Vampirella #1 Value: A Magazine, Not a Comic

This is the only publication on my Silver Age list that is not a comic book, and the difference is not a technicality. Vampirella 1 value behaves the way magazines behave, which is not the way comics do.

Warren published it in September 1969 as a black-and-white magazine, larger than a comic and sold on a different shelf.

Why the format changes the price

A magazine is bigger, has no cover price restriction from the Comics Code, and was never bagged and boarded by the people who bought it. It got rolled, stacked and stored flat under other magazines, and it shows up with wear that a comic of the same age does not have.

Warren magazines also had heavier, glossier covers than newsprint comics, which means they survive scuffing differently. A copy that looks clean at arm’s length can grade well below what an owner expects once the surface is examined.

The practical consequence is that high grades are scarcer here than the print run suggests, and that a copy which has simply been stored flat and dark can be worth a great deal more than a comparable comic from the same year.

Identification is easy: a 60 cent cover price, September 1969, Warren Publishing on the cover. The character has had many later series and #1 issues, all of them ordinary and all of them dated much later.

A market that moved twice

One of these was reported by CGC. The middle of the ladder is where the recent action has been.

The 9.2 line is the most interesting thing on this page. It brought $2,995 in September 2025, then $7,100 in February 2026 and $6,588 in March. That is more than double in five months, at a grade with thirteen sales behind it, so it is not one odd result.

What makes it stranger is that the 9.4 above it did nothing over the same period: $7,500 in July 2024, $6,970 in December 2025. A 9.2 has caught a 9.4 and very nearly passed it.

Above them the 9.6 line sits between $18,000 and $21,221 across three sales, and the 9.8 record of $78,000 from January 2024 is six times what the same grade brought in 2016.

Read together: the top of this book was repriced in 2023 and 2024, and the repricing worked its way down to 9.2 about eighteen months later. That is a market still moving, which is unusual on this list and worth watching if you own one.

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

Vampirella #1 value across the grades

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

Every row above is a documented sale, verifiable in Heritage’s public Vampirella issue index and in CGC’s published auction reporting. The 9.2 and 9.0 lanes carry the most sales and the most recent movement.

What a readable copy brings

Underneath all that movement, the readable end of this magazine has been perfectly steady, across fifty-five sales since the start of last year.

Across April to August 2026: three 7.0 copies brought $1,500, $1,342 at Heritage and $1,000, three 6.5 copies brought $1,250, $1,020 and $885, a 5.5 brought $870, and a 4.0 brought $780.

So a readable copy of this magazine runs from roughly seven hundred and fifty dollars to fifteen hundred, and the 6.5 and 7.0 bands overlap enough that half a grade is not worth arguing about.

One thing specific to the format is worth saying: because these were stored flat and unbagged, an ordinary-looking copy is often a 5.0 rather than the 7.0 its owner assumed. I would rather set that expectation before photographs than after.

Selling a Vampirella #1

1. Check it is the 1969 Warren magazine. Sixty cents, September 1969. Every later Vampirella #1 is an ordinary comic from a relaunch.
2. Photograph the cover at an angle. Warren’s glossy stock shows scuffing that a flat-on photograph hides completely, and it drives the grade.
3. Do not assume a high grade. Magazines were not looked after the way comics were, and most copies grade lower than their owners expect.
4. Keep the early run together. The first dozen Warren issues sell as a set to collectors who want the magazine format specifically.

Send photographs, including one of the cover at an angle to the light, and I will give you a grade range that accounts for how these were actually stored.

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 Silver Age comics. And what each one really sold for.
• How grading actually works. What the numbers on a label mean, and what moves them.
• Are damaged comic books worth anything?. Relevant here, because magazines take damage comics do 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.