The 2025 CPV Price Guide for Canadian Price Variants free online guide caters to collectors interested in Canadian Price Variant (CPV) newsstand comics from Marvel (October 1982 to August 1986), DC (October 1982 to September 1988), and other publishers. This year’s edition is dedicated to Bill Alexander, one of the CPV guide’s co-founders who passed away unexpectedly in July 2024 at the age of 66.
Back in 2010, historian and Overstreet Advisor Jon McClure introduced the term “Type 1A” in The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #40 article “A History of Publisher Experimentation and Variant Comic Books” to describe this type of cover price variant. Collector interest in Type 1A Price Variant comics has continued to build since then, and McClure’s updated variant article was published in The Overstreet Guide to Grading Comics Sixth Edition in 2021.
The first edition of the CPV guide was released in 2017, by McClure, fellow Overstreet Advisors Doug Sulipa, Bill Alexander, and Paul Clairmont, and historian Angelo Virone, in collaboration with Benjamin Nobel of the Rare Comics Blog.
In subsequent years, the team was joined by former CBCS International Comics Specialist Tim Bildhauser, MyComicShop.com President Conan Saunders, CaptCan Comics proprietor Jayden Mitchell, and Overstreet Advisor and GPAnalysis writer Dr. Greg Holland. This year, Toronto-based CPV researcher Salvatore Miceli joins the team, stepping into Alexander’s role.
The 2025 edition features new original articles by the CPV guide team as well as two articles from guest contributors David Greer and David Pietila. Topics range from CPVs in the DC/LEGO Bionicle comic series, to analysis of the current state of the CPV comic book marketplace. GPAnalysis contributed their CPV sales data for a newly updated article by Greg Holland that analyzes the recent marketplace sales of CGC-graded CPVs. It reveals that the “CPV 9.8 multiplier” – an indication of the current market premium given to CPVs over regular 9.8 copies – has expanded to 2.9x.
“Interest in our online guide continues to ride the larger wave of growing collector interest in newsstand comics broadly, with grand total site-wide hits since we began tracking them in November 2019 now surpassing 12 million,” Nobel said. “Following CGC’s recognition of newsstand comics on their labels starting in 2022, more collectors have been researching newsstand comics and in turn discovering the existence of the newsstand exclusive US published 1980s cover price variant newsstand comics that our guide was created to cover – especially the highly popular keys in our guide’s Top 100 list, like Secret Wars #8 and Amazing Spider-Man #238 and #252.”
Together the collaboration team announced the release of their eighth edition, The 2025 Newsstand CPV Price Guide for Canadian Price Variants (Type 1A), available to read for free. It has been published online at cpvpriceguide.com.
