PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #17

Cover shows strong gloss and bright, unfaded color with sharp corners and a clean spine with no visible ticks or stress lines. There is minor edge wear at the top right corner and a very slight bend at the lower right corner tip. No creases, tears, or stains are visible on the cover, and the barcode/price box area is intact and undamaged. Interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #17 (April 1978) continues Bill Mantlo's run on Spider-Man's second ongoing title, pairing the wall-crawler with Ghost Rider and several members of the Champions — Angel, Black Widow, Darkstar, Hercules, and Iceman — against Ghost Rider's demonic antagonist Zarathos and the villain Rampage. The issue is notable chiefly for its cover, penciled by John Byrne during his rapid ascent at Marvel in the late 1970s, and for Sal Buscema's interior art, a mainstay of the Spider-Man line throughout the Bronze Age. It carries no first appearances or origin material of consequence; its interest lies in the roster crossover and the Byrne cover rather than any landmark story content.

Market data reflects a book with substantial certified population and modest but steady demand. With 115 CGC Universal copies recorded against 117 total graded, supply is ample across the grade spectrum, and pricing follows a shallow curve: values climb only gradually through the mid grades before rising more sharply at the top of the census. The 9.8 tier, though it has no true ceiling above it on record, shows a healthy number of tracked sales relative to its census size, indicating collectors are actively completing high-grade Spider-Man and Ghost Rider crossover runs rather than chasing this issue as a standalone target.

This is a bread-and-butter Bronze Age crossover book: attractive to Spider-Man and Ghost Rider completists, Byrne cover collectors, and dealers building runs of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, but not a priority acquisition on its own. Lower and mid-grade raw copies trade cheaply and are easy to source, while CGC 9.8 examples command a real premium driven by condition scarcity rather than story significance — the typical pattern for a well-drawn but non-key late-1970s Marvel team-up issue.