Star Trek #1 Value: Why Photo Covers Grade Low

One physical fact about this comic drives almost everything about what it is worth, and it is visible from across a room. Star Trek 1 value is a story about the cover stock.

Gold Key put a photograph of the cast on the front in 1967, which nobody else was doing, and which turned out to matter enormously.

Why photo covers grade so harshly

Line art hides wear. A crease across a drawing disappears into the linework, and a scuff on a printed illustration reads as part of the picture. A photograph does neither. Every fold, every rubbed corner and every shelf mark sits on a smooth continuous image and is instantly obvious.

Gold Key’s photo covers also used a slightly different stock from the interior newsprint, and it takes a crease in a way that stays. The result is that copies which would grade 8.0 with a drawn cover routinely come back lower.

For an owner this cuts both ways. It means high-grade copies are genuinely scarce and worth real money, and it means an average-looking copy on your shelf is probably in the fives rather than the eights.

To identify it: 12 cents, Gold Key, 1967, with a painted-in border around the photograph. Gold Key comics carry no bar code and no Comics Code stamp, which is the fastest way to tell one at a glance.

A high grade that halved

CGC reported one of these. The 9.6 line is where the drama is, and everything under it has been calmer.

The 9.6 line went $20,400 in November 2019, then $45,600 and $46,500 within three months across the turn of 2023, then $22,800 in April 2025. It roughly doubled, held for a season, and gave all of it back.

The 9.4 beneath it declined more gently and more believably: $13,800 in January 2022, $12,000 in April 2024, $10,200 that December.

The 9.2 line has settled. $10,200 in September 2021, then $6,600 in September 2025 and $6,500 on eBay in January 2026. Two sales four months apart within a hundred dollars of each other, at two different venues, is about as solid a number as this book offers.

So the useful reading is that the 9.2 and 9.4 lanes are quotable and the 9.6 is not. A grade that has traded at both $46,500 and $22,800 inside twenty-six months has to be given as a range.

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

Star Trek #1 value across the grades

235 sales tracked back to 2002; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Star Trek issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 8.0 lane alone carries twenty-three of them, which is where most graded copies of this book end up.

Where the photo cover puts most copies

Most copies of this comic end up here, and the cover stock is why. Seventy of them have sold in readable grades since January 2025.

From May to August 2026: two 7.0 copies brought $660 and $600, a 6.5 brought $785, a 6.0 brought $525, a 5.5 brought $469 and another $380, a 5.0 brought $450, a 4.5 brought $560 and a 4.0 brought $300.

That whole spread, from 4.0 to 7.0, sits between three hundred and eight hundred dollars. Three full grade points are worth about five hundred dollars, which is not much, and it is why I keep steering owners of this comic away from grading.

A 5.5 also sold for $158 in August 2026, well under the rest of its lane. On a photo-cover book that usually means something the photographs did not show, and it is a reminder that on this issue the description does more work than the label.

Selling a Star Trek #1

1. Photograph the cover raked against the light. On photo stock the creases only show at an angle, and a buyer will find them anyway.
2. No bar code, no Code stamp, 12 cents, 1967. That combination identifies a Gold Key original at a glance.
3. Assume a lower grade than it looks. Photo covers grade harshly and an optimistic guess will cost you credibility on the sale.
4. Keep the early Gold Key run together. The first handful of issues sell as a group to collectors who want the photo covers specifically.

Send photographs, and get one of them raking across the cover rather than square on, so the grade estimate you get back accounts for what photo stock hides.

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

• How grading actually works. And why some covers grade harder than others.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics. And what each one really sold for.
• Are damaged comic books worth anything?. Directly relevant on a cover that hides nothing.

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.