THE THING #2

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks. Slight edge wear may be present near the top but is largely obscured by the protective bag and glare. Spine appears tight with no stress lines visible. Interior and back cover were not assessed; grade is based solely on the visible front cover through the plastic sleeve.

Launched in mid-1983 alongside John Byrne's celebrated run on Fantastic Four, The Thing gave Ben Grimm his first sustained solo ongoing title. Byrne scripted the early issues over pencils by Ron Wilson, a artist long associated with the character through Marvel Two-in-One, with Joe Sinnott inking the cover and Bob Sharen on color. This second issue, "For Beauty Passed Away!", turns on Ben's relationship with Alicia Masters and threads directly into the Negative Zone storyline running through Fantastic Four #257, with Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, Franklin Richards, Willie Lumpkin, and Ben's brother Jacob Grimm appearing. It is a well-made character piece rather than a milestone: no first appearance, origin, or death anchors it.

Market behavior follows that reality. Copies are plentiful, print runs from 1983 were large, and the series has never developed the speculative following attached to Byrne's Fantastic Four proper or to Marvel Two-in-One's key issues. Raw copies circulate constantly in dealer boxes and online bulk lots, and most transactions occur at or near shipping cost. Certified copies are scarce on the census not because the book is rare but because submission economics rarely justify slabbing it, which means the small handful of top-grade examples price off scarcity of graded supply rather than underlying demand. That thin certified record makes the high-grade bracket the least reliable of the three.

Buyers are principally run collectors completing the twelve-issue Byrne-era stretch of the series, Thing and Fantastic Four completists, and Ron Wilson followers. Across grades the book behaves like most common Bronze-to-Copper transition Marvel: mid-grade and low-grade copies are effectively interchangeable in the marketplace, with the spread between a beaten reader and a solid Fine amounting to a couple of dollars, while the entire premium concentrates in registry-grade certified examples. Dealers are best served moving raw copies as part of a complete run, where the set commands more than the sum of its issues; single certified copies should be marketed to census-driven buyers, with patience, since turnover at that tier is measured in months rather than days.