is the busiest part of it, and where a low grade can still mean four figures.

Twenty sales sit at 3.5, running from $500 in July 2024 to $1,081 in January 2026, with most of them between $650 and $900. Eighteen more sit at 4.0, where 2026 has produced $1,275, $959, $824, $1,098 and $1,000.

The 2.5 lane brought $708, $698, $540 and $850 across 2026, and the 2.0 lane beneath it brought $698 and $450 in January of the same year.

Which is to say a battered but complete copy of the first Nick Fury is a five-hundred to nine-hundred-dollar comic, and a merely tatty one is closer to a thousand.

Raw copies and the completeness problem

Thirty-five ungraded sales are on record and they are the widest spread on the page, from $100 in April 2026 to $1,800 in May of the same year.

That range is not condition alone. Raw sales of this comic include coverless copies, trimmed copies, restored copies sold as they stand, and complete sharp copies whose owners did not want to pay a grading fee. All of them list under the same search term.

If you are buying, that is a hazard. If you are selling something genuinely complete, it is an opportunity, because the ungraded market prices to the worst thing a comic might be unless you prove otherwise.

What proves otherwise is photographs: the cover flat and square, the back cover, the staples, the center pages open, and the last page of the story so a buyer can see the book runs to the end. That set of shots is worth several hundred dollars on this comic specifically.

At 7.0 and above I would grade it instead. The steps up there are worth thousands of dollars each, and no amount of photography will get a raw copy paid like a slabbed one at that level.

One warning about the trimmed copies in particular, because this comic attracts them. A 1963 Marvel with edges that look suspiciously fresh is worth a careful measure against another comic from the same month before anybody pays four figures for it. Trimming is not always obvious and it turns a valuable comic into a cheap one the moment a grader sees it, so if there is any doubt at all it belongs in the description rather than in a surprise later.

Selling a Sgt. Fury #1

1. Twelve cents, May 1963. Strange Tales #135 is a later and different Nick Fury book.
2. Confirm the copy is complete before pricing it. Coverless and trimmed copies share the raw market with sound ones.
3. Grade at 7.0 and above. The steps up there are worth thousands each.
4. A battered complete copy is still worth hundreds. The 2.0 and 2.5 lanes hold twenty-nine sales between them.

Send photographs including the last page of the story. On this comic completeness is worth more than the corners are.

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. The S.H.I.E.L.D. debut that keeps getting called the first Fury.
• Fantastic Four #1. What early sixties Marvel does at the head of a census.
• 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.