FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #22

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creasing or color break; spine appears tight with no stress lines evident in this bagged photo. There is a small printed correction sticker over the logo area (publisher-applied, not damage) and minor edge wear along the top border. The book is in a protective sleeve, which limits full assessment of surface and spine; back cover and interior pages were not visible for grading.

Fantastic Four Annual #22 (1989) arrived during Marvel's company-wide "Atlantis Attacks" crossover, one of the publisher's earlier attempts at a summer annual event spanning multiple titles. The issue was scripted and co-colored by Gregory Wright, with pencils by Keith Williams and Hilary Barta and inks finished by longtime Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott, who also provided the cover. The story gathers an unusually large cast pulled from the X-Men, Avengers, and New Mutants corners of the Marvel Universe alongside the Fantastic Four themselves, reflecting the crossover's ensemble structure rather than any single character milestone.

Market activity for this annual is sparse, with only a handful of certified sales recorded across the grade spectrum and no meaningful raw-market data. Demand is driven almost entirely by condition-sensitive collectors chasing high-grade Copper Age annuals rather than by any first appearance or origin story, since the issue introduces no new characters and contains no landmark creative event. Pricing at the top of the grade scale shows a steep premium for pristine copies relative to mid- and low-grade material, a pattern typical of mass-printed late-1980s annuals that were not preserved in quantity at the newsstand level.

This is a filler-tier book for most collections, appealing chiefly to Fantastic Four or crossover-event completists and to census chasers seeking a clean 9.8 for a Copper Age run. Raw copies in low and mid grade trade for token amounts reflecting their common availability, while a true Universal 9.8 commands a real premium given the small certified population and limited turnover at that grade. It is not a book that draws speculative interest or investment attention, and pricing is likely to remain flat outside of occasional high-grade census-driven sales.