DOCTOR STRANGE, SORCERER SUPREME #25

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks. There is minor edge wear along the spine and top edge, with slight bindery/trim waviness typical of the era but no significant stress lines. The UPC barcode confirms newsstand edition; cover is housed in a protective sleeve which slightly obscures fine surface detail. Interior and back cover were not assessed.

Cover-dated January 1991, this issue falls in the Fabian Nicieza stretch of Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, with Ron Lim on pencils and a cover credited to Lim and Kelley Jones. The story pulls Stephen Strange out of his usual Greenwich Village orbit and into Native American mysticism, bringing in Red Wolf and Black Crow alongside the spirit figures Owayodata, Hotamitanio, Nanabozho, and Calumet, plus Red Wolf's wolf companion Lobo. It is a self-contained excursion rather than a continuity pivot, and it carries no first appearance, origin, or death that price guides track. Its interest lies in the creative lineup and in Marvel's periodic attempts during this run to fold lesser-used characters into Strange's corner of the line.

Market behavior matches that profile. Raw copies circulate constantly through eBay bulk lots, dollar boxes, and mail-order back-issue services, and the recorded sold listings cluster tightly at the low end regardless of whether the copy is a beater or a clean reader. Certification is rare for this number: the census barely registers, and comparable issues from the same stretch of the run show only scattered slabs. What supports the top bracket is not demand for the issue itself but the cost and scarcity of a high-grade newsstand copy from a period when newsstand distribution was already declining and handling was rough, which keeps registry and set builders paying real money for a 9.8 when one surfaces.

Buyers here divide cleanly. Run collectors completing the sixty-issue Sorcerer Supreme series and Ron Lim followers take raw copies at whatever a clean midgrade costs, and price sensitivity is absolute at that level; a low-grade copy is a reading placeholder and trades accordingly. The narrow slice of buyers chasing certified newsstand examples treat this as a scarcity play rather than a value play, and their bids are driven by census population rather than by the story. Expect flat, liquid trading in raw grades and lumpy, listing-dependent results in slabs, with the spread between the two brackets far wider than the book's underlying significance would suggest.