THE CHAMPIONS #13

Cover shows strong gloss and vibrant color with sharp, unblunted corners and a tight spine with no visible ticks or stress lines. Minor handling wear is possible near the top edge but no creases, tears, or color breaks are evident in this photo. The book is currently sealed in a protective sleeve, which limits full assessment of edge and surface condition; interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

The Champions #13 closes out a three-issue arc pitting Marvel's short-lived West Coast super-team against the cosmic threat of the Possessor, working in concert with the Stranger and touching on Ghost Rider's demonic alter ego Zarathos. Bill Mantlo scripts the finale over pencils by John Byrne, early in a run that would soon make him one of the defining Marvel artists of the era, with a cover by Dave Cockrum. The Champions title itself was a commercially modest experiment pairing established characters (Angel, Iceman, Hercules, Black Widow) with newer ones (Ghost Rider, Darkstar, Black Goliath), and it folded after only seventeen issues, leaving this arc as one of the series' more talked-about stretches among completists of the run.

Market activity for this issue is thin and heavily weighted toward the high end of the census: certified sales cluster at 9.6 and 9.8, with comparatively few transactions recorded below 9.2 and only a handful of raw or low-grade copies surfacing at all. This pattern is typical of a book that was not heavily speculated on at the time of release and has since been submitted mostly by grade-chasers rather than traded broadly across all conditions. Demand is driven almost entirely by John Byrne's growing collector following and, to a lesser extent, interest in early Ghost Rider crossover appearances, rather than by any first appearance or landmark event within the issue itself.

This is a book for Bronze Age Marvel completists, John Byrne art collectors, and Champions-run specialists rather than a broad speculative target. Lower and mid raw grades trade cheaply and infrequently, largely as reading or run-filling copies, while pristine certified examples command a real premium driven by census scarcity at the top rather than narrative significance. Expect steady, low-volume interest rather than active bidding wars, with value concentrated almost entirely in top-graded slabs.