XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS: THE DRAGON’S TEETH #3

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creasing or spine stress in this photo; edges appear clean with only minor handling wear possible at the extreme corners. No color breaks, tears, or stains are visible on the front cover. Interior pages and back cover were not assessed, so grade is limited to what is visible here.

The Dragon's Teeth was a three-issue Topps mini-series published at the height of the Xena television boom, scripted by Roy Thomas with pencils by Robert Teranishi, digital inking and color by Digital Chameleon, and lettering by Ken Lopez. Thomas, long associated with mythological adaptation work, folds the Theban cycle into the show's continuity: this concluding chapter, "The Seven Against Thebes," places Xena and Gabrielle alongside Oedipus, Antigone and Creon as Adrastus's armies press the city. The painted cover is by Zina Saunders, and the issue was also distributed in a Lucy Lawless photo cover edition, a standard Topps practice for its licensed television titles.

Market behavior here is typical of late-1990s licensed television tie-ins. Print runs were adequate to demand, the books were widely collected by television fans rather than speculators, and supply in high grade remains easy because copies were bought and stored new. Demand is driven almost entirely by Xena completists and by collectors assembling Roy Thomas bibliographies; there is no first appearance or continuity event to anchor speculative interest. Certified copies are effectively absent from the market, which means a slab carries scarcity of certification rather than scarcity of the book itself, and buyers price it accordingly.

This is a run-filler for the Xena collector and a modest curiosity for Thomas readers, not an investment book. Low-grade copies move only as part of bulk or as reading copies, and mid-grade examples trade at little more than the original cover price. The realistic ceiling belongs to sharp, unread copies with clean spines and square corners, where the photo cover edition tends to find buyers slightly faster than the painted variant. Anyone considering certification should weigh submission cost against the likelihood of recovering it on resale.