With Avengers: Doomsday now in production, and set for release on May 1st, 2026, all eyes are squarely focused on one actor and character: Robert Downey's Doctor Doom.
This will no doubt be the biggest film of 2026, and Marvel's most important film since 2019's Avengers: Endgame. While the lead up to this film throughout the Multiverse Saga hasn't been as strong as it was during the Infinity Saga, Doctor Doom is arguably Marvel's greatest villain of all-time and Robert Downey, Jr. is definitely the MVP of the MCU thus far. I don't think anyone would be surprised if we see Doctor Doom make his first appearance in a post credit scene at the end of Fantastic Four: First Steps.
In spite of the hype, including Downey's surprise return to the franchise at last year's San Diego Comic Con Hall H announcement, Doctor Doom's first appearance in Fantastic Four #5 (1962) is displaying signs of weakness. The most heavily weighted comic book in GoCollect's Silver Age CPI (as a reminder, the most valuable Silver Age key issues, such as Fantastic Four #1, are included in the Big Spenders Club CPI and not in the Silver Age CPI), Fantastic Four #5 has surprisingly experienced a significant dip in recent months contributing only 166 points to the overall index:
When you disaggregate the sales data over the past year by individual CGC grades, we can observe the overall drop in value was primarily caused by unusually low sales for CGC 8.0 and 7.5 copies of this issue:
A CGC 8.0 has lost 46% of it value over the past two years.
Let's take a deeper dive into the sales data for a CGC 8.0. As you can see, the value of a CGC 8.0 stayed relatively flat for many years before experiencing a big jump in value in November 2018 when a copy sold for nearly $17,000. This sale occurred about 11 months after Disney had announced its intention to purchase 21st Century Fox (including the rights to the Fantastic Four IP) and about four months before the acquisition was completed in March 2019.
The value of an 8.0 continued to surge through the pandemic-fueled "comic boom" of 2021 reaching an all-time high sale of $33,500 in December 2022. Then, like the rest of the comic book market this book rapidly corrected, losing 33% of its value in its next sale about a year later. Earlier this month, an 8.0 had lost nearly 50% from its all-time high with this sale on Heritage Auctions:
Is Fantastic Four #5 a buy at current price points?
As the saying goes, you don't want to catch a falling knife and we haven't seen any evidence yet that this key comic has hit bottom. On the other hand, you also can't time the market. One good question to ask is whether this issue is a good value at current price points. If you exclude sales that occurred during the comic boom as being outliers and look at sales that occurred during late 2019 and early 2020, I think it's fair to say that an 8.0 should be reasonably valued in the $15,000 to $20,000 range. Personally, I think that's a conservative estimate considering the supply of graded copies has barely increased, and especially once inflation has been factored in.
