Donny Cates is the hottest name in comics, and his body of work is only making him more in demand. Now that his groundbreaking God Country has been optioned for a movie, how are those Cates keys holding up?

Donny has been a busy guy for the past year. Over at Image and Aftershock, he broke into the mainstream with the aforementioned God Country, Redneck, and Babyteeth. Since he joined Marvel, he's penned a Doctor Strange run, Thanos Wins, and he's given us the first actually good Venom series in the character's history.

While Cates still writes a few comics with Image, Skybound, and Aftershock, he's earning his money at Marvel. He's continuing his Venom run, and he'll be returning to Thanos as well as working on the upcoming Marvel Knights and Guardians of the Galaxy. Personally, I've never been a real fan of GOTG, but the prospective lineup on the teaser images looks amazing.

With all this talk of Donny Cates, let's take a look at a couple of Cates keys and see how their values are holding up. For the purposes of this article, I'm not going to get into Thanos #13 or God Country #1, since I've devoted entire posts strictly to those two issues in A God Country Movie?, Cosmic Ghost Rider in the Sky, and Thanos Wins Second Prints. I'll also be spotlighting that Cosmic Ghost Rider first appearance later this month as we ready for the new GOTG series.

REDNECK #1

Remember the spring/summer of 2017 when the comics' world went into a frenzy over Redneck #1? As Image is known to do, they released "dealer incentive" copies, limited to one per comic shop that sold their titles. Even before Redneck was published, the speculation that it was going to become the next Walking Dead and that production companies were eyeing Redneck for a television series initially drove prices through the roof. A 9.8 gold-foil edition brought as much as $162 at the height of the hysteria in June 2017. The standard edition was routinely selling for $80-$90 in April and into May of last year as well.

Although Redneck has been an entertaining series, those spring/summer 2017 values of the first issue haven't held up. By the end of the year, the standard cover had dropped to the $30-$40 range, while the once-coveted gold foil edition dropped to around $60 this past April. However, now that Donny has gained mainstream popularity along with the God Country movie news, Redneck is getting back into the game. The gold foil 9.8 reached $145 in August and the last sale on October 10 was for $125.

BABYTEETH #1

The standard edition hasn't seen much action, but some of the Babyteeth #1 variants have been rising. Of course, like pretty much every other issue #1 released these days, there's only 10,000,000 variant covers. That being said, here are the variants that have seen a boost in fair market value this year: ComicXposure edition, both Eh! variant covers A and B, the Unknown Comics sketch edition, and the Midtown Comics edition. If God Country gets the green light, you'll see Babyteeth climb the ladder on the speculation that maybe a production company will option it based on Cates' popularity.