THE FLASH #164

Cover shows a vertical crease/soft spine line running down the left edge near the spine, along with some minor surface wear and slight discoloration at the top edge. Corners appear reasonably sharp with only light blunting. No major tears, stains, or color breaks are evident, but the spine area shows stress lines consistent with reading wear. Interior and back cover were not assessed in this photo.

The Flash #164 (DC Comics, September 1966) arrived during the height of the title's classic Silver Age run, when Carmine Infantino's dynamic figure work and John Broome's scripting defined Barry Allen's adventures. The issue is a standard entry in the series rather than a landmark one: it carries no first appearance, origin story, or death, and its cover, while representative of Infantino's clean mid-1960s design sensibility, has not entered the pantheon of covers cited by price guides as genre-defining. Its interest lies chiefly in its place within a tightly followed, historically important run rather than any single event inside its pages.

Certified sales data shows a typical Silver Age demand curve: values remain flat and modest through the mid grades, with FMVs clustering near $46-55 from grade 5.0 through 8.0, before rising steadily at 9.0 and above. The jump from $120 at 9.2 to $350 at 9.6 illustrates the premium collectors place on true high-grade survivors of a book that saw heavy handling as a newsstand title. With only two 9.8 copies on census and no recorded sale at that grade, top-end value is driven by scarcity rather than transaction history, and any future 9.8 sale would likely set a new high watermark for the issue.

This is a book bought primarily by Flash run-completists and Silver Age generalists building toward a full Barry Allen set, rather than by speculators chasing a single key. Lower and mid-grade copies trade as affordable reading or filler pieces, with pricing largely insensitive to condition differences below very fine. High-grade certified copies, by contrast, see disproportionate demand from registry-focused collectors, where census scarcity at the top end supports a steep premium over 9.4 and 9.6 comparables.