IRON MAN #321

Cover shows sharp corners and clean, unworn edges with no visible spine ticks or stress lines. Colors appear bright and unfaded with strong gloss retained. The book is in a protective sleeve which limits assessment of surface sheen and any minor scuffing; interior pages and back cover were not visible for review. No creases, tears, or stains are apparent on the front cover.

Iron Man #321 lands in the middle of The Crossing, the 1995 Avengers-line crossover that recast Tony Stark as a long-term sleeper agent of Kang. Terry Kavanagh scripts, with pencils by Heitor Oliveira and Marcos Tetelli over inks by Mark McKenna, and the story turns on Stark working to breach the Avengers' safe while Marianne Rodgers u2014 a supporting player carried over from the Michelinie/Layton years u2014 confronts him. Hercules, Masque, Moonraker, and Marilla fill out the cast. The issue's most durable point of interest is the cover, credited to Alex Maleev with McKenna inks, which predates the artist's better-known Sam and Twitch and Daredevil work by several years and represents an early American credit.

Market profile is that of a common late-Bronze-into-Modern Marvel print run: enormous distribution, no first appearance, no origin, and a storyline whose reputation was damaged enough that Marvel walked it back within a year. Raw copies move as run filler in dealer bins and in multi-issue Crossing lots rather than as individual sales, and there is effectively no certified market u2014 the CGC census carries almost nothing for this number, and slabbing costs exceed any plausible resale for most submitters. What demand exists is completionist: readers assembling the full Iron Man volume one run, or Crossing collectors chasing the sequence across Avengers, Force Works, and War Machine.

Buyers for this book are run collectors and Iron Man title specialists, plus a thin secondary audience of Maleev cover completists. Across grades the spread is compressed: a low-grade copy and a solid mid-grade copy differ by only a dollar or two, since near-mint copies from 1995 remain plentiful and set the ceiling for raw pricing. A certified 9.8 would trade on scarcity of submission rather than scarcity of the book, and any premium there should be read as a grading-supply artifact. Dealers should catalog this as run stock and price accordingly, reserving certification for copies already in hand from a submission batch.