TALES OF SUSPENSE #87

Cover shows moderate wear consistent with a Silver Age book: mild corner rounding at top left and bottom corners, some surface wear and light rubbing to the red ink at the spine edge, and a visible vertical crease/spine stress along the left edge. Slight color fading is noticeable in the red background near the top and there appears to be minor edge wear along the right border. The book is in a protective sleeve, which limits full assessment of gloss and surface texture, and the interior and back cover were not visible for grading.

Tales of Suspense #87 arrived in March 1967 near the end of the title's long run as a split book pairing Iron Man and Captain America adventures before the series folded into standalone Captain America with issue #100. By this point Stan Lee was overseeing scripts across the line, with Gene Colan (credited in the period as Adam Austin) providing distinctive, moody artwork on the Iron Man feature, while the Captain America back-up carried the visual DNA of Jack Kirby's foundational work on the character. The issue sits squarely within the mature Silver Age Marvel house style, reflecting the era's escalating Cold War-inflected science fiction and espionage plotting that defined Iron Man's solo adventures.

The market data shows a typical mid-run Silver Age curve: values stay compressed and stable through the low-to-mid grades (roughly $42-48 from 4.5 through 7.5), before climbing steadily at 9.0 and above, then spiking sharply at the top of the census. With only five 9.8 copies recorded against a much larger surviving population in the 330-370 range, the top grade commands a substantial premium driven by scarcity rather than raw demand intensity — this is a book collected primarily by Iron Man and Captain America completists and Silver Age Marvel run-builders rather than a marquee character-first-appearance audience.

Expect this issue to trade as a steady, unspectacular commodity in low-to-mid grades, moving through dealer inventory and online marketplaces at modest prices with little urgency. High-grade certified copies, particularly at 9.4 and above, see meaningfully stronger competition as census population shrinks and condition rarity becomes the dominant value driver, making the 9.8 tier a genuine outlier price point reserved for advanced Iron Man or Silver Age Marvel specialists rather than casual buyers.