OUR FIGHTING FORCES #109

Cover shows generally good gloss retained on the black background with some scattered surface wear and light rubbing along the edges. There is a small vertical crease/stress line visible near the bottom left border and minor corner softness at the top left and bottom right corners. Spine appears mostly tight with no major rolling visible, though slight wear is present at the spine ends. The book is in a protective sleeve which obscures fine detail assessment; interior and back cover were not assessed.

Our Fighting Forces #109 (cover-dated October 1967) carries the Lt. Hunter's Hellcats feature, the commando-unit series that Robert Kanigher launched in issue #106 and ran through #123, when the title handed off to the Losers. The story, "Burn, Raider, Burn!", sends the Hellcats undercover with a traveling circus, playing to the unit's roster of misfit specialists: Brute, Snake Oil, Juggler and Swinger, under Lieutenant Ben Hunter, opposite Major Von Krauss and with Mlle. Cherie in support. Irv Novick supplies the cover, a flamethrower image typical of DC's late-Silver Age war line, when Kanigher's editorial office was producing Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank and the Hellcats in parallel.

Market behavior here is that of a collected mid-run war book rather than a key. Demand comes from run collectors filling the #106-#123 Hellcats stretch and from buyers of DC war titles by cover, and it is satisfied almost entirely in the raw market through dealer stock, convention boxes and low-price online listings. Certification is rare: the issue was a newsstand throwaway with no speculative pull, so almost nobody pays grading fees on it, and the practical result is a market with plenty of mid-grade supply and essentially no certified track record. That asymmetry is the defining feature of the book — the raw brackets are liquid and well established, while anything at the top of the grade scale is a thin, event-driven market.

Buyers divide cleanly. Readers and set-builders take complete low- and mid-grade copies, where the book trades quickly and predictably, and where condition matters mainly for completeness and flat covers rather than for price. High-grade interest comes from a much smaller pool: DC war specialists and registry builders who want the Hellcats run in uniform grade and who understand that white-page, well-centered copies of 1967 DC war books are genuinely uncommon. Sellers holding a strong copy should expect to make their own market and to need the right auction cycle to find the one or two bidders who care.