IRON MAN #262

Cover shows sharp corners, strong gloss, and vibrant unfaded ink with no visible spine ticks or stress lines in this photo. No creases, tears, or color breaks are apparent, and the Spider-Man head direct-edition logo box is clean and uncreased. Book is protected in a plastic sleeve which slightly obscures fine surface detail; interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Iron Man #262 falls in the middle of Armor Wars II, the nine-part sequel storyline that ran through the title in 1990 under writer John Byrne with pencils by John Romita Jr. and inks by Bob Wiacek. Chapter five, "The Enemy Within," advances the arc's central medical crisis: Tony Stark's nervous system is failing through the sabotage engineered by Kearson DeWitt, a plot thread that would carry the series toward Stark's staged death and the extended "Rescue"/War Machine developments of the early 1990s. It is a well-produced continuity chapter rather than a debut issue, and its interest rests on the creative team and its place in a storyline collectors read as a unit.

Market behavior tracks that status. The issue circulates in volume — it was printed at the height of the direct-market boom and survives in quantity in high grade — so raw copies move as run filler at dealer tables and in multi-issue eBay lots rather than as individually sought books. Certification is rare because slabbing costs exceed the book's raw value by a wide margin, leaving the census sparse and top-grade transactions episodic; when a Near Mint/Mint slab does surface, it prices off the general Copper Age common-issue band rather than off any demand specific to this number. Newsstand copies of this period are scarcer than direct-market copies and can attract a modest premium from run specialists, but the direct edition is the default supply.

Buyers are principally Iron Man run collectors filling the #258-266 sequence, Byrne completists, and readers assembling the Romita Jr. run on the title. Across grades the spread is compressed: low-grade and mid-grade copies trade at essentially the same nominal level and are usually acquired incidentally as part of a lot, while the only real price separation appears at the certified Near Mint/Mint tier, where the premium reflects the cost and scarcity of grading a common book rather than underlying rarity. It is a sound inclusion in a complete-run offering and a reasonable long-term hold only insofar as Armor Wars II remains adaptation-adjacent material.