THE SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK #22

Cover shows strong gloss and vibrant color with sharp corners and no visible creases or spine stress lines. Edges appear clean with no chipping or fraying visible through the protective sleeve. Minor glare from the plastic bag obscures fine surface detail, and interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Published with a December 1990 cover date, Sensational She-Hulk #22 falls squarely in the interregnum between John Byrne's two stints on the title, the stretch running from #9 to #30 in which Marvel cycled a series of writers and artists through Jennifer Walters' fourth-wall-breaking solo book. "Blondes and Bombshells" is scripted by Steve Gerber and Buzz Dixon with pencils by Tom Artis and inks by Jim Sanders III, and it leans on Marvel's own history: the story carries a flashback featuring the All-Winners Squad — Captain America, Bucky, the Human Torch, Toro, the Sub-Mariner, the Whizzer and Miss America — alongside the Blonde Phantom, with Mister Fantastic, the Abominatrix, Captain Rectitude and a cameo by J. Edgar Hoover rounding out the cast. The cover is by Dale Keown over Jim Sanders III inks, produced in the same period Keown was establishing himself on The Incredible Hulk.

Market-wise this is an ordinary mid-run copper-age issue and it trades that way. Raw copies circulate constantly in dealer boxes, want-list inventory and multi-issue lots, and the spread between a beaten copy and a presentable mid-grade one is measured in a couple of dollars rather than multiples. What movement exists at the top end is driven by two narrow factors: the Keown cover, which draws the collectors who chase his pre-Pitt Marvel work, and the general lift the character received from renewed screen exposure, which pushed attention across the whole 1989 series rather than toward any single issue. High-grade certified examples are scarce mostly because almost nobody submits the book, not because the print run was small; census depth at the 9.8 level is shallow and sales are sporadic, so asking prices on adjacent issues run well ahead of what copies actually realize.

Buyers divide cleanly. Run collectors filling the 1989 series and Golden Age completists attracted by the All-Winners Squad and Blonde Phantom content take the raw copies, and for them condition matters less than availability, which means low- and mid-grade copies are essentially interchangeable inventory. The certified market is a different audience: Keown cover specialists and registry-minded She-Hulk collectors who need the census grade, and who are effectively paying for the slab and the scarcity of submissions as much as for the book. Expect the raw end to remain flat and lot-driven, and the 9.8 end to stay illiquid but firm, with pricing set by whichever one or two copies happen to be listed at a given moment.