TALES OF THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #349

Cover shows strong gloss and vivid color with sharp corners and no visible creases or spine stress. No price box barcode is present, replaced by cover price info without UPC, consistent with a direct edition; the small logo-like corner box confirms this. Minor handling wear may be present but not visible at this resolution; interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is capped conservatively.

Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes #349 (July 1987) belongs to the reprint phase of DC's Legion double-track experiment. After issue #325 the Tales title stopped producing new material and began reprinting the deluxe Baxter-paper Legion of Super-Heroes (1984 series) roughly a year behind schedule, giving readers outside the direct market a cheaper route to the same stories. This issue reprints Legion of Super-Heroes #24, scripted by Paul Levitz with pencils by Norm Breyfogle and inks by Mike DeCarlo, a chapter turning on the Sensor Girl mystery and featuring Timber Wolf, Lightning Lass, and Shvaughn Erin. The described copy is the direct edition, distinguished by the higher one-dollar cover price against the seventy-five-cent newsstand printing.

Market demand here is set by the book's status as second-printing material. Collectors who want the story generally pursue the Baxter original, which carries the better paper stock, the first-printing designation, and the series numbering that price guides track; the Tales reprint trades as run filler. Copper Age DC supply is deep, this stretch of the title was printed in commercial quantities, and the issue carries no first appearance, origin, or death to anchor speculative interest. Consequently raw copies clear at dollar-bin and near-dollar-bin levels regardless of whether they present as low grade or solid mid grade, and the spread between those two brackets stays narrow because buyers pay for the slot in the run rather than for condition.

The realistic buyer is a Legion completist assembling the full #314-354 span, or a dealer filling a run lot for a convention box. Certified copies are effectively nonexistent and would remain economically irrational to create, since submission costs exceed the underlying value of the book; any high-grade slab that reaches the market prices off the cost of certification rather than off collector competition. For inventory purposes this is a book to move in bulk, ideally bundled with adjacent issues of the reprint block, where the run's completeness rather than any single issue carries the value.