WHERE MONSTERS DWELL #4

Cover shows good gloss and bright colors with sharp corners overall; a few small vertical stress lines/creases are visible in the dark background near the top and center-left, and slight edge wear at the bottom corners. There is minor surface rubbing/scuffing along the mid-right edge. The book is in a protective sleeve, and interior and back cover were not assessed.

Where Monsters Dwell #4 belongs to Marvel's early-1970s wave of black-and-white-to-color reprint anthologies, which recycled pre-Fantastic Four "giant monster" stories from the company's 1950s Atlas incarnation. These titles served as inexpensive filler for the newsstand, repackaging stories originally drawn by artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko for a new generation of readers during the horror-comics revival of the era. The series carries no first appearances of continuity-significant characters and no landmark creator work original to this issue; its interest lies almost entirely in genre nostalgia and the giant-monster aesthetic that predates the Marvel Universe proper.

Market data reflects a low-demand, high-supply title: a substantial 72-copy Universal census with sporadic sales activity across most grades, and pricing that stays flat through the mid grades before climbing sharply only at the top of the census. The gap between grade 4 ($16 average) and 9.8 ($475) is driven almost entirely by rarity at the high end—only ten 9.8s exist on census—rather than by any narrative significance, and the thin sales history at 9.6/9.4 confirms that demand is concentrated among condition-census chasers rather than character or story collectors.

This is a book that trades as a commodity rather than a key: low- and mid-grade copies move cheaply and steadily to genre completists and Bronze Age horror/monster readers, while pristine slabs attract a narrower pool of census-registry collectors willing to pay a premium purely for top-of-census standing. Buyers should expect abundant raw supply at modest prices, with value concentrated almost entirely in the 9.6-9.8 tier.