A near-mint copy of the first Batman comic*, published in 1940, was sold for $1.85m (£1.36m) on January 17 in a three-day sale held by Heritage Auctions (20% buyer’s premium), as reported in News, ATG No 2477. However, that Dallas sale contained a great many other high-priced comics and comic artworks.
Bid to £320,000 (£235,640) was what the saleroom, never shy of a superlative, called a “sensational copy of one of the most sought-after Golden Age comics of all!”.
Published in 1941, this was a copy, graded CGC 8.5, of the very first issue of Captain America. It features a Joe Simon/Jack Kirby cover image of this new superhero “socking it to Adolf Hitler” just a few months before the US entered the Second World War.
Daredevil and Flash Gordon
Copy of Daredevil #1 of 1964 – $85,000 (£62,500) at Heritage.
Issued by Marvel Comics in 1964, a copy of Daredevil #1, graded a near-perfect CGC 9.6 and delivering “the senses-shattering premiere issue of ‘The Man Without Fear!’”, sold at $85,000 (£62,590).
The cover again featured artwork by Kirby, this time in collaboration with Bill Everett, the artist responsible for the inside pages artwork.
Also sold at $85,000 was Alex Raymond’s original artwork for a Flash Gordon Sunday paper comic strip of 1936.
This was a feature conceived as a rival to the popular Buck Rogers strip and in the Heritage cataloguer’s view, offering artwork far superior to that produced for Buck and featuring better story lines, the latter co-written with Don Moore.
* Batman had actually made his very first appearance in Issue No 27 of Detective Comics in March 1939, and in a November 2020 sale Heritage had sold a copy of that debut outing of the ‘Caped Crusader’ for what proved a short-lived record $1.26m.
