FANTASTIC FOUR #152

Cover shows a small paper/color loss spot near the center-right (visible white fleck breaking the art), moderate wear at the top and bottom corners with slight blunting, and a faint vertical crease running through the lower right portion of the cover. Spine appears mostly tight with no major rolling visible, though there is slight surface rubbing along the edges. The book is in a protective sleeve which obscures some fine surface detail; interior and back cover were not assessed. Cover date is pre-1977 so no direct/newsstand distinction applies.

Fantastic Four #152 (November 1974) arrived during Marvel's mid-1970s stretch under writer Gerry Conway with pencils by Rich Buckler and inks by Joe Sinnott, continuing the multi-issue arc pitting the team against Thundra, the warrior woman from a matriarchal alternate future, and the Brute, a savage counterpart to Reed Richards drawn from a parallel Earth. The storyline built on plot threads Marvel had been developing since Thundra's introduction a few issues earlier, folding alternate-reality concepts into the team's core science-adventure premise. It is a representative example of the FF's exploration of parallel-world doubles and moral inversion, a device the series returned to often across its run.

The book's market profile is that of a well-collected but non-key Bronze Age issue: a substantial certified population (161 Universal copies on census) with steady but modest turnover across most grades, and pricing that stays flat through the mid grades before spiking sharply only at the top of the census. That jump between the upper-9 grades and the 9.8 tier is the primary demand driver, reflecting the relative scarcity of pristine copies against a comparatively large graded population, rather than any first-appearance premium.

This is a book collectors pick up to complete a run rather than chase as a standalone key, so raw and mid-grade copies trade as inexpensive filler pieces with little grade-to-grade price differentiation below the 8.0 range. Interest concentrates heavily at the 9.6-9.8 tier, where condition-census buyers and Fantastic Four run-builders compete for the handful of top-graded copies, producing outsized returns relative to the modest cost of acquiring a mid- or low-grade example.