IRON MAN #322

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creasing or spine stress in this photo; slight edge wear may be present at the top right corner but is hard to confirm through the protective sleeve. No color breaks, stains, or tears are visible. Book is in a plastic sleeve which limits full assessment, and interior/back cover were not evaluated.

Cover-dated November 1995, Iron Man #322 is a chapter of The Crossing, the line-wide Avengers event that recast Tony Stark as a longtime pawn of Immortus and pushed the Avengers titles toward the reboot that followed a year later. Terry Kavanagh scripts, with pencils by Jim Cheung and Sergio Cariello, inks by Mark McKenna and Hector Collazo, and a Cheung cover; the story sends Stark into the sub-basement of Avengers Mansion, where the temporal assassin Neut is loosed, and carries over from the concurrent Avengers issues. The supporting cast is deep for a solo title, with Hawkeye, the Vision, Black Widow, Crystal, the Wasp, U.S. Agent, and James Rhodes on hand. Its principal historical interest today is as early American work from Cheung, who had come over from Marvel UK and would later co-create Young Avengers and Scion.

Market behavior matches that of the surrounding run: a plentiful, widely distributed direct-edition book from a period of contracting print runs but even more sharply contracted collector interest. Copies circulate constantly in dealer bins and online, and raw examples in any presentable grade trade as reader material. The Crossing itself remains a critically maligned storyline, which caps speculative interest even during periods when Kang and Immortus are prominent in adaptations. Certified copies are scarce not because the book is hard to find in high grade, but because almost no one submits it; the small population means an occasional 9.8 sale can look disproportionate to the raw market beneath it.

Buyers are run collectors completing Iron Man volume one, Avengers event completists assembling The Crossing in order, and a small number of Cheung followers tracking his pre-CrossGen output. Across the low and middle grades there is effectively no price gradient, so condition-sensitive buyers should be paying for eye appeal rather than a numeric grade, and shipping cost is a meaningful share of the transaction. Only at the top of the census does the book separate itself, where the scarcity of submitted copies rather than the story's reputation sets the price; that premium is thinly supported and should be treated as opportunistic rather than as a durable floor.