Price Comparison between 30 cent Variant Issues and Regular Issues

For buyers and sellers of high-grade certified comic books, I highly recommend a subcription to GPAnalysis.  GPAnalysis tracks and records the sales of CGC certified books and publishes them in an online-searchable database.  GPAnalysis also provides some useful monthly summary reports including a very useful report each month which details the sale of certified price variants.  (For the only comprehensive sales report that includes "raw" price variants, check this blog monthly.)  One of the interesting things that this report does is compare the sales price of variants to their regular edition issues.

Here are some high grade examples.

Amazing Spider-Man 171 9.2  $800  (40x the last regular edition sale of $20)
Iron Fist 15                       8.0  $785  (37x the last regular edition sale of $21)
Amazing Spider-Man 173 8.5  $612  (23x the last regular edition sale of $26)
Star Wars 3                       8.5  $600  (30x the last regular edition sale of $15)
Daredevil 146                   9.2  $375  (22x the last regular edition sale of $17)
X-Men 106                        7.5  $375  (22x the last regular edition sale of $17)
Spectacular Spider-Man 9 9.0 $220   (27x the last regular edition sale of $8)
Tarzan 1                             9.2 $205   (29x the last regular edition sales of $7)


I have written several times about what might happen if a high-grade Spidey or X-Men price variant book ever showed up at auction.  Consider this recent book in the November 2010 ComicLink Feature Auction.

Yes, that is correct.  One of the eight current CGC 9.8 copies of Amazing Spider-Man issue 156 brought a hammer price of $650 in the auction.  In case you think that price is unusual, there was only one sale of a 9.8 issue 156 last year and it was for $550.  Highest graded Spider-Man issues are always in demand.  Figure this.  20 times $650 is $13,000 and 30 times $650 is $19,500.  I am not saying that if a 9.8 Spider-Man 156 30 cent price variant shows up at an auction that it will bring $13,000 to $19,500.  We may never know since one has not been graded yet (there are only two price variant 9.6s and two price variant 9.4s on the census.)  I never thought I would see a 9.6 Star Wars 1 price variant sell for over $25,000 either.  Interesting to think about, yes?