Blue Beetle First Appearance: Dan, Ted and Jaime, Values

Blue Beetle first appeared in Mystery Men Comics #1, cover-dated August 1939, from Fox; PriceCharting lists the publisher as Fox Features Syndicate. Wikipedia credits the creation to Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski, who worked under the house name "Charles Nicholas". That first Blue Beetle was Dan Garrett, a rookie police officer with a bulletproof costume who took "Vitamin 2X" (Wikipedia).

Three people have made the name famous, and each has a separate first appearance:

• Dan Garrett, revived (1964): Charlton rebooted him as an archaeologist who got superhuman powers from a mystical scarab.
• Ted Kord: Captain Atom #83 (November 1966, Charlton), a student of Dan Garrett who took over the role.
• Jaime Reyes: Infinite Crisis #3 (February 2006, DC); first shown as Blue Beetle in Infinite Crisis #5 (April 2006), with his own series starting in Blue Beetle vol. 7 #1 (May 2006). Created by Keith Giffen, John Rogers and Cully Hamner.

Sources: Wikipedia's Blue Beetle and Jaime Reyes articles.

DC bought the Charlton characters in 1983 (Wikipedia), which brought Ted Kord into the DC Universe. Ted was killed in Countdown to Infinite Crisis (May 2005): Maxwell Lord captured him and shot him in the head. Jaime Reyes, a teenager from El Paso, Texas, picked up the scarab in Infinite Crisis the next year.

PriceCharting values retrieved September 25, 2026:

• Mystery Men Comics #1 (1939): public sales are few. The ungraded sales PriceCharting lists date from 2001 to 2005 ($977.50 to $1,725.00), and a CGC 5.5 copy sold for $24,000 in October 2023. PriceCharting says some of its figures for this book are estimates from other grades, so ask an auction house for a current range.
• Captain Atom #83 (Ted Kord, 1966): ungraded $53.00; graded 4.0 $125.24; 6.0 $245.08; 8.0 $399.50; 9.2 $800.00; 9.8 $7,200.00 (about one sale a year). Art by Steve Ditko.
• Infinite Crisis #3 (Jaime Reyes, 2006): ungraded $4.18; graded 9.2 $29.99; 9.8 $38.39.

The Ted Kord issue has the steepest climb at the top: 9.8 is nine times the 9.2 figure, but that number rests on about one sale a year.

Yes. The first Blue Beetle debuted in August 1939, 23 years before Spider-Man's first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962; see our Spider-Man page). Ted Kord (1966) and Jaime Reyes (2006) both came after Spider-Man.

No. The Blue Beetle who is Mexican-American is Jaime Reyes, introduced in 2006; Wikipedia describes him as being of Mexican-American origin and powered by a sentient armored suit of alien origin. The two earlier Blue Beetles were Dan Garrett (1939, revived 1964) and Ted Kord (1966). Wikipedia calls the 2023 film, with Xolo Maridueña as Jaime, the first live-action superhero film with a Latino lead.

Blue Beetle opened in the US on August 18, 2023, directed by Ángel Manuel Soto, on a budget Wikipedia gives as $104 to $125 million. It grossed $130.8 million worldwide and became the lowest-grossing film in the DC Extended Universe. Wikipedia lists the reasons given: the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes, the coming reboot of DC films under James Gunn and Peter Safran, Hurricane Hilary hitting the Los Angeles market, competition from Barbie and Oppenheimer, and audience uncertainty about where the DC films were going.

Wikipedia describes Extraño as the first openly gay superhero in DC Comics. He debuted in Millennium #2 (January 1988), created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Joe Staton; his real name is Gregorio de la Vega, a Peruvian magician who joined the New Guardians.

• Indicia: the small print on the first page or inside cover gives the title, issue number, date and publisher; reprints and facsimiles say so there.
• Cover price and barcode: a price or barcode that did not exist in the cover year means a later edition.
• Paper: decades-old newsprint tans at the edges; bright white pages on an old date are a warning sign.
• Restoration: color touch, trimmed edges and replaced covers are common on expensive keys; a grading service such as CGC can detect them.

Shoot the front cover flat and straight on in even light, then the indicia and the back cover. For Blue Beetle, say which one you mean: the three first appearances are different titles from three publishers, so the masthead in the photo settles which book you have. ComicLens reads the title, issue number and cover art from the photo, and there are free scans every day.

Research and drafting were assisted by AI and checked line by line against the sources listed on this page. Prices are the figures shown by the named source on the date given; they change with the market, and a grade that trades about once a year can move a lot on a single sale.