Showcase #4 Value: Where the Silver Age Begins

Ask when the Silver Age of comics begins and you will get one answer: October 1956, with this comic. Not a first issue of anything, not a debut title, the fourth issue of a DC try-out anthology whose whole purpose was to test ideas cheaply and cancel the ones that failed. Showcase 4 value begins from that number.

What it tested was bringing back the Flash. Superheroes had been dead commercially for most of a decade; the genre had been buried under crime, romance and westerns. DC put a new man in the suit, gave him a new origin, and the thing worked well enough that within a few years the entire industry had rebuilt itself around costumed heroes again. Marvel’s whole run, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, all of it, follows from the door this comic opened.

A ladder that runs backwards

Most books on my list price in a straight line: higher grade, more money, every time. This one does not, and the documented sales say so plainly.

The 9.0 in the middle of that table sold for $36,000 less than an 8.0 had fifteen months earlier. A full grade point higher, and a materially worse result. Look at the three 8.0 sales on their own and you can see why: $132,000 in June 2023, $81,000 that January, $72,000 the following November. The same grade lost nearly half its value in seventeen months, and the 9.0 sold into the back half of that slide.

So the grade is not the variable doing the work here. The date is. This is the one book on my Silver Age list where I would not price a copy off its grade alone. If somebody quotes you the 2023 figure for an 8.0, they are quoting you the top of a market that has since come down by a third, and it is the most expensive kind of stale number because it sounds so precise.

What I would use instead is the most recent result at or near your grade, and I would treat everything above it as history rather than as a target.

Where a comp comes from matters

The bottom row of that table is different in kind from the rest, and I have labeled it that way on purpose. The CGC 4.5 at $14,611 sold on eBay. Every other row sold through a major auction house.

Both are real sales and I am not dismissing the eBay one. But they are different markets with different bidder pools, different fee structures and different levels of scrutiny, and a book can bring meaningfully different money in each. An eBay result and a Heritage result are not the same kind of evidence, and I will not print them as though they were.

There is a second version of the same problem, and it applies to this whole page. Six of those seven rows come to me through CGC’s auction reporting. CGC is a grading company writing about books it certified, which makes it a good source with a particular shape: it covers high-grade certified copies thoroughly and ordinary ones barely at all. So for the lower half of the table I would also read GoCollect and PriceCharting, which track graded sales and raw eBay closes respectively and answer to nobody in this conversation.

That matters practically for you, because a low- to mid-grade copy of this comic is exactly the kind of book that could sell in either place, and where it goes changes what it makes. That is a conversation worth having before anything is listed anywhere.

Why so few of these survived

The scarcity here is worse than the date alone suggests, and it comes from what this comic was rather than how old it is.

Nobody bought it as a first appearance, because at the time it was not one, it was issue four of an anthology that had already run three unrelated try-outs, and the character inside was a revival of a hero who had been out of print for years. There was no reason for a reader in 1956 to think this issue mattered more than the one before it, and no collector market to tell them otherwise. It went home, got read, and mostly got thrown out.

Compare that with a book people knew was significant on the day it appeared. Those get put away by somebody, somewhere, in numbers. This one did not, which is why the high-grade population is thin enough that a single 9.6 coming to market is an event, and why the record sits so far above everything under it.

It also means the copies that do surface come from ordinary places rather than from collections, a box in an attic, a house being cleared, a run of fifties DCs somebody kept because they liked the Flash. If that describes what you are looking at, the condition is probably honest and unimproved, which is worth more than it sounds.

Showcase #4 value, grade by grade

131 sales tracked back to 2001; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Showcase issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The record holds 132 sales; the recent ones are the only ones a quote should rest on.

The densest column is CGC 2.0, 14 sales: $1,673 in 2011, $7,800 in 2021, $14,400 in 2022, $7,999 in 2026. From $1,673 up to $7,999, with the 2022 peak at $50,000.

Selling a Showcase #4

1. Check the issue number and the date. Showcase ran for years and most issues are worth very little. It is number 4, October 1956, ten cents.
2. Use a recent comp, not the best one. The 2023 results describe a market that has cooled.
3. Expect a low grade. This is a 1956 comic aimed at children, and the survival rate in high grade is brutal, which is exactly why the 9.6 brought what it did.
4. Do not do anything to it. No pressing, no cleaning, no tape on a loose cover.

Send photographs and I will tell you whether this is a house book or an eBay book before you commit it to either. On a comic this uneven, that routing decision is worth more than a grade point.

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

• Fantastic Four #1, the book that answered this one five years later.
• Why price guides and real sales disagree, which is the whole problem this page is about.
• 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.