ThunderCats

ThunderCats — The Complete Comic King Guide

ThunderCats was a toy line and a cartoon before it was a comic, and the comic arrived almost immediately — Star Comics, Marvel’s imprint for younger readers, put the first issue on sale on 27 August 1985, seven months after the show premiered. It ran twenty-four issues.

Then it was never reprinted. Not once, in forty years. Those twenty-four issues have been genuinely difficult to find for most of the lifetime of most of the people who want them — and that ended this year, because Dynamite is finally collecting the whole run.

Dynamite also has the licence for new material, from Warner Bros. Discovery, and has been publishing since February 2024. There is a fifteen-part crossover with SilverHawks that finished a few days ago and a brand new ongoing series starting on 9 September. So this is a live shelf, not a nostalgia shelf.

And there is one thing worth knowing before anything else, because it is specific to buying and selling comics in Canada and almost nobody checks it.

Two things about what is actually inside these books, since almost nobody talks about them. The 1985 first issue is a straight adaptation of the pilot — David Michelinie working from Leonard Starr’s original teleplay — so it reads as the episode you remember, drawn by Jim Mooney and Brett Breeding, who were seasoned Marvel hands rather than a licensing afterthought. It is a children’s comic and it is a competent one. The current line is a different proposition entirely: Declan Shalvey wrote the relaunch, stayed on it for twenty-five issues, and then wrote and drew the crossover himself. The first issue sold heavily enough to need a second printing within five weeks. Whatever you think of licensed comics generally, neither of these was phoned in.

Quick Facts

Story: Refugees from a destroyed planet build a new home on Third Earth and fight a mummified sorcerer. It was a toy line and a cartoon first, and the comic arrived the same year.
Length: Four publishers across forty years. The original Star Comics run is 24 issues, 1985 to 1988; the current Dynamite line started in February 2024 and is still going.
Status: ★ LIVE, and unusually so. Dynamite has published continuously since 2024, finished a fifteen-part crossover in August 2026,
and launches a new ongoing on 9 September 2026.
Publisher: Star Comics (Marvel) 1985-88 · Marvel UK 1987-91 · WildStorm and DC 2002-05 · Dynamite since 2024, licensed from Warner Bros. Discovery.
⚠ Dynamite moved to Lunar for comic shops in July 2025.
Age guide: ⚠ TWO DIFFERENT ANSWERS. The 1985 comics are children’s comics — Star Comics was Marvel’s imprint for kids.
The current Dynamite line is rated TEEN by its own publisher.
Formats: The 1985 run, finally collected after forty years · a 592-page omnibus · the Dynamite line and its enormous variant family · a UK weekly nobody has ever reprinted.
At Comic King: We check the cover price, the page count and the barcode box on every ThunderCats number one that comes in. In that order, and here is why.

Check the Price on the Cover. Seventy-Five Cents Is the Canadian One.

In the middle of the 1980s, Marvel printed a separate run of some of its comics for the Canadian market with a Canadian price on the cover. ThunderCats #1 is one of them. The American copy says sixty-five cents. The Canadian copy says seventy-five.

They are the same comic. They are not the same book.

The certified population tells the story: for every twenty-six copies of the American edition that have been graded, there is roughly one Canadian one. And in top grade, the Canadian version has sold for something in the region of three times what the American one fetches.

Here is the part that matters at a counter in Edmonton. There is no price guide entry for it. Not a stale one, not a thin one — none. The main guide the trade uses has no record for the Canadian variant at all, which means two things happen. The first is that its sales quietly land in the American book’s figures instead, dragging them around in both directions. The second, and the one that costs people money, is that when someone brings one in, there is nothing to look it up in. It gets priced as an ordinary copy because that is the only number anyone can find.

We are in Canada. This is not an exotic edge case here — it is what walks through the door. So we check the cover price on every ThunderCats first issue, every time.

One honest caveat, and we would rather give it to you than pretend the ground is firmer than it is. Collectors draw a distinction between a true Canadian edition and a copy that simply carries a seventy-five cent price, and the tells are said to be the barcode, a distribution code under the date, and which advertisement is on the back cover. That distinction comes from the collecting community rather than from anything Marvel ever published, and we have only found it stated in one place. We use it, we think it is probably right, and we will not pretend it is a documented fact.

While the book is in your hand there are two other things to look at, and both are on the outside.

Count the pages. ThunderCats #1 went to three printings, and the second and third carry the same December 1985 cover date and the same sixty-five cent price as the first. Nothing on the cover distinguishes them. But the first printing is thirty-six pages and the later two are thirty-two, and both later printings are worth less. If you can flip the book, you can tell.

Then look at the top left corner. If there is a barcode box rather than the direct-market box, it is a newsstand copy — sold in supermarkets and corner shops rather than comic stores. Newsstand copies survived in worse condition, so in high grade they carry a real premium, well over double in the top grade. But raw, ungraded, a newsstand copy actually trades below a direct one, because most of them are beaten up. It is the one book on this page where the same feature is worth more in a slab and less out of it — and the grading companies do not put the word newsstand on the label, so you have to see it yourself.

The Run, Era by Era

Four publishers, forty years, and — unusually for this site — a first issue that really is the first thing.

The Keys — Issues Everyone Hunts

Before the keys, something worth saying plainly, because we spend a lot of these pages telling people that the famous first issue is not actually the first appearance.

On ThunderCats, it is.

We went looking hard for something earlier — that is the pattern on licensed toy properties, and it has turned up seven times running on other titles here. It is not here. The LJN action figures came packed with a fold-out catalogue, not a mini-comic. The British weekly did not start until March 1987, sixteen months later. The American ThunderCats magazine started in 1987 too. And a dealer catalogue listing forty-four separate ThunderCats titles across every publisher contains no giveaway, no promo, no ashcan and no mini-comic of any kind. Star Comics #1 is the first ThunderCats comic, and you can buy it as such with a clear conscience.

One footnote, in case someone shows you an app that says otherwise: there is an earlier ThunderCats item, and it is Marvel Age #31 from October 1985 — but it is a promotional article about the forthcoming comic, not a story. An earlier appearance in print, yes. An earlier comic, no.

So the key is the 1985 first issue, and it is a good one: important, cheap, and genuinely liquid. It trades something like thirteen times a month in clean single-copy sales, which is more than anything else in the franchise by a wide margin. Buy the direct edition, raw, in very fine or better, having checked the price, the page count and the corner box.

It is also the only ThunderCats comic in existence that is worth having graded.

We ran that properly, rather than guessing — what share of copies actually reach each grade according to the certified population, what those grades genuinely sell for, net of selling fees, against what a submission really costs a Canadian shop once shipping and brokerage are in. The 1985 first printing clears comfortably, and it keeps clearing even if you assume the grading outcomes come in at half the rate the population suggests. Everything else fails: the second and third printings, the last issue, the WildStorm books, and the modern Dynamite first issue all lose money in a slab.

There is a ceiling on it, though, and it is lower than most people expect. Pay too much for the raw copy and the submission stops paying for itself however nice the book looks — so the sum only works if you bought well in the first place. Ask us before you send anything away.

And a warning about the modern books, because it runs the other way. More than thirty Dynamite-era ThunderCats covers reach the top grade on over eighty-four percent of submissions — one of them at nearly ninety-eight percent. When almost every copy comes back at the top grade, the grade is not telling anyone anything, and the fee is simply gone.

Two numbers you may be shown that we would not stand behind. There is a top-grade figure published for the third printing that rests on one single sale from April 2022, more than four years ago; it is the most misleading number in this franchise. And the grade-ten figure on the 1985 book is arithmetic rather than a market — no copy of it has ever been certified at that grade.

Every Format You Can Buy

The routing here is genuinely easy, which makes a change. If you want the one you remember, the Classic Years collection. If you want the modern take, Dynamite volume one. If you are collecting rather than reading, the 1985 first issue and nothing else. What you should not do is start in a pile of Dynamite variants, and the reason is the next section.

⚠ A word about those variants, because this is where money gets lost. Dynamite’s 2024 first issue has at least forty-five different covers — twelve regular ones including foil, gold foil and virgin editions, fourteen retailer incentives running from one-in-ten up to one-in-two-hundred, and at least twenty store exclusives on top. No source anywhere lists them all. The plain cover A is an ordinary comic and prices like one. Two or three of the others genuinely trade at ten times that. And the published guide figures on this issue are wrong in both directions at once — badly overstating the common cover and badly understating two of the valuable ones. We identify the exact cover before we say a number, and so should anyone selling you one.

Screen & Series Status

Updated August 2026: there is a film announcement and very little behind it yet.

On 22 June 2026, at the Annecy animation festival, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation announced it is developing an animated ThunderCats feature. That is real and it is on the record. What does not exist: a director, a voice cast, a release date, a release window, or even a confirmed animation style. The honest summary is that Warner Bros. have said they are making one and nobody has said when.

It is muddier than that, actually. A separate live-action ThunderCats film has been attached to the director Adam Wingard since March 2021, and he was still calling it an active project in early 2024. Warner Bros. has not said whether the newly announced animated film replaces it, absorbs it, or runs alongside it. Anyone telling you they know is guessing.

The screen history behind all that: the original series premiered on 23 January 1985 and ran 130 episodes, made by Rankin/Bass with the animation done in Tokyo. Cartoon Network rebooted it in 2011 for twenty-six episodes and one season. ThunderCats Roar followed in 2020, restyled as a comedy, and was cancelled after a season — it is the least-liked thing the franchise has produced and we would not lead with it.

We are not going to tell you where to stream it, incidentally. Every listing we could check was American, and one of the services involved does not operate in Canada at all.

Collector's Corner — Grading, Care & We Buy

★ BUY ON SIGHT: ThunderCats #1 from 1985, first printing, direct edition, ungraded, very fine or better. Check the price, the page count and the corner box before you commit. It is the most liquid book in the franchise by a distance and the only one worth grading.

The interesting thing about the film announcement is that we could actually measure whether it did anything, and it is the first time on this site that a screen event has moved a price rather than just moved attention. Across the window either side of the June announcement, the 1985 first issue rose in top grade and in the grade below it. A control book — Masters of the Universe number one, same imprint, same year, same kind of collector, no ThunderCats in it — fell over exactly the same period. The gap between them is about twenty percentage points in both grades.

We would rather show you the caveat than hide it: there are only a handful of sales on the far side of that event, so the size of the move is soft. What is not soft is the direction, because it holds in two independent grades while the control goes the other way.

What is genuinely unusual is the mechanism. Submissions to the grading companies stayed flat on ThunderCats through the announcement while the price went up — and the number of copies changing hands actually fell. That is not buyers arriving, that is sellers deciding to hold. Meanwhile the control book took a large surge in submissions and its price dropped. More slabs, less money, on the book that had no news. It is a clean illustration of something we say a lot: supply moves prices at least as much as demand does.

The Dynamite relaunch back in 2024 is worth separating out, because it did something different. It lifted the middle of the grade ladder on the old first issue and drove people to get copies graded, but it did not lift the top grade at all. A relaunch pulls up the affordable copies. It does not move the expensive one.

On buying: ThunderCats arrives here in two completely different shapes. The 1980s copies come from people who bought them as children, and those want checking one at a time. Modern Dynamite copies arrive as variant piles from people who bought them as an investment, and most of that pile is ordinary stock with two or three exceptions buried in it. We sort both honestly and we will tell you which half of your pile is which.

On care: these are ordinary paper comics of their era. Bag them, board them, keep them out of the sun and out of the basement. The 1985 issues are approaching forty years old and the newsstand copies especially have usually had a hard life, which is exactly why the clean ones are worth what they are.