THE WEST COAST AVENGERS #41

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks. There is minor edge wear along the top and right border and a faint spine tick near the mid-spine, typical of light handling. The book is in a protective sleeve which limits full assessment of surface sheen; interior and back cover were not examined.

West Coast Avengers #41, cover dated February 1989, closes out the long-running friction between Mockingbird and the Phantom Rider that Steve Englehart set in motion during the Lost in Space-Time arc, when Bobbi Morse allowed Lincoln Slade to fall to his death and concealed it from Hawkeye. Scripted by Tom DeFalco and Ralph Macchio with pencils and cover art by Tom Morgan, the issue also feeds the Asgardian conflict against Seth that ran through Thor at the time, bringing Hellstorm and Sif into contact with the California team. It sits in the short window between Englehart's departure and John Byrne's arrival with the following issue, making it the last stop before the Vision Quest storyline reshaped the series.

Market behavior is that of a mid-run Copper Age Marvel title with modest print-era demand. West Coast Avengers has never carried the speculative weight of the parent Avengers book, and interest concentrates almost entirely on the Byrne issues immediately after this one and on the Great Lakes Avengers debut later in the run. Copies circulate through dealer stock, convention boxes, and low-dollar online listings rather than auction houses, and recorded sales volume is slight. Certified copies are scarce not because high grade is difficult but because submission economics rarely justify grading the issue, which creates a thin, volatile top of the census.

Buyers are chiefly run collectors completing the 1985 series, Mockingbird and Phantom Rider followers tracking that storyline to its resolution, and Thor readers assembling the Seth crossover. In low grade the book is reading-copy material and trades accordingly; in the mid grades it moves as inexpensive back stock, where shipping cost is a real share of the transaction. Only at the top of the grade scale does the issue behave differently, with registry and high-grade set builders occasionally paying a premium out of proportion to the raw market because so few certified examples exist.