THE THING #28

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with only minor edge wear visible along the top and right border; a couple of faint spine ticks are visible but no major stress lines or color breaks. No creases, tears, or stains are apparent in this photo, and the book is protected in a plastic sleeve which may be masking minor surface wear. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is based solely on the visible front cover condition.

Mike Carlin and Ron Wilson closed out Ben Grimm's association with the Thunderiders here and moved him into the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation, the superhuman wrestling circuit that would define the back half of this solo title. His first opponent is Demolition Dunphy, the strongman who debuts in these pages and who would resurface as D-Man in Mark Gruenwald's Captain America, becoming a persistent supporting figure in that book and, decades later, a character revisited by Marvel for his role as one of the publisher's early sympathetically written gay heroes. Wilson pencils with Brett Breeding on inks, the pair also supplying the cover; Gruenwald edited, which explains how cleanly the wrestling cast migrated into his Captain America run.

Demand is character-driven rather than title-driven. The Thing's 1983-86 solo series is a comparatively soft Copper Age run, printed in quantity and widely available in high grade, so mid-run issues move as dollar-box material. What separates this number is the Dunphy debut, which dealers now flag consistently in listing titles and which price-guide databases index as a first appearance. That recognition sets a floor under raw copies without producing real scarcity pressure: supply of clean, unread copies from 1985 remains ample, and certified examples surface only sporadically because submission economics rarely justify grading the book.

The buyer profile is the completist filling a Thing run, the Captain America reader tracing Gruenwald-era supporting cast origins, and the speculative buyer positioning ahead of any screen use of the character. Across grades the spread is compressed at the bottom, where mid-grade and low-grade copies trade at little more than handling cost, and widens sharply at the top, where a census-grade slab carries nearly all of the premium. Newsstand distribution was still the majority channel for Marvel in 1985, so the designation identifies the copy accurately but does not by itself command the surcharge it would on a late-1980s or 1990s book. Anyone treating this as a hold should be grading-selective; anyone treating it as a reading copy will find no shortage of options.