Tomb of Dracula #10 Value: What a Screen Cycle Costs

In March 2022 a CGC 9.8 of this comic sold for $35,000. This August, a 9.8 sold for $9,500. Nothing about the comic changed in between; a film was announced, delayed, recast, and delayed again. Tomb of Dracula 10 value is the clearest record I hold of what a screen cycle does to a price.

Blade first appears in July 1973, twenty issues into a horror series that Marvel launched when the comics code loosened its rules on vampires.

A horror comic that a film franchise found

Blade was a supporting character in someone else’s book for years, and the 1998 film changed that permanently. Every subsequent announcement has moved this comic, and the 2020s development cycle moved it further than anything before.

The 374 documented sales here run back to 2011, which is long enough to see the whole arc: a quiet horror key, then a speculative run-up, then four years of giving it back.

What the record also shows is that the movement was concentrated. The top three grades did nearly all of the rising and nearly all of the falling; the readable copies moved by tens of dollars while the 9.8 moved by tens of thousands.

To identify it: 20 cents, July 1973, Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula logo. Blade’s later solo titles and the 1990s reprints are separate, inexpensive comics.

Four years, watched from the top

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.

Seven dated 9.8 sales tell the story without commentary: $48,000, $35,000, then $12,905 and $12,000 in the same month of April 2025, then $10,980, $9,760 and $9,500 across this year. A four-fifths decline, documented step by step.

The two April 2025 sales landing less than a thousand dollars apart at different venues is the useful detail. That was not one bad result; that was the market agreeing on a new number.

The 9.6 fell in the same shape — $15,600 in April 2022, $3,227 this June — and the 9.4 went from $7,800 that same spring to about $2,200 now.

Then the fall stops mattering. From 8.0 down, this book’s prices in 2026 look much like its prices several years ago, because the people buying readable copies were never the people bidding on the census.

Which is the actual lesson for an owner: whether the last four years cost you money depends entirely on which grade you hold, and for most people the answer is that it did not.

Those figures are Heritage results and completed eBay sales. GoCollect and PriceCharting track Tomb of Dracula #10 independently, and if their numbers disagree with mine it is worth finding out which of us is wrong.

Tomb of Dracula #10 value in every grade

374 sales tracked back to 2011; here are the three freshest in every grade.

Heritage rows are verifiable in Heritage’s public Tomb of Dracula issue index; the rest are completed eBay listings. They run back to 2011, long enough to contain the entire speculative arc.

The half of the book that ignored all of it

Below 9.0, this comic has been remarkably steady through everything above.

Recent sales: 8.0 copies at $1,095 to $1,300 across May and July, 7.5 copies at $866 to $1,300, 7.0 copies at $847 to $970, and 6.5 copies at $620 to $830.

Further down it stays orderly — 5.0 copies at $565 to $671 this summer, 4.0 copies at $500 to $600, and 2.5 copies between $341 and $400.

The 8.5 lane is the one exception to all that calm, running $973 to $1,599 across May and July. That is a wide spread for a single grade in a single season, and on a horror book it usually comes down to page quality: two copies can share a number and look nothing alike under a lamp.

A readable first Blade is a $500-to-$1,300 comic and has been for years. If a price guide tells you it collapsed, that guide is reading the 9.8 lane and describing your comic with it.

The 9.2 lane sits interestingly between the two halves: twenty-eight sales, running $1,751 to $2,500 over the past eight months. It fell with the top and then stopped, which makes it the grade where the cycle finished earliest.

At the very bottom the record holds one CGC 0.5 sale, $459 in November 2022. A half-point copy is a comic that has been through something, and it still cleared four hundred dollars, which is the most compact argument I can make against throwing anything away before it is photographed.

Timing a sale on a book that moves with news

Books that track screen announcements can be timed, and this is the clearest example on the Bronze list, so it is worth being direct about how.

If you hold a high-grade copy, you are holding the volatile part. The record says the 9.8 lane has moved by a factor of five in four years, and the direction has followed announcements more than anything intrinsic to the comic.

That cuts both ways and I will not pretend to know which way next. What I can tell you is that selling into an announcement has historically paid better than selling into a delay, and the dates in the table above are the evidence.

If you hold a readable copy, none of this applies. Your lane has been stable through the entire cycle, and waiting for a film to move it has not worked at your grade in fifteen years of record.

One more thing specific to this book: two conserved copies sit in the record, and Bronze horror comics attract old tape repairs at the spine. If yours has any, say so — the label will find it, and a described repair sells while a discovered one does not.

Selling a Tomb of Dracula #10

1. Twenty cents, July 1973. Blade’s later solo titles are different, cheaper comics.
2. A stiff card bound at the centerfold is a Mark Jewelers copy. Military exchange distribution, genuinely scarcer, and I have one documented sale, which is not enough to price from.
3. Readable copies did not crash. The $500-to-$1,300 band has held through the whole cycle.
4. High grade is the volatile half. The 9.8 lane moved fivefold in four years.
5. Disclose spine repairs up front. Seventies horror books collect old tape.

Send photographs and the answer comes back with a date attached: what your grade did this quarter, not what the headline grade did in 2022.

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

• Are damaged comic books worth anything?. Relevant on a seventies horror book that collects tape.
• Incredible Hulk #181. The other 1974-era Marvel key whose top ran the same cycle.
• The 100 most valuable Bronze Age comics. Where this book ranks against the era.

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.