Tales to Astonish #13 Value: A Film Made This Book

I can show you almost exactly what a film release is worth, because this comic was sold before one and after one and the record caught both. Tales to Astonish 13 value was rewritten between 2012 and 2022.

It is the first appearance of Groot, from November 1960, in a monster story that has nothing to do with the character audiences know.

A monster comic that became a franchise

Groot arrives here as an alien invader, a talking tree that plans to abduct a town, in the kind of one-off monster story Marvel published by the dozen before superheroes took over. He is a villain, he is verbose, and he was never meant to return.

Fifty-four years later the character appeared in a film that made close to eight hundred million dollars, and the comic that had been a curiosity became a key.

What makes this book unusually clean evidence is that almost nothing else about it changed. It was scarce before and it is scarce now, the print run did not move, and no reprint or reissue muddied the market.

To identify it: 10 cents and a November 1960 date, with no bar code anywhere. Monster-era collections have reprinted the story and each declares its edition inside.

Before and after, in one lane

CGC has no auction coverage of this comic, so nothing below is a link. Heritage and eBay supplied the rows.

The 7.5 lane has six sales and they split neatly in half. Before 2022: $6,274 in May 2018, $5,040 in November 2019, $4,920 in March 2020. From 2022: $10,500 in June, $13,812 that September, then $8,400 in January 2025.

That is roughly a doubling, and the 2022 peak is nearly three times the 2020 result. The most recent sale has come back to $8,400, which is still well above anything the grade managed before the film.

The single 9.2 result is the strangest row on this page. It sold for $2,868 in November 2012, which is less than a 6.0 brings today. That figure is not a valuation of a 9.2 now; it is a snapshot of what this comic was worth before anybody cared.

On a book with a hundred and fifty-six sales in the record and this much movement inside them, any comp older than 2022 should be treated as history rather than as a benchmark.

One more comparison is worth making. A CGC 7.0 brought $6,900 on eBay in January 2026, and the 7.5 half a grade above it brought $8,400 at Heritage a year earlier. Fifteen hundred dollars for half a grade, on a comic where the grades below 7.0 are all four figures too.

That is a much flatter ladder than a book of this value normally has, and it is what happens when demand comes from people who want the character rather than from collectors chasing condition. It also means grading a mid-grade copy here is a genuinely marginal call rather than an obvious no.

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 Tales to Astonish #13 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Tales to Astonish #13 value across the grades

156 sales tracked back to 2003; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Tales to Astonish issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. Only one of them sits above 7.5, and it is fourteen years old.

Expensive all the way down

Unlike almost every other monster-era Marvel, the readable grades here are four-figure comics. Twenty-two of them have traded over the past eighteen months.

From November 2025 to May 2026: a 6.5 brought $4,250 and another $3,840, a 6.0 brought $3,415, a 5.0 brought $3,050, two 4.0 copies brought $2,500 and $2,420, a third brought $1,750, a 3.5 brought $2,012 and a 5.5 brought $1,458.

The 4.0 lane is the most useful, with three sales between $1,750 and $2,500 inside seven months. Call a readable 4.0 a two-thousand-dollar comic and you will be close.

The 5.5 at $1,458 selling below three separate 4.0 copies is the kind of inversion that turns up when a market is driven by people who want the character rather than the grade. On this book that is most of the demand.

Selling a Tales to Astonish #13

1. Ten cents, November 1960. Monster-era collections reprint this story and each names its edition inside.
2. Ignore any comp from before 2022. The market for this comic was rebuilt by a film and older figures describe a different book.
3. Say Groot in the listing. Nobody is searching for a 1960 monster story; they are searching for the character.
4. Grading pays here. Even mid-grade copies are four-figure comics, so the fee is a small share of the outcome.

Photographs will get it priced against the sales since the film rather than the ones before, which on this comic is the difference between two answers and the correct one.

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

• Tales to Astonish #27. The first Henry Pym, in the same title, fourteen issues later.
• The 100 most valuable Silver Age comics. And what each one really sold for.
• How much are my comic books worth?. Where a film changes a price and where it does not.

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.