THE WEST COAST AVENGERS #40

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks; spine appears tight with no stress ticks visible in this photo. There is a small mark/scuff near the bottom left corner and slight edge wear at the top right corner. The book is in a protective sleeve which limits full assessment of surface sheen, and the back cover and interior pages were not examined.

Cover-dated January 1989, this installment falls in the interregnum between Steve Englehart's departure from the title and John Byrne's arrival with issue #42. Mark Gruenwald scripts, with pencils and cover art by Al Milgrom and inks by Mike Gustovich. The story, "And Now the…Night Shift!", pits the team – Hawkeye, Mockingbird, Moon Knight, Tigra, Wonder Man, the Vision, and the Scarlet Witch – against the Night Shift, the ensemble of second-tier villains led by the Shroud that Englehart had assembled earlier in the run, including the Brothers Grimm, Gypsy Moth, Dansen Macabre, Tatterdemalion, Tick-Tock, and Werewolf by Night. The issue is a self-contained fill-in fight book rather than a plot pivot, though it appears immediately before the "Vision Quest" arc that reshaped the Vision and Scarlet Witch.

Market profile is that of a common late-1980s Marvel print run. Copies circulate freely in dealer bulk, at conventions, and inside #40-52 lots, and there is no meaningful census pressure or speculative interest attached to the issue itself. The certified market for this stretch of the series is driven almost entirely by the Byrne issues, where the first white Vision and the subsequent unraveling of the Scarlet Witch generated real graded demand during and after the WandaVision broadcast cycle. That demand did not spill onto the Gruenwald fill-in in any durable way, and high-grade slabs of #40 trade infrequently enough that pricing must be inferred from neighboring issues rather than observed.

Buyers are run collectors completing the West Coast Avengers series, Night Shift and Shroud completists, and readers assembling context for the Vision and Scarlet Witch material that follows. Raw copies move as filler at almost any grade, with little spread between a well-read example and a solid mid-grade one, so grading costs exceed any realistic return outside of true top-census copies. The upside case rests on adjacent-issue demand and on the team's ongoing screen relevance rather than on anything intrinsic to this book, which makes it a reasonable inclusion in run lots and a poor candidate for standalone speculation.