The 1966 Topps Batman PSA 10 That Does Not Exist

On December 11, 2025, Heritage Auctions hammered a 1966 Topps Batman "Black Bat" #1 - "The Batman," in PSA 9 - for $131,250. A record for the card, and nearly triple what a PSA 9 brought eighteen months earlier. Six figures for a card that is, by the grader's own standard, not perfect.

Which raises the question this article exists to answer: where is the perfect one? Batman's first trading card - the #1 in the first series of the first Batman set ever printed, painted by pulp legend Norm Saunders with Bob Powell - has been submitted to PSA for a quarter century. Not one copy has ever graded GEM MT 10. The ceiling is 9, and there are only thirteen of those.

The wall, in numbers

The population record tells the story better than any theory. Back in 2009, PSA's own Sports Market Report noted that of 102 copies of card #1 submitted, there were no PSA 10s and just seven PSA 9s. Sixteen years of grading later, per the Card Ladder population data cited when the record sale hit (December 2025), the count of 9s had climbed to thirteen - and the count of 10s was still zero.

And the wall runs right through the rest of the 1966 run. PSA's set retrospectives note that the Riddler Back set's own #1 card had never graded above PSA 8 across its early submissions, and the Blue Bat series opener - #1B, "The Joker's Icy Jest" - showed no 10s and just two 9s as of the same reporting. First cards, as a class, did not survive 1966 well.

Why the first card never had a chance

The #1 curse is the oldest condition story in the hobby, and this card is its poster child. Kids sorted their cards in numerical order, and the #1 rode on top of the stack - taking the rubber band, the pocket, the shoebox lid, the thumb. As one market analysis of the December sale put it, the card's placement at the top of collector stacks made it uniquely subject to wear. The card that mattered most got handled most.

Then there is 1966 itself. These were five-cent packs printed for children at mid-60s Topps production standards - centering wandered, cuts ran rough, print defects were routine. A PSA 10 has to clear two filters at once: it has to be born essentially perfect off a 1966 press, and then it has to spend sixty years untouched. Either one is rare. Both together, on the single most-handled card in the set, has so far proven to be a population of zero.

The villains got the gem

Here is the detail that makes the whole thing sting: a PSA 10 of the 1966 Topps Riddler (#36) exists. The Riddler achieved perfection. The Penguin's henchmen scattered across the middle of the set have their high-grade survivors. But the Caped Crusader himself - the card the entire hobby calls Batman's rookie - tops out at 9. The villains won this one.

What condition is worth

The grade ladder on this card is the steepest in non-sport collecting, and recent sales draw it plainly:

Read that middle of the table again. A PSA 9 with an off-center qualifier - the same number on the flip, with an asterisk - brought about three percent of what the clean 9 did. This is a market that pays for perfection and punishes footnotes, which is exactly why the missing 10 matters so much.

Could one still turn up?

In theory, yes - a pack-fresh copy in an attic, or a monster raw example that has never seen a grading room. But consider the incentive now attached to it. With the clean 9 at $131,250, a first PSA 10 of this card would be a mid-six-figure event at minimum, and every dealer, auction house and crack-and-resubmit specialist in the hobby knows it. That bounty has been flushing high-grade candidates out of hiding for years. Every year the 10 fails to appear with that much money hunting for it, the likelier it becomes that it simply does not exist to be found.

We won't put a price on a card with no comp - that is a guess, and this index does not publish guesses. What we can tell you is what the market is doing right now: the index tracks every live listing of the 1966 Topps Batman #1 across every grade, raw included, on its 1966 Batman set index, and logs a confirmed sale only when a listing verifiably ends. If the perfect copy ever surfaces, the ledger here will show what the world decided it was worth - to the penny.

Population figures per PSA's Sports Market Report (2009 snapshot) and the Card Ladder population data cited at the December 2025 sale; population counts shift as new submissions grade. Sale prices per Heritage Auctions and reported eBay results, December 2025.