XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS: THE WRATH OF HERA #1

Cover shows light overall surface wear with a faint vertical crease near the left edge/spine and mild rubbing at the top corners. Colors remain bright with no significant fading, staining, or tears visible, and the spine shows only minor stress with no major ticks. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is based solely on the visible front cover condition.

Released in September 1998 at the peak of the television series' popularity, The Wrath of Hera #1 opened a four-part Topps mini-series scripted by Trina Robbins with pencils by Gordon Purcell and inks by Larry Mahlstedt, and an interior John Van Fleet pin-up matching the art-cover edition. The story pulls Xena and Gabrielle directly into Olympian family politics: Zeus claims Gabrielle as his lover to shield Leda from Hera's jealousy, setting the queen of the gods against the pair. Robbins, best known for her work in underground and feminist comics and for Wonder Woman, was a fitting choice for a franchise built on female leads, and the issue sits among the better-regarded of Topps' licensed output in its final years before the company wound down its comics line.

Market behavior here is that of a late-1990s licensed tie-in produced in adequate quantities for a large television audience. Supply is steady on the secondary market, with singles and complete sets both readily available, and pricing has stayed close to cover for decades. Demand is driven almost entirely by Xena fandom and Trina Robbins completists rather than by speculation; there is no first appearance or origin content to attract crossover buyers. The absence of a recorded CGC census entry is itself informative, indicating that essentially no one has considered the book worth the cost of certification.

Buyers are typically franchise collectors assembling the full Topps Xena and Hercules libraries, Robbins collectors, and dealers filling licensed-media boxes. Across grades the spread is compressed: low-grade and mid-grade copies trade at bulk-box levels, and only high-grade unread copies command any meaningful step up, with complete four-issue sets consistently outperforming the sum of loose singles. A certified example would be a novelty rather than an established market, so any high-grade valuation rests on extrapolation from comparable slabbed Topps licensed titles; the practical collecting strategy is to buy sharp raw copies and pursue the photo-cover variants alongside the standard edition.