THE WEST COAST AVENGERS #27

Cover shows strong gloss and bright, unfaded colors with sharp corners visible at bottom left and right. No creases, spine stress lines, or color breaking are apparent along the spine edge in this photo. The book is in a protective sleeve, which limits full assessment of edges; interior pages and back cover were not examined.

Published with a December 1987 cover date, this installment falls in the closing stretch of Steve Englehart's tenure on the title, with pencils by Al Milgrom, inks by Mike Machlan, colors by Paul Becton, and Mark Gruenwald editing. The story advances the extended Zodiac storyline in which a Life Model Decoy Scorpio built on the Jake Fury template has wiped out the original Zodiac cartel and turned the Zodiac Key against the team; here Hawkeye is ambushed and replaced by an LMD Sagittarius, who walks into the compound in his place while Mockingbird misreads her husband's sudden coldness as fallout from their own troubled marriage. Cornelius van Lunt's Taurus and Nick Fury figure into the supporting cast, and the roster on hand is the classic West Coast lineup of Hawkeye, Mockingbird, Tigra, Wonder Man, Moon Knight, and Hank Pym in his non-costumed scientist role.

Commercially this is a mid-run Copper Age book from a series printed in healthy quantities for the direct market, and it trades accordingly. Raw copies are bargain-box and dollar-bin material, moving mainly as run fill or as part of multi-issue lots rather than as individual purchases, and low-grade copies carry little separation from mid-grade ones because condition-sensitive buyers simply hold out for the abundant high-grade unslabbed stock. The one genuine scarcity in the equation is certification: the run is so lightly submitted that the census for this issue is effectively empty, which means a certified top-grade example is a rarity of indifference rather than of supply, and pricing for such a slab is set by whichever registry or run collector happens to be looking.

The buyer base is narrow and specific: collectors assembling complete West Coast Avengers runs, Englehart completists, and the durable secondary interest in Hawkeye, Mockingbird, and Moon Knight generated by screen adaptations, which lifts the whole series modestly without singling out individual chapters. Dealers should expect this to function as inventory depth rather than as a headline item, priced for volume in raw grades and treated opportunistically if a graded copy surfaces. Any meaningful upside would come from renewed attention to the Zodiac, to Scorpio, or to the marriage arc that this storyline sets up, none of which is currently reflected in the numbers.