DOCTOR STRANGE, SORCERER SUPREME #55

Cover shows strong gloss and vibrant color with sharp corners and no visible creases or spine stress lines. Minor edge wear is possible near the bottom corners but not clearly visible under the protective sleeve's glare. No stains, tears, or color breaks are evident on the front cover. Interior pages and back cover were not assessed, so grade is capped conservatively.

Cover-dated July 1993, this is chapter seventeen of the Infinity Crusade crossover, the third of Jim Starlin's cosmic Marvel trilogies. Roy Thomas scripts from a plot co-developed with Geof Isherwood, who provides pencils, inks, and the cover, with color by George Roussos. The story, "World Enough, And Time…," turns on Dormammu's fear of the Goddess: the Dread One attempts to persuade Strange to serve as his channel into this dimension, a self-contained sidebar to the main event that resolves with the memory-wipe device the title used often in this period. There are no first appearances or origin material here, and the issue sits comfortably in the middle of the 1988-1996 Sorcerer Supreme run rather than at any of its marked points.

Market behavior follows the pattern for early-1990s Marvel direct-edition tie-ins printed in heavy quantities. Supply is abundant at every grade a collector is likely to want, raw copies move in dollar boxes and multi-issue lots rather than as individual listings, and the certified population is thin not because the book is scarce in high grade but because nobody submits it. Demand is driven by two narrow groups: Infinity Crusade completists assembling the full forty-eight-chapter reading order, and Doctor Strange run collectors filling gaps between the more sought-after issues of the series. Neither group pays a premium, and the film-era interest in the character that lifted the 1968 and 1974 series has not extended meaningfully to this stretch of the 1988 title.

For a dealer, this is inventory rather than a position. Low- and mid-grade copies belong in bulk or as run filler, where turnover matters more than margin, and even sharp unread copies rarely justify individual listing unless bundled with the rest of the crossover. Certified examples are a different proposition: the grading fee exceeds the book's raw value by an order of magnitude, so a slab's price largely reflects the cost of certification plus the scarcity of anyone having bothered, and registry-set builders working the Sorcerer Supreme run are the realistic buyers. Anyone acquiring at the high end should expect a shallow bid pool and slow resale.