Silver Surfer #1 Value: The Top Held, the Rest Did Not

Two sales fifteen months apart at exactly the same figure, and one grade down a market that lost half its money. Silver Surfer 1 value depends entirely on which of those two stories your copy belongs to.

This is the Surfer’s own title from August 1968, two years after he first appeared in somebody else’s comic.

His own book, two years after the debut

The Surfer first appears in Fantastic Four #48 in 1966. This 1968 issue is the start of his solo series, and it carries an expanded origin that the earlier appearances do not.

It is also a double-size, twenty-five-cent comic rather than a standard twelve-cent one, which matters more than it sounds. The larger format and higher page count make the spine and the staples the first thing to fail, and they are the first thing a grader looks at.

That single physical fact is behind a lot of what follows. High-grade copies of this issue are scarcer than the print run would suggest, and the premium at the top reflects it.

To identify it: 25 cents, August 1968, no bar code, and a page count noticeably thicker than the comics around it.

A record repeated to the dollar

Two of these were reported by CGC. Read the 9.8 pair first and then look at what the 9.6 did underneath them.

The 9.8 sold for $132,000 in January 2024 and $132,000 again in April 2025. Two sales, fifteen months apart, the same auction house, the same figure to the dollar. That is a grade with a firm and well-understood price.

Directly underneath it the 9.6 collapsed over the same period: $22,800 in December 2024, $20,400 in July 2025, $15,000 that September, $11,590 in March 2026, $10,980 that May. Five sales, one direction, and less than half the money at the end of it.

So the premium for two tenths of a grade went from roughly six times to roughly twelve times in eighteen months. That is not a market pricing quality; it is a market that has decided only the perfect copy is worth chasing.

The 9.4 shows the same thing at closer range. It brought $15,600 in July 2025 and $6,710 in March 2026, a fall of more than half in eight months, at one auction house.

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

Silver Surfer #1 value, grade by grade

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

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Silver Surfer issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 9.6, 9.4, 9.2 and 9.0 lanes carry twenty, thirty, twenty-five and thirty sales respectively, which is unusual depth.

The part that has not moved

While the graded lanes above were halving, the readable end of this book did nothing at all. A hundred and fifteen copies have sold there since January 2025.

From July to August 2026: a 7.0 brought $1,199, a 6.5 brought $700, a 6.0 brought $750, a 5.0 brought $650, three 4.5 copies brought $449, $400 and $395, and three 3.5 copies brought $350, $329 and $315.

Three 4.5 sales inside a month between $395 and $449, and three 3.5 sales between $315 and $350. Those are the tightest clusters on this page and they are at the opposite end from all the drama.

If you own a readable copy of this comic, nothing described above has happened to you. The number has been stable for eighteen months and it is roughly three hundred to twelve hundred dollars depending on grade.

Selling a Silver Surfer #1

1. Twenty-five cents, August 1968. This is a double-size issue; a twelve-cent Silver Surfer comic is a later one.
2. Photograph the spine and the staples first. On a thick book those fail before anything else and they decide the grade.
3. Do not price a 9.6 from 2024. That grade has lost more than half its value since, across five documented sales.
4. Grade only at the very top. The premium has concentrated at 9.8 and is now roughly twelve times the 9.6.

Send photographs and I will tell you which of the two markets on this page your copy belongs to, because they have spent the last two years going opposite ways.

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 #48. Where the Surfer first appears, two years earlier.
• Selling graded comics. Worth reading if you hold a high grade of a book that has moved this fast.
• 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.