One of the question I always asked is about the value of 2nd appearances in comics. I believe there is a cut off point where 2nd appearance will start to experience price appreciation. However, when does this occur and what is the correlation between the prices of first and second appearance in different price ranges? This is what the article will explore by looking at ebay prices for a few key silver age comics across different price ranges.

My initial hypothesis is that once a VG copy crosses a certain price threshold, collectors or investors will start to look for higher grade 2nd appearances. Hence, my default grade for this research will be as such: 3.5-5.5 for first appearance and 7.0 and above for second appearance. I have included the year for the 2nd appearance as it makes a lot of difference to the pricing of the books, especially if you have looked at my previous article on pre 1965 silver age comics.

I focus the research on silver age comics as any comics produced after this period will be far too many for 2nd appearance to be worth anything. The interesting case will be when the first appearance is in silver but 2nd is in bronze or copper. I don’t have any data on this yet but will be actively looking for data samples.

From the table, one thing is clear: 2nd appearance of key characters who are or rumored to be in movies are worth money. Very interesting, high grade copies of 2nd appearance can be similar in pricing levels to low grade copies of first appearances.

This is an important insight for future speculation: if you are too late in getting the first appearance, go for high grade second appearances as these tend to be ignored during the initial hype run up.