SAME PUBLISHER. SAME YEARS.

BRZRKR — The Complete Comic King Guide

Keanu Reeves wrote a comic about an eighty-thousand-year-old immortal warrior who works for the American government in exchange for help finding out what he is. It is exactly as violent as that sounds. It ran twelve issues, it finished properly, and it is genuinely good.

It also arrived on the back of the largest crowdfunding campaign in comics history and became the biggest original comic launch in nearly thirty years. Comic shops ordered something in the region of SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN THOUSAND COPIES of the first issue. For scale, a healthy modern independent comic sells a few thousand.

And a copy of that first issue is worth about what you paid for it. Not because it is a bad comic — it is not — but because six hundred and fifteen thousand of anything is not rare. This page exists to explain that properly, because a lot of people bought this book as an investment in 2021 and deserve a straight answer rather than a shrug.

Quick Facts

Story: An immortal warrior, eighty thousand years old, cannot die and does not know why. The American government has found a use for him. He would like the truth in exchange.
Creators: Written by Keanu Reeves with Matt Kindt, drawn by Ron Garney, coloured by Bill Crabtree.
Publisher: BOOM! Studios, from March 2021.
Length: Twelve issues, March 2021 to March 2023 — a complete, finished story, which makes it an easy recommendation.
The launch: Comic shops ordered around six hundred and fifteen thousand copies of the first issue. It was the biggest original comic launch in nearly thirty years.
What is it worth: About cover price for a raw copy of the first issue. Roughly half of recorded sales are BELOW cover. A certified top-grade copy is a different conversation.
Where to start: Volume one, or the complete collection if you want the whole thing at once. It is short, it is finished, and it is in print.
Age guide: ⚠ Extremely violent — the premise is an immortal berserker and the book delivers on it. Adults only, and we will say so even though the cover makes it fairly obvious.

The Biggest Comic Launch in Thirty Years Is Worth About Five Dollars

Both halves of that sentence are true, and being able to explain why is the most useful thing anybody working behind a comic counter can learn. So here it is properly.

★★ TWO COMICS, ONE PUBLISHER, EIGHTEEN MONTHS APART. In September 2019, BOOM! Studios published a horror comic by a writer with a following but no mainstream fame, about a character nobody had heard of. Shops ordered around thirty-three thousand copies. In March 2021 the same publisher put out a comic written by KEANU REEVES, on the back of a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign, with coverage in the mainstream press. Shops ordered something like six hundred and fifteen thousand.

★ TODAY THE HORROR COMIC IS A FOUR-FIGURE KEY AND THE KEANU REEVES COMIC IS WORTH ABOUT COVER PRICE. Roughly eighty to one, in favour of the book nobody had heard of. The hype went one way and the value went the other, and the only variable that explains it is HOW MANY WERE PRINTED.

It is worth sitting with how counterintuitive that is. Everything about BRZRKR that made it exciting — the famous name, the record campaign, the press coverage — is precisely what guaranteed it would never be scarce. The publisher knew the demand before printing a single copy, so they printed for it. Nothing was left to chance and nothing was left rare.

★★ AND HERE IS THE PART THAT PROVES IT RATHER THAN JUST ASSERTING IT. The same issue one, in a variant cover limited to about a hundred and twenty-five copies, is worth MORE than a raw copy of that four-figure horror comic. Same book. Same publisher. Same famous name on the cover. The only difference between the five-dollar version and the several-hundred-dollar version is that one was printed six hundred thousand times and the other about a hundred and twenty-five. BRZRKR does not break the rule. It demonstrates it twice, in opposite directions, inside a single issue.

⚠ ONE HONEST QUALIFICATION, because we would rather give you the whole picture. Print run explains the DIRECTION of that gap completely, but not all of its SIZE — the orders differ by about eighteen to one and the prices by about eighty to one. The rest is staying power. The horror comic is a first appearance in a franchise that is still publishing, still expanding, and only at its halfway point. BRZRKR finished in 2023 and its spin-offs are inexpensive. Scarcity sets the floor; a story people keep coming back to sets the ceiling.

★ AND ONE MORE THING WORTH KNOWING BEFORE ANYBODY DECIDES THIS BOOK IS WORTHLESS: 'about cover price' is true of ORDINARY COPIES. A certified top-grade copy of the first issue is worth something like fourteen times cover. It is still not an investment, and grading one costs more than most copies are worth — but the flat statement that BRZRKR is worthless is not quite right either, and we would rather be accurate than dramatic.

The Run, Era by Era

Six years, one publisher, and a complete twelve-issue story with a proper ending. Every era, the one issue that represents it, and why collectors care — or, more often on this franchise, why they do not.

The Keys — Issues Everyone Hunts

There is no chase here, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose your trust. Issue one is worth about cover price raw, and roughly half of recorded sales are BELOW cover. Issues two through twelve are all a few dollars each, and not one of them has had a single certified top-grade sale in the past year except the finale, which managed one. That is not a criticism of the comic. It is arithmetic.

★★ WHAT IS GENUINELY WORTH MONEY HERE IS THE SCARCE VARIANTS, and they are worth knowing about because they are the exception that proves everything else on this page. The retailer virgin variants limited to a few hundred copies or fewer carry real prices — the scarcest of them, at about a hundred and twenty-five copies, is worth several hundred dollars raw and more again certified. There is also a metal cover on the final issue limited to ten copies. Same famous name, same book, tiny numbers, real value.

⚠ BUT WE WILL BE STRAIGHT ABOUT THOSE TOO, BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT LIQUID. Several of the scarce variants have had NO RECORDED SALES AT ALL IN THE PAST YEAR, and the ten-copy metal cover has not traded in over two years. They are display pieces with long sale cycles, not inventory. If you want one we will find it. If you own one and need to sell it, expect that to take months rather than days, and be suspicious of any published price with nothing behind it.

★ THE ONE ORDINARY PRINTING WITH A PREMIUM is the SECOND PRINTING of issue one, a foil edition which is worth roughly three times what a first printing is. That is an odd little fact and it is genuinely the only place in the standard run where the printing question changes the answer. The third, fourth and fifth printings are all worth about the same as the first, which is to say very little.

IF YOU WANT THE COMICS RATHER THAN THE SPECULATION, THE WHOLE THING IS A BARGAIN. Twelve issues, finished, all inexpensive, and one of the more satisfying complete runs a beginner can put together for almost nothing. We will happily build you the set. The four one-shot spin-offs are similarly cheap and are genuinely worth reading — one of them is by a writer with a serious mainstream reputation, and another brought back the novelist who co-wrote the prose book.

★★ AND THE COMPARISON WE THINK EVERY CUSTOMER SHOULD HEAR, because it is the most useful two minutes available at this counter. We keep this book next to SOMETHING IS KILLING THE CHILDREN deliberately. Same publisher, eighteen months apart. This one had a famous author, a record campaign and press coverage everywhere, and shops ordered six hundred and fifteen thousand copies. That one had none of it and shops ordered thirty-three thousand. That one is a four-figure book. This one is worth cover price. If you take one thing away from anything we tell you about collecting, take that.

★ A NOTE ON GRADING, since people ask: because so many copies were bought as speculation and bagged immediately, high-grade copies of issue one are extremely common. Grading does almost nothing for value here and costs more than most copies are worth. We will tell you that rather than take the submission fee.

Every Format You Can Buy

Screen & Series Status

Updated August 2026.

★ THE HONEST POSITION, AND WE WILL NOT DRESS IT UP: THERE IS NO HELLBOY FILM OR SERIES IN DEVELOPMENT RIGHT NOW. The character has been adapted three separate times with three different leads and no continuity between them — two films in the 2000s, a reboot in 2019, and a smaller horror film in 2024 that went straight to video on demand and led to nothing. Nothing has been announced since.

The question that comes up at the counter is the unmade third film from the original run, and the straight answer is that it was never made and no follow-up has been announced. Its star said earlier this year that it never came close and that people moved on, while adding that he would still do it if the right person turned up. It has NOT been formally cancelled, because there is nothing to cancel. We will not tell you it is dead and we will not tell you it is coming.

★★ WHICH IS WHY THE PITCH ON THIS FRANCHISE IS THE ART, AND WHY IT WORKS. Almost everything else in the shop leans on a screen adaptation to create demand. Hellboy does not have one and sells anyway, because the pages do the work. Opening an omnibus in front of a browsing customer converts at a rate we do not get from anything else on the graphic-novel wall. If you have never read it, ask us to show you rather than describing it.

★ AND THE ACTUAL NEWS THIS YEAR IS COMICS NEWS, WHICH SUITS IT. Mignola is returning to the Hell material this autumn for the first time in a decade, with a second Hell story following in December. There is a Victorian-era Hellboy Universe series running now, a young-Hellboy series, another new series in September, and a hardcover in November that Mignola is drawing himself. This is one of the busiest Hellboy years in a long time and none of it depends on a film. There is a Hellboy board game arriving this autumn too — ask us and we will find out whether we can get it.

⚠ ONE PIECE OF CONTEXT WE WILL BE STRAIGHT ABOUT, because customers who follow the industry will ask. Dark Horse's founder left the company earlier this year after forty years, and its parent group has announced plans to spin the business out as a separately listed company. Mignola's public comment was that he hopes things continue as they have and that time will tell. The reassuring part for anybody buying collected editions: MIGNOLA OWNS HELLBOY HIMSELF. The character is not an asset of the publisher, and Dark Horse is currently soliciting new Hellboy material into next year.

THE EVERGREEN PLAYBOOK: this franchise has no screen calendar to plan around, so the trigger is publication rather than adaptation. When Mignola himself writes or draws something new, stage it face-out with the omnibuses beside it — his direct involvement is what moves this material, not the brand. And keep volume one of the omnibus in standing reorder permanently, because the thing that sells Hellboy is somebody opening it.

Collector's Corner — Grading, Care & We Buy

Three habits govern this franchise at our counter, and the first one is really a policy about how we talk to people.

★★ WE TELL PEOPLE THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT THIS IS WORTH, EVEN WHEN IT IS THE WHOLE REASON THEY CAME IN. More people bring us BRZRKR expecting real money than any other modern comic, because they bought it in 2021 on the strength of the name and the campaign. We explain the print run, we show them the actual recorded sales on a screen, and we do it kindly. It costs us a sale and it earns a regular, and that trade has never once been a bad one.

WE CHECK WHICH EDITION BEFORE WE QUOTE. Standard covers, incentive variants, retailer exclusives and the scarce virgins are all in circulation and they are not interchangeable — the difference between the cheapest and the dearest version of issue one is several hundred times. ⚠ One correction to advice you may have heard elsewhere: there is NO crowdfunded version of issue one. The campaign produced collected books, so a single issue will never be one.

WE BUY IT CHEAP OR WE PASS KINDLY. It arrives in quantity, it is worth very little, and we will not pay speculative money for it on the strength of a film that has been in development for five years. If we cannot make you an offer worth your time, we will say so plainly rather than lowball you and hope.

AND THE THING THAT MAKES THIS TITLE ACTUALLY VALUABLE TO US: it brings people through the door who have never been in a comic shop. Someone arriving because Keanu Reeves wrote a comic is a customer we would otherwise never meet. The measure of a good conversation here is not whether they buy BRZRKR — most of them already own it. It is what they leave with alongside it.

On storage and grading, briefly: bag and board, boards behind the comic, upright and out of sunlight. And no, do not grade it. High-grade copies are everywhere because half the print run went straight into bags, and certification costs more than the book returns.