Scarcity of a given comic, we are told, can contribute to value. This is, in fact, the reason why I mainly choose to invest in high grade Silver and Bronze Age comics over most modern books. The print runs of the Silver or Bronze Age comics may have been much higher, in terms of sheer number of issues published as compared to their modern age counter-parts, but in an age before specialty shops, grading companies or even the regular use of bags and boards, the number of high grade (9.2 - 9.8) Silver and Bronze keys makes them actually more scarce and so in many cases much more valuable.

What happens when you take a Marvel Bronze Age book that actually had a low print run to begin with? Well, if Marvel’s niche title Night Nurse is any indication you then get a quite valuable comic.

Night Nurse was a Marvel experiment that failed. In the early seventies Marvel was trying to increase its readership by reaching out to a different demographic. In an attempt to draw in female readers, they set upon the idea of a comic aimed at women featuring young women working as nurses. In order to ensure the authenticity of the book they even assigned a female writer (Jean Thomas) to script it.

Resurrecting and rebooting the character of Linda Carter, first seen in the Atlas published comic Linda Carter, Student Nurse (which ran for nine issues from 1961-1963), Thomas gave us an updated version of Carter and added two companions (Christine Palmer and Georgia Jenkins) on top of moving the stories from the Mid-West suburbs to the definitively urban setting of Metro-General Hospital in Manhattan. The tag line for the series was: “Enter the world of Danger, Drama and Death!”, but the focus was actually drama and romance.

Sensing that this was a somewhat risky experiment, the Night Nurse series had a smaller than average print run and was ended by low sales after only four issues.

By some estimates, Night Nurse is one of the rarest of Marvel Bronze Age books (see here).

Night Nurse #1 (November 1972) – First Issue of Night Nurse

With a grand total of 233 copies on the CGC census and only four of them 9.8 [along with 12 in 9.6, 14 at 9.4 and 17 in 9.2 grade], you could call this a scarce comic. The low availability of 9.8 gives it a FMV of $9,750.00 in that grade. To put that in perspective that’s almost exactly half the value held today by Incredible Hulk #181 (the undisputed king of the Bronze Age) and for a comic that has no movie deal, no big name character (like Hulk or Wolverine) and little to none pop culture exposure - unless you count the esoteric references in some of the Netflix Marvel shows, that’s pretty impressive.

More impressive still, the 2018 Overstreet Comics Price Guide ranks this comic as #29 on the list of top 50 Bronze Age comics. A 2016 ComicLink sale of a certified 9.8 graded copy sold for
$7, 700.00 (on 12/08/2016). While not extremely difficult to find in lower grade, prices really drop on anything below 9.0. So here we have a case of a comic to look for in at least 9.2 grade or higher to take advantage of the scarcity of those grades. Not to mention that having a copy means owning a piece of Marvel Bronze Age history.