Thor 132 and the Mysterious Grading Spike

Thor_132About 20 years ago I stumbled across a copy of Thor 169 at an estate sale.  It came with a number of other Silver Age Marvel books.  If I recall correctly there was a heavily water damaged Amazing Spider-Man 35, an Ironman 8, Hulk 104, and a few other books that I do not recall.  It was a great find, even though the books were not in very good shape.

The Thor book lingered with me though.  I read it, and enjoyed it.  Especially the writing.  Stan Lee’s writing was just so over-the-top!  And that book happened to be the origin of Galactus…so what wasn’t to love!  Well…long story short, after realizing that the books were pretty cheap at the time, I ended up putting together a near complete run of Kirby Thor.  I still don’t have Journey into Mystery #83…but I’ll get there soon enough.

Taking a quick look at the CGC data for these books, I thought I would feature Thor 132 in this post (cover above…and also in my blog banner if you look closely).  This is another fantastic Thor book…Tana Nile, the Indestructible, the dramatic splash of Ego at the end of the story…it’s all pure Kirby!   But, as the name of the blog suggests, let’s take a look at the rarity of the book, shall we?!?!  Check out this plot of CGC public data on graded books in and around this issue number (Y-axis is number of thor_126_140copies graded, X-axis is the issue number).  Now…CGC states clearly on their website that this data should not be used to make conclusions on rarity of a given book…but clearly this data is not meaningless!  Something odd is going on here.  I don’t have any explanation, other than a hunch that this book might have been part of the Mile High II hoard.  Other than that, know that if you want a high grade copy of  Thor 132, you probably shouldn’t have to pay what you would for issues 131 or 133 (or other surrounding issues)!

I hope you like what you see in this one post…this is pretty much the direction  I want to go with this blog.  Sometimes I will focus more on the comics themselves, and sometimes on the rarity data…but overall a healthy does of both!

Until next time…

P.S. Looking for Silver Age Thor comics graded CGC 9.0 or higher?
 

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