ACTION COMICS #665

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks. Slight edge wear is possible near the top corners but not clearly visible through the protective sleeve's glare. No stains, tears, or spine stress ticks are apparent in this photo. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is capped conservatively.

Action Comics #665, cover dated May 1991, carries the final pages of the nine-part "Time and Time Again" crossover before turning to a self-contained tale titled "Wake the Dead!" Roger Stern scripts, Tom Grummett pencils with inks by Jose Marzan Jr., and Grummett and Dennis Janke supply the cover. The story returns Superman to the present and to Lois Lane, who by this point in the post-Crisis continuity already knows his dual identity, then sets him against the voodoo villain Baron Sunday, who reanimates dead inmates to engineer a breakout from Stryker's Island. It is a competent, well-drawn chapter of the tightly coordinated four-title Superman publishing program of the early nineties, but it contains no first appearance, origin, or death.

Market behavior matches the cataloging. This is late-Copper Age product printed in high quantities for a title with heavy newsstand and subscription circulation, and surviving copies are abundant in high grade because collectors of the period bagged and boarded as a matter of habit. Raw copies move as run filler, priced by the handful rather than by the book, and dealers typically use issues like this to complete customer runs of the Stern-Grummett era or of the crossover itself, which is more readily satisfied through the collected edition. Certified examples appear only sporadically, and when they do the price reflects the cost of certification more than any underlying scarcity or demand.

Buyers fall into two groups: run collectors filling the long stretch of Action Comics between the 1986 relaunch and the Death of Superman period, and registry-minded completists who want a top-census slab of every issue in that run. The first group is price-sensitive and buys in volume, which keeps low- and mid-grade copies firmly in bulk territory regardless of how attractive the Grummett cover is. The second group is small but stable, and it supports a modest premium at the very top of the grade scale, where supply of true near-mint newsstand copies with sharp corners and unbroken spine gloss is thinner than raw census figures suggest. The sensible dealer approach is volume placement at the low end and patience at the certified end.