FANTASTIC FOUR #2

Graded at 3.0 (GD/VG) on 2026-10-30, from new photos taken out of the sleeve: front, back, spine and interior page. Spine with many stress ticks, some breaking color. Short tear and crease at top edge. Blunted corners with small creases. Pencil price above the Code box. Tan pages.

Fantastic Four #2 (Marvel, cover-dated January 1962) followed the team's debut by introducing one of Marvel's most durable alien races, the shape-shifting Skrulls, in a story credited to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with inks by Dick Ayers. The issue's cover, depicting the Thing, Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Girl, and the Human Torch confronting duplicate versions of themselves, became an early template for the imposter/doppelganger convention that recurred throughout the Marvel Universe, and it cemented the book's status as a foundational entry in the line launched just one issue earlier.

Market demand tracks its position as the earliest widely available Fantastic Four issue after the notoriously scarce and expensive #1, giving it broad appeal among Silver Age Marvel collectors who cannot or will not chase the first issue. Pricing across the CGC population shows a steep, non-linear climb from mid-grade into the low 9-point range, with census data reflecting hundreds of graded copies at the low-to-mid end but only a handful surviving above 9.4; auction results for those upper-grade examples have historically drawn strong competition, consistent with a first-appearance book whose supply thins dramatically as grade rises.

The book is a mainstay of Silver Age Marvel and Fantastic Four run collections, moving steadily in the sub-$1,000 range for well-worn copies and climbing into five- and six-figure territory for the rare high-grade certified examples. Entry-level and mid-grade copies attract run builders and Kirby/Lee completists, while the top of the census is contested primarily by advanced Silver Age keys collectors and investors targeting scarce condition-census material; given how few copies exist near the top of the grading scale, transactions there are infrequent and each sale tends to reset expectations for the next.