MARVEL’S FIRST SUPERHERO BOOK OF THE SILVER AGE, HERE IN NEAR-PERFECT CONDITION, IS AS TREASURED AS GOLD
By Robert Wilonsky
“None higher” – the clarion call of the collector for whom only the perfect and pristine will suffice. None higher. The very best of the very best. It’s a phrase that will be heard almost 200 times during Heritage Auctions’ September 12-15 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction, applied to mint-condition moments spanning some of comics and pulp fiction’s most significant, revered and recognizable offerings.
Among the event’s centerpieces is one of only two copies of 1961’s Fantastic Four No. 1 awarded a Near Mint+ 9.6 grade by Certified Guaranty Company. Most copies of this Marvel landmark didn’t look this clean and crisp, this impressively immaculate, when they rolled off the printing press, fell off the distributors’ truck and landed on newsstands 63 years ago. It’s the Silver Age dipped in platinum, a sonically sealed time machine heading to auction for the first time. In more than two decades as the world’s premier comic book auction house, Heritage has never offered so highly graded – and coveted – a copy of the first Fantastic Four as this one.
This copy of ‘Fantastic Four’ No. 1, graded Near Mint+ 9.6 by Certified Guaranty Company, is available in Heritage’s September 12-15 Comics & Comic Art Signature® Auction.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime comic and, really, a pop-culture trophy piece,” says Heritage Auctions Vice President Barry Sandoval. “It’s the greatest Silver Age comic ever to come on the market.”
Fantastic Four No. 1 was Marvel’s first superhero book of the era, and, given its mint condition, there will be little debate about its value, as a copy graded Near Mint- 9.2 sold in 2022 for $1.5 million. The book also serves as a springboard for the most anticipated Marvel movie in a long while: July 2025’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, starring Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm and The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm – a period piece set in the 1960s in keeping with the title’s debut.
September 12-15, 2024
Online: HA.com/7379
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Barry Sandoval
214.409.1377
BarryS@HA.com
But this first Fantastic Four is more than a comic book franchise awaiting its latest big-screen iteration. It redefined the superhero whole cloth. Marvel launched the book to compete with DC’s Justice League of America. But Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and their super friends were “square-jawed paragons of virtue,” as longtime FF writer Tom DeFalco notes in the paperback collection Fantastic Firsts. Marvel’s new superhero team, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, possessed quirks and flaws, too. Wrote DeFalco, forever after that first FF, “Heroes were required to have individual personalities, dialogue patterns, interesting backstories and personal conflicts.”
Fantastic Four No. 1 was far more than just a superhero tale. It created the entire foundation upon which the Marvel Universe was eventually built and commingled numerous genres into a singular, riveting narrative. As Douglas Wolk wrote in All of the Marvels, the team’s debut was “an adventure-serial comic that’s also a superhero comic and also a monster comic and also a romance comic and also a teen-humor comic and also a sci-fi comic, all at once.”
ROBERT WILONSKY is a staff writer at Intelligent Collector.