In a Comic Book Auctions (16% buyer’s premium) sale that ended on June 2 the comic, rated ‘Very Good +’, sold at £4500 to a buyer who also parted with £560 to reunite it with the free gift.
Bidding reached £8300 for a double-page ‘Thunderbirds’ artwork produced by Frank Bellamy for a 1967 issue of TV Century 21 – more than doubling the sum paid in March of last year for the last such artwork CBA sold. Illustrated on the Bid Barometer pages of ATG No 2396, this was yet another lot with the Bob Monkhouse archive as a provenance.
On the web
The day’s top lot, however, was the first of a selection of unreserved ‘Silver Age’ American comics from the Marvel stable to be offered.
Priced at 9d on the cover but sold for £9500 was a first UK issue of Amazing Fantasy No.15, one that in 1962 marked the first appearance of Spider-Man, a hugely successful character co-created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
It was a copy that the owner had managed to get signed by Lee when they met at a London comic event in 2015.
First US issues, of course, make far higher sums. In February 2016 a near mint, 9.4 CGC rated, 12 cent copy that had spent over three decades in a safe deposit box emerged to sell for $380,000 (then £265,975) at Heritage Auctions of Dallas.
