THE WEST COAST AVENGERS #36

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or major spine stress; a small mark is visible near the top right of the title logo. The direct edition box art (black Spider-Man icon) is crisp, and colors appear vibrant with no fading. Slight edge wear may be present but not clearly visible under the current lighting/glare from the protective sleeve. Interior pages and back cover were not assessed, so grade is capped at 9.0 pending full inspection.

Cover dated September 1988, this installment closes out the Eastern European arc that Steve Englehart built around Hank Pym's search for his first wife, Maria Trovaya. Pencils and cover art are by Al Milgrom with inks by Mike Machlan, the art team that defined the visual character of the title's second half. The story places Pym in a Bratislava prison and in conflict with his own teammates, ending with a mutated Maria and Pym's departure from the group — a beat that matters to readers tracking the character's long, uneven arc from Ant-Man through Yellowjacket and beyond. Hawkeye, Mockingbird, Wonder Man, Tigra, Moon Knight and the Wasp are on hand, with The Voice and Quicksilver also appearing.

Market-wise this is a mid-run Copper Age Marvel with high print survivorship and no first appearance to carry it. Demand is driven almost entirely by run collectors filling the 1985-1989 West Coast Avengers series and by Hank Pym completists, and the title's speculative attention sits elsewhere — at the White Vision issue and the Great Lakes Avengers debut, both of which command multiples of what surrounding issues bring in certified grades. Raw copies circulate freely in dealer back-issue stock and in bulk eBay lots, and the certified population for this number is small simply because few submitters see a reason to pay grading fees on it.

Buyers here are set builders, Englehart readers, and Ant-Man/Wasp character collectors, with occasional interest from anyone assembling a Milgrom cover run. Across the grade spectrum the book behaves like most late-1980s direct-market Marvel: low- and mid-grade copies trade as inexpensive reading and filler material with little spread between brackets, while the entire premium is concentrated at the top of the grade curve, where the scarcity of submitted high-grade examples rather than underlying demand sets the price. Anyone paying up for a top-census copy should understand that the value rests on registry-style completion of the run, not on broad market pull.