Sold for: $492,937.00CGC: 9.8 It took a tremendous amount of foresight for whoever owned this oh-so-near-mint copy of X-Men #1 to keep it in such good condition for such a long time, especially since the mutant team were relatively unpopular for the first ten years of their existence. Clearly they had faith in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's "strangest superheroes of all!" and reaped the benefits in 2012, with a sale price of just under $500,000. For all intents and purposes it was a perfect copy, without any of the yellowing that aged comics pages tend to suffer. And, like a lot of Marvel's modern heroes, this issue contained a lot of the characters and themes that would be at the core of the X-Men for years to come: hated and feared by humanity, the team - which consisted of Cyclops, Iceman, Marvel Girl, Beast and Angel - nonetheless do their superheroic duty in stopping whatever nefarious scheme Magneto had gotten into his chrome-domed, megalomanical head that month.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
