FEAR #4

The cover shows moderate wear consistent with a mid-grade copy: visible spine stress with light color breaking near the top and bottom, some edge wear along the top corners, and slight surface scuffing across the cover art. There is a faint vertical crease/waviness visible in the lower right cover area. The book is in a protective sleeve which obscures fine detail assessment; interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Fear #4 arrived from Marvel in mid-1971 as part of the publisher's early-1970s wave of horror anthology titles, a format Marvel used to reprint Atlas-era monster and suspense stories while testing reader appetite for supernatural content ahead of the Comics Code's 1971 revision. The series would later become notable as the launching pad for Man-Thing's ongoing feature, but that transformation did not begin until later issues; Fear #4 predates that shift and consists of anthology material without an ongoing headline character. As such, it holds no first-appearance or origin significance of its own.

Market activity for the issue is thin and concentrated almost entirely in high grade, with the bulk of certified sales occurring at 9.2 through 9.6. Demand tracks general Bronze Age horror-anthology collecting rather than any character-driven key-issue interest, and pricing reflects a typical low-population curve: modest and stable through the mid grades, then rising sharply as copies approach the top of the census. No 9.8 has yet been certified, which adds a rarity premium for any future submission that achieves it.

This is a book for completists of Marvel's early horror line and for collectors assembling a run of Fear leading into the Man-Thing issues, rather than a standalone investment target. Raw copies in low and mid grade trade inexpensively and steadily, while high-grade certified copies command outsized premiums driven almost entirely by scarcity at the top of the grading scale rather than character or story demand.