Star Wars #1 Value: Five Cents Is Worth Five Figures

A CGC 3.0 of one version of this comic sold for $2,950. A CGC 9.8 of the other version sold for $3,000. The battered copy and the near-perfect copy are the same comic, printed the same month, and the difference between them is five cents printed in the corner of the cover.

Marvel’s Star Wars adaptation reached stands in April 1977, six weeks before the film opened, and Marvel simultaneously ran a small regional test at a higher cover price.

The price box is the whole test

In 1977 Marvel tested a price increase by printing a limited run of certain issues at 35 cents instead of 30, and distributing them in a few regional markets. The comics are otherwise identical: same cover art, same interior, same date.

So the check takes two seconds. Look at the price in the upper corner of the cover. 30 cents is the ordinary edition. 35 cents is the variant, and it is worth a different order of magnitude.

The reason is arithmetic: the regular printing ran to the hundreds of thousands and was kept by a generation of children who knew the film mattered. The test run was a rounding error by comparison, and nobody set those aside on purpose.

And because the stakes are this high, altered price boxes exist. A grader will catch one, and so will a raking light.

Four things wearing the same cover

These are counted separately, because they are not the same comic in a buyer’s eyes. The sales column matters as much as the money: one of these is a deep market and one is a handful of copies.

The bottom two rows are the ones that cost people money, and they are easy to confuse because both can show 35 cents. The 1977 test printing is the five-figure comic. The Whitman reprint reached $159 and $168 at CGC 9.0 this year, and it names itself in the indicia.

The newsstand distinction, which matters enormously on eighties books, is close to irrelevant here: its lanes track the regular edition. Nobody should pay a premium for the word newsstand on this issue.

Two editions, side by side

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.

Every row above except one belongs to the 35-cent variant. The single exception is the $5,200 result at 9.8 this May, the best documented sale of the ordinary edition — and it still sits below a battered 6.0 of the variant.

The variant’s record is thin by design, with a single 9.4 at $31,200 in April 2025 and three sales at 9.0 running from $16,097 to $24,999.

Thin records swing. The 8.0 lane shows it plainly: $2,510 back in 2014, $12,000 in November 2025, $6,422 this July. On a book that surfaces a few times a year, each sale is its own event.

The regular edition is the opposite in every way: orderly lanes, and a 9.8 that reached $5,200 in May before settling at $3,000 to $3,150 across four sales in July and August.

The ungraded variant market is where sellers get hurt. Raw sales in the record include results at $10 and $35, which are almost certainly ordinary copies sold as variants or variants sold by owners who never looked at the price box.

The variant record also shows a long climb the regular edition does not. An 8.0 brought $2,510 in 2014 and $12,000 in November 2025; a 4.5 went from $3,107 in 2018 to $5,000 in December 2025. Where most of the Bronze Age gave money back these past four years, this variant kept finding buyers.

Those figures are Heritage results and completed eBay sales. GoCollect and PriceCharting track Star Wars #1 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Both editions, every documented grade

The regular 30-cent edition

The comic almost everyone has. Printed in enormous numbers and kept by a generation.

280 sales tracked back to 2022; here are the three freshest in every grade.

The 35-cent price variant

A regional test printing, and one of the most valuable price variants in comics.

46 sales tracked back to 2014; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Heritage rows are verifiable in Heritage’s public Star Wars issue index; the rest are completed eBay listings. The regular edition carries 281 of them and the variant 46, and the gap between those two numbers is the entire story.

What the common edition is actually worth

Most people reading this have the 30-cent edition, and it deserves a straight answer: it is a common comic that is pleasant to own and modest to sell.

This summer, 9.2 copies brought $348 to $525, 9.0 copies $154 to $391, and 8.5 copies $233 to $335. Below 8.0 it drops into the low hundreds quickly — 6.0 copies at $61 to $220, 5.0 copies around $110 to $160.

Raw copies of the regular edition ran $60 to $150 in August. That is a real number for a comic that sold in the hundreds of thousands and was kept by nearly everyone who bought it.

The exception is the top: a 9.8 has cleared $3,000 four times this summer, because pristine copies of a comic children loved are genuinely scarce even when the comic is not.

The step down is steeper than most owners expect. A 9.6 brought $750 to $1,150 in July and August and a 9.4 ran $537 to $700, so two tenths of a grade takes roughly two-thirds off. A grading fee pays for itself at the very top of this book and nowhere else.

If you think you have the variant

Assume the ordinary edition until the price box proves otherwise, then check anyway, because the upside is five figures. Photograph that box straight on and in focus: half the variant enquiries I get are settled by that one photograph.

If it does read 35 cents, slow down. This is not a comic to sell quickly to the first offer: the record is thin, the grade steps are enormous, and the difference between a 6.0 and a 9.0 on the variant is roughly sixteen thousand dollars.

Grade it. Where authenticity and grade both carry five-figure consequences the fee is trivial against the certainty, and the documented sales up there are almost all graded copies.

And if the rest of the 1977 run is there, keep it together. Issues #2, #3 and #4 carry the same variant logic, so check every price box in the pile.

Selling a Star Wars #1

1. Check the price box before anything else. Thirty cents is common; thirty-five cents is the variant.
2. Reprints have no price or a reprint line in the indicia. Two seconds to rule out.
3. The ordinary edition is a modest comic outside 9.6 and above. That is not bad news, just true.
4. Grade a genuine variant. The grade steps up there are worth thousands each.

Send one straight-on photograph of the cover price box. That single image answers the only question that matters on this comic.

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

• The 100 most valuable Bronze Age comics. Both editions hold ranks on the list.
• How grading actually works. Why a genuine variant belongs in a slab.
• Where to sell comics in Southern California. The options, whichever edition you have.

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.