PTOLUS: CITY BY THE SPIRE #4

Cover shows strong gloss and vibrant color with sharp corners and no visible creases or spine stress in this image. There is minor edge wear along one border and a small fleck of debris on the surface that appears to be dust rather than damage. Only the front cover was examined; back cover and interior pages were not assessed, so grade could be affected by unseen defects such as spine ticks or interior discoloration.

Ptolus: City by the Spire #4 is part of a six-issue miniseries co-published by Marvel Comics and Dabel Brothers Productions, adapting Monte Cook's acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons 3rd-edition campaign setting. Cook, a central architect of the d20 system, wrote the series himself as an entry point into his 672-page Ptolus sourcebook, with interior art by Caanan White. This installment follows retired sword-for-hire Sheva Callister as she navigates the tomb of the lich king Narros and the political intrigues of the spire-shadowed city, with the enigmatic Iron Mage looming in the background. It is a competently produced sword-and-sorcery tie-in rather than a title with first appearances or historical weight.

The book's market profile is that of an inexpensive modern licensed property. It saw a single print run of modest distribution, and demand is confined largely to D&D and Monte Cook completists rather than mainstream comic speculators. Single issues, including #4, change hands only occasionally and near or slightly above cover, while complete #1-6 runs are the more commonly transacted unit at low dollar figures. No meaningful certified market exists; census-graded copies are effectively absent, so any high-grade slab price is a thin extrapolation rather than an established comp.

Collecting interest concentrates among tabletop RPG fans and fantasy-comic readers assembling the full miniseries or the 2007 trade paperback, which itself competes with the singles for buyer attention. Raw copies dominate trading across all grades, and the spread between a low-grade reading copy and a clean near-mint example is narrow in absolute dollars. Certification rarely makes economic sense here given slabbing costs relative to value, so this remains a raw, run-collector book with stable but shallow demand.