Detective Comics #31

Batman's third cover

Batman was a few months old when Detective Comics #31 reached newsstands. He had debuted in Detective Comics #27 that spring, and the anthology still split its 68 pages among a crowd of other sleuths and adventurers: Buck Marshall, Speed Saunders, Cosmo the Phantom of Disguise, Larry Steele and Slam Bradley among them. The issue carries a September 1939 cover date, but the Catalog of Copyright Entries puts its publication on July 30, 1939. It cost 10 cents.

The cover was only the third time Batman had appeared on the front of Detective Comics. Bob Kane drew and signed it: an enormous, brooding Batman hangs over a dark castle while, below him, a hooded villain carries an unconscious woman. It is dark, moody and almost wordless, and later commentators have called it arguably the greatest cover in the character's history.

The book appeared under the indicia of Detective Comics Inc., the company that became DC, with Vin Sullivan credited as editor.

Fox, Kane and the hands behind them

"Batman Versus the Vampire" runs 10 pages and was the first half of a two-part tale. The main bibliographic index of comics credits the script to Gardner Fox. Other accounts credit Part 1 to Fox together with Bill Finger, Batman's long-uncredited co-creator, and Part 2 to Fox alone. The sources do not agree, so this page gives Fox the lead credit and notes the dispute. With these two stories, Fox had written more Batman stories than Finger up to that point.

Bob Kane is credited with the pencils and inks, and his signature appears on both the cover and the story. Sheldon Moldoff, working uncredited, ghosted the backgrounds. Fox had already given Batman his first super-villain, Doctor Death, and his first two-part story; he would later help create the Flash and the Justice League.

The same issue holds a 13-page Slam Bradley story written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster, the pair who created Superman. Few single comics from 1939 gather that much of the founding talent of the superhero business between two covers.

Hypnotists, werewolves and a gadget that stayed

The story opens with Batman stopping his fiancee, Julie Madison, from killing someone while she is under hypnosis. A doctor who has himself been hypnotized sends her on a cruise to Paris, straight into a trap. Batman follows her across the Atlantic and on to a remote castle, where he confronts the Monk, a red-robed hypnotist who is both vampire and werewolf. In Part 2, in the next issue, Batman ends the threat with silver bullets.

It was a story of firsts. Batman throws the Batarang for the first time and flies the Batgyro, the first of his bat-vehicles and the forerunner of the Batplane. Julie Madison, Bruce Wayne's first love interest, makes her debut; she later became an actress in the stories and made her last Golden Age appearance in Detective Comics #49 in 1941. The Monk is the second super-villain Batman ever faced and his first with supernatural powers, and his red robe made him the first costumed foe Batman fought.

The story is also the first to say outright that Batman worked in New York City, a year before Gotham City was named, and the first in which he left his home city to fight crime. It was the first Batman story with supernatural horror at its center.

Summer 1939

The comic went on sale in a summer of spectacle and dread. The New York World's Fair had opened on April 30. Lou Gehrig ended his 2,130-game streak on May 2 and gave his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium on July 4. Superman had just been given his own comic book in June. Three days after this issue's publication date, Albert Einstein signed the letter warning President Roosevelt that uranium could be used to build a bomb.

By the time September arrived, war was under way in Europe, and on September 5 the United States declared its neutrality. A story that sent an American hero across the ocean to a castle full of monsters read differently within weeks of being printed. The Wizard of Oz premiered in August and Gone with the Wind in December; the gothic, movie-serial mood of the cover belonged to that year's screens as much as to its comics.

The census, the record and the paperboy's copy

No print run for the issue is documented in the sources consulted. What is documented is how few copies survive in high grade. In June 2024 a CGC 5.0 copy was described as one of 61 unrestored copies on the CGC census, with seven graded higher. In April 2025 the census showed 66 copies with Universal grades, two at 7.0 and two higher. By January 2026 it listed 118 copies in all, 73 of them with Universal grades and only 10 of those at FN- 5.5 or better.

The 5.0 copy that anchors this entry sold at an online auction in New York on June 26, 2024, for $174,340 after 18 bids. Five months later, on November 24, 2024, a CGC 4.0 copy brought $174,000 at an auction held November 21 to 24, in which several other early Batman comics also passed six figures.

The finest copy ever offered publicly came out of a family's storage. A teenager working as a paperboy in rural Maine during the Depression spent his earnings on comics fresh off the rack, among them Detective Comics #27 and #31. The family later moved to a dry desert town in California, and decades later his daughter found the books in trash bags while clearing out a house in Los Angeles. The #31 had stayed raw, never even bagged, for 86 years. The auctioneer admitted he read it before sending it off to be graded.

Graded CGC 7.0, one of only two copies at that grade, it sold at auction in Lambertville, New Jersey, on April 22, 2025, for $329,400 against an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000, a record for the issue. The whole collection brought $1,317,280, led by its Detective Comics #27 at $683,200. Before that sale, the highest-graded unrestored copy ever sold publicly had been a 6.0, in 2017.

Lower grades trade too. A CGC 2.0 sold for $91,500 in September 2025 against a $50,000 to $80,000 estimate, a CGC 3.0 crossed the block in February 2026, and even a coverless, ungraded copy brought $4,392 in September 2026.

How to know it, and why it lasts

A genuine copy has the 10-cent price, the September 1939 date and Kane's signed image of Batman over the castle. Because the cover has been reproduced so often, including as modern facsimiles, the giveaway is the whole book: the original is a 68-page anthology with Slam Bradley and the other detective features inside. Graded copies are labeled either Universal, meaning unrestored, or restored, and in January 2026 some 45 of the 118 graded copies did not carry Universal grades, which is why unrestored copies command a premium.

The cover has been saluted for decades. In 1970 Denny O'Neil and Irv Novick paid tribute to the story in Batman #227, with Neal Adams recreating the cover. Gerry Conway revived the Monk and his accomplice Dala in Detective Comics #515 in 1982, Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson drew on the tale for Batman: Gothic in 1990, Matt Wagner retold it as Batman and the Mad Monk in 2006, and the Monk made a cameo in Tom King's Batman #14 in 2016. The original story was collected in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told in 1988.

Among collectors the issue is counted as the third most valuable Batman comic, behind Detective Comics #27 and Batman #1, and the second most valuable issue of its title. A standard price guide ranks it ninth among the Top 100 Golden Age comics.

The numbers

Cover price

10 cents

Pages

68; the Batman story is 10, Slam Bradley 13

Print run

Not documented in the sources consulted

Census, June 2024

61 unrestored copies; seven graded above 5.0

Census, April 2025

66 Universal-grade copies; two at 7.0 and two higher

Census, January 2026

118 copies; 73 Universal, 10 of them at 5.5 or better; six at 3.0 with 27 higher

Known copies

No count outside the census is published in the sources consulted

Timeline

1. May 1939

   Batman debuts in Detective Comics #27.

2. Jul 30, 1939

   Detective Comics #31 is published, according to the copyright catalog.

3. Sep 1939

   The issue's cover date. The Batarang, the Batgyro, Julie Madison and the Monk all appear for the first time.

4. Mar 1941

   Julie Madison makes her last Golden Age appearance, in Detective Comics #49.

5. 1970

   Neal Adams recreates the cover for Batman #227, whose story by Denny O'Neil and Irv Novick salutes the original.

6. 1982

   Gerry Conway brings back the Monk and Dala in Detective Comics #515.

7. 1988

   "Batman Versus the Vampire" is reprinted in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told.

8. 2006

   Matt Wagner retells the story as Batman and the Mad Monk.

9. Mar 7, 2017

   A CGC 6.0, the highest-graded unrestored copy sold publicly until 2025, changes hands.

10. Jun 26, 2024

    The CGC 5.0 copy sells at an online auction in New York for $174,340.

11. Nov 24, 2024

    A CGC 4.0 copy sells for $174,000.

12. Apr 22, 2025

    The paperboy's copy, CGC 7.0, sells in Lambertville, New Jersey, for a record $329,400.

13. Sep 9, 2025

    A CGC 2.0 copy sells for $91,500.

14. Jan 2026

    The CGC census lists 118 copies, 73 with Universal grades.

15. Feb 26, 2026

    A CGC 3.0 copy sells at auction.

16. Sep 26, 2026

    A coverless, ungraded copy sells for $4,392.

The world in 1939

• Apr 30, 1939

  The New York World's Fair opens.

• May 2, 1939

  Lou Gehrig's streak of 2,130 consecutive games ends.

• Jun 1939

  Superman gets his own comic book.

• Jul 4, 1939

  Gehrig tells Yankee Stadium he is "the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

• Aug 2, 1939

  Albert Einstein signs the letter to President Roosevelt about the potential of uranium for a bomb.

• Aug 15, 1939

  The Wizard of Oz premieres in Hollywood.

• Sep 5, 1939

  With war under way in Europe, the United States declares its neutrality.

• Dec 15, 1939

  Gone with the Wind premieres in Atlanta.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Detective Comics #31 is number 27 of 100 in the comics entries of the FLOAT 100. 92 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (41 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The Batarang and the Batgyro, Batman's first flying machine, both debut in this issue.
• This was the first Batman story to say he worked in New York City. Gotham City came a year later.
• The Monk was the second super-villain Batman ever fought, after Doctor Death, and the first with supernatural powers.
• The same 68 pages include a Slam Bradley story by Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
• The record copy was bought new by a paperboy in rural Maine and sat unbagged for 86 years before it was graded.
• The auctioneer who sold the record copy read it before sending it off to be graded.