ACTION COMICS #670

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks. Spine appears tight with no stress lines visible in this photo. The book is in a protective sleeve which limits full assessment of edges; interior and back cover were not assessed. Minor handling wear cannot be ruled out due to glare from the plastic sleeve.

Published with an October 1991 cover date, "Skullduggery" follows the wreckage left by Monarch's rampage in Armageddon 2001, with the collapse of S.T.A.R. Labs turning metagene test subject Joseph Martin into the radioactive villain who would become the modern Atomic Skull. Roger Stern scripts, Bob McLeod handles interior pencils with Denis Rodier inking, and Dan Jurgens and McLeod supply the cover featuring Waverider alongside Superman in the Metropolis disaster zone. The issue sits inside the tightly woven weekly Superman crossover machine of the early 1990s, with the Justice League International cast, the Guardian, Deadman, and Emil Hamilton filling out a story that feeds directly into Superman: The Man of Steel #5.

Demand rests almost entirely on the Atomic Skull debut. The character carries a recognizable name from later media, including Justice League Unlimited and animated Superman features, which keeps a steady trickle of character collectors hunting the issue, but he has never anchored a major storyline and the print run for a 1991 Action Comics is very large. That combination produces the familiar Copper Age pattern: unlimited raw supply at low prices, no depth of auction records in mid grades, and value concentrated in a thin population of high-grade certified copies where white pages and clean edges are the scarce commodity rather than the book itself.

Buyers divide into two groups. Superman completists and Armageddon 2001 crossover collectors want a presentable reader and treat any VF or better copy as interchangeable, which is why raw grades from Good through Fine trade as near-bulk merchandise and why grading costs exceed the return on all but top-census examples. The registry and first-appearance crowd pursues certified 9.8s, where the small census supports a genuine multiple over raw copies and where sales are episodic rather than continuous. Dealers should expect this book to move quickly at modest money in raw form and to require patience, and the right audience, at the certified end.