MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE ANNUAL #4

Cover shows strong gloss and vibrant color with sharp corners; a faint diagonal crease is visible near the upper left corner box and light handling wear along the top edge. Spine appears tight with no visible stress lines or color breaks in this photo. The book is in a protective plastic sleeve which creates some glare, slightly obscuring fine surface detail. Interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Marvel Two-In-One Annual #4, cover-dated December 1979, pairs the Thing with Black Bolt in the 34-page "A Mission of Gravity!" — a story plotted by Allyn Brodsky and scripted by David Michelinie, penciled by Jim Craig, and inked by Bob Budiansky and Bruce Patterson, behind a Joe Sinnott cover. Black Bolt comes to the Baxter Building seeking the Fantastic Four's help and ends up alongside Ben Grimm against Graviton, whose gravity-warping rampage draws in S.H.I.E.L.D. and Nick Fury, with Medusa, Lockjaw, and Alicia Masters also appearing. The issue closes out Graviton's early run with an apparent death, roughly two years after his introduction in Avengers, and sits in the Roger Stern-edited stretch of the title that also produced the Project: Pegasus arc; it was later collected in Marvel Masterworks: Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 5.

Market behavior matches its cataloging: a well-liked but non-key annual from a mid-tier Bronze Age team-up book. Raw copies are plentiful and trade as reader and run-filler material across the full spectrum from low grade through VF, with the newsstand and direct-market printings drawing no premium against one another at those levels. What price support exists comes from two directions — Thing completists working the Marvel Two-in-One run and its annuals, and Inhumans collectors who buy Black Bolt appearances broadly. Certification is rare enough that the census is thin at the top, which means high-grade slabs are priced off scarcity rather than off demand, and single sales can swing the reported average sharply.

Buyers here are run collectors, Thing and Inhumans specialists, and dealers assembling complete annual sets, and the book is most often acquired as part of a lot rather than as a targeted purchase. Low- and mid-grade copies are effectively fungible and should be expected to move quickly at bulk levels; the meaningful decision point is whether to certify, since grading costs exceed the value of anything short of a clean NM/MT copy. High-grade newsstand examples are the scarcer of the two printings in practice, and that is the version worth setting aside for census-driven buyers, while everything below VF belongs in the run-building inventory.