HAUNTED #4

This photo shows an interior story/splash page (captioned 'Driven to Destruction') rather than the actual front cover, so the cover's true condition cannot be assessed and the book is treated as effectively coverless for grading purposes, warranting the minimum 0.3 grade. The visible paper is heavily browned/tanned with age, there is a hard vertical fold/crease running through the page, and the edges show wear consistent with a well-handled Golden Age pamphlet. No assessment of the actual front cover, spine, or interior pages was possible from this single interior image.

Haunted was one of Charlton Comics' Bronze Age horror-mystery anthologies, and this fourth issue carries interior work by Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange whose stint at Charlton produced some of the most atmospheric short horror strips of the era. The book collects self-contained tales of the supernatural in the mystery-anthology format that defined the period, hosted by the genre trappings that made Charlton's line a low-budget but creatively fertile corner of 1970s comics. For readers, the draw is Ditko's spare, moody linework applied to short-form horror rather than any single landmark story or first appearance.

This is a common-run anthology title from a second-tier publisher, and its market reflects that: the certified population is very small, with only a handful of graded copies on record and thin sales history to anchor pricing. Demand is driven almost entirely by Ditko's involvement, which gives the issue a steady collector base among completists chasing his Charlton output. High-grade certified examples are genuinely scarce because Charlton's newsprint and production standards make well-preserved copies uncommon, so the few top-graded slabs carry a meaningful premium over what raw copies fetch.

Buyers here are principally Ditko specialists and Bronze Age horror-anthology collectors rather than speculators, and the book trades accordingly. Raw mid-grade copies change hands inexpensively, while the value concentrates sharply at the top of the grade ladder where certified scarcity meets the Ditko name. With no 9.8 on the census, a hypothetical top slab would command a rarity premium, but the shallow demand pool keeps this an affordable specialist pickup across most grades.