DEADMAN #4

Cover shows strong gloss and vivid color with sharp corners and no visible creases or spine stress; there is a faint vertical scuff/scratch line running through the yellow beam area that may be a printing or pressing mark rather than damage. Edges appear clean with no chipping visible. The book is in a protective sleeve, which limits full assessment of edge wear. Interior and back cover were not assessed.

Deadman #4 falls mid-way through the seven-issue limited series DC published in 1986, the first sustained attempt to give Boston Brand a solo showcase since his Strange Adventures run of the late 1960s. Andrew Helfer's script leans on the mystical architecture of the character – Rama Kushna, the seer Vashnu, and the Sensei of the League of Assassins all figure in the arc – while Josu00e9 Luis Garcu00eda-Lu00f3pez supplies the interior art, with Tom Ziuko on color and John Costanza lettering under editor Janice Race. Garcu00eda-Lu00f3pez is the principal draw: his classicist figure work, best known to a wide audience through DC's licensing style guide, is unusually well suited to a weightless protagonist who moves through other people's bodies.

Commercially this is a mid-run Copper Age book from a limited series that saw normal 1986 distribution, and the market treats it accordingly. Supply is plentiful in high grade because the series arrived after collector-driven bagging and boarding had become standard, and demand is driven by run completists and by Garcu00eda-Lu00f3pez followers rather than by any first appearance or origin content. Raw copies move as dealer-stock and dollar-box material at fixed retail rather than through competitive bidding, and public auction results are sparse enough that individual sales carry little signal.

The buyer for this issue is typically assembling the complete 1986 mini alongside the Strange Adventures reprint volumes and the 1989 Deadman: Love After Death and Exorcism prestige books, or collecting Garcu00eda-Lu00f3pez interiors broadly. Because near-mint raw copies remain easy to source, certification is rarely economic except for registry builders, and the spread between a well-worn copy and a sharp unslabbed near-mint is narrow in absolute dollars. Grading pressure sits entirely at the top of the scale: a top-census slab commands a multiple of raw value, but that premium reflects scarcity of certified copies rather than scarcity of the book itself.