ASTONISHING TALES #2

Cover shows moderate wear typical of a Bronze Age book: light corner blunting at top right and bottom left, faint spine stress lines with a couple of small ticks visible along the spine, and slight surface scuffing/gloss loss across the cover. Colors remain bright with no major color breaks, tears, or creases visible, and no writing or stains are apparent on this side. The book is protected in a plastic sleeve; interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Astonishing Tales #2 continues the split-format experiment Marvel launched with the debut issue, pairing a Ka-Zar jungle-adventure lead story with a Doctor Doom solo backup. The Ka-Zar feature, scripted by Roy Thomas with art attributed to John Buscema, gave the jungle lord one of his first extended solo showcases outside the X-Men and Daredevil, while the Doom segment, written by Stan Lee with art by Wally Wood, is notable for putting Marvel's premier villain in the driver's seat of his own narrative years before he carried a regular ongoing title. No first appearances or origin material occur in this issue, but the format itself and the Wood art on Doom give it lasting interest to Bronze Age specialists.

The FMV curve shows a book with a substantial surviving census (159 Universal copies) and a market that stays largely flat through the mid-grades, with values only breaking upward meaningfully at 9.4 and above. Demand is driven almost entirely by Doctor Doom completists and Wally Wood art collectors chasing clean, unrestored copies, since raw mid-grade examples trade for modest sums reflecting ample supply. The steep jump to 9.8 reflects genuine scarcity at the top of the grading scale relative to the number of copies that were handled and read as ordinary newsstand fare in 1970.

This is a book for Bronze Age run-builders and Doctor Doom or Ka-Zar character collectors rather than blue-chip investors; it is unlikely to headline an auction on its own but fits comfortably into thematic or creator-driven collections. Lower and mid-grade raw copies remain affordable and plentiful, making the book an easy pickup for readers, while pristine 9.8 slabs command a real premium given how few have been certified at that level, rewarding patient buyers who wait for a fresh-to-market copy rather than chasing inflated grading-event pricing.