FANTASTIC FOUR #291

Graded at 8.5 (VF+) on 2026-11-04, from new photos taken out of the sleeve: front and back. Pale strip along the fold on the front, wider than most. Bottom outer corner a touch soft, the others sharp. No color-breaking ticks on the spine. Light back cover free of soiling and marks.

Fantastic Four #291 (June 1986) arrives late in John Byrne's celebrated tenure as writer/artist on the title, a run widely credited with revitalizing Marvel's First Family after a period of creative drift. By this point Byrne had reshaped the team's roster and tone, installing She-Hulk in place of the Thing and steering the book through ambitious cosmic and street-level storylines alike. Issue #291 falls within the final stretch of stories Byrne would produce before departing the series with #293, a period notable for tightly plotted arcs and some of the clearest, most kinetic superhero art of the era.

Market data shows this is a plentiful Copper Age comic, with well over two hundred CGC-certified copies recorded and the population weighted heavily toward high grades, a pattern typical of a book that was speculated on and preserved in quantity at the time of release. Demand is driven almost entirely by ongoing collector interest in the Byrne FF run as a complete story arc rather than by any singular first appearance or landmark event in this specific issue, which keeps values modest across the grading spectrum even as certified 9.8 copies command a real premium over lower grades. Sales activity is thin below near-mint, reflecting limited transactional interest in mid- and low-grade copies of a common, non-key issue.

This is a book for Byrne-run completists and Fantastic Four series collectors building toward a full run rather than a target for speculative or key-issue investment. Expect low- and mid-grade raw copies to move cheaply and infrequently, often as part of bulk lots or long-box browsing, while pristine 9.8 slabs retain a steady, if unspectacular, premium driven by census scarcity at the top of the grading curve and continued respect for the artistic quality of the era.