AGE OF REPTILES: THE HUNT #1

Cover shows generally strong gloss and sharp corners with no major creases. There is a light vertical crease/bend visible along the upper right edge and some minor edge wear at the top right corner and bottom left corner. The spine appears mostly tight with no significant stress lines visible. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is based solely on the visible front cover surface.

Age of Reptiles: The Hunt #1 opens the second of Ricardo Delgado's dialogue-free dinosaur miniseries for Dark Horse, following the 1993 Age of Reptiles: Tribal Warfare that established the format. Delgado wrote, penciled and inked the book himself, with color work by James Sinclair, and built the story around a young Allosaur orphaned by a pack of Ceratosaurs and forced across a Jurassic desert. The complete absence of captions and word balloons was the series' calling card, and the naturalistic staging reflects Delgado's parallel career as a film concept and production designer. The Hunt ran five issues in 1996 and was collected in trade the following year.

Market activity is driven almost entirely by readers, paleoart enthusiasts and Delgado followers rather than by speculators. Copies surface regularly on eBay and through mainstream back-issue dealers at very modest levels, and complete five-issue runs typically clear for only slightly more than the sum of loose issues, which caps single-issue upside. Print runs were healthy for the period and the book carries no first appearance or origin hook, so there is no grade-driven price ladder of the kind seen in contemporaneous Dark Horse keys. Certified copies are effectively absent from the market, which means a high-grade slab trades on scarcity of certification and on the collateral interest generated whenever dinosaur media cycles back into fashion.

The realistic buyer here is a completist assembling Delgado's body of work, a dinosaur-comics specialist, or a store customer filling a run. Low-grade copies function as inventory filler and generally move only in bulk or as part of a set, while mid-grade copies sit close to that same floor because supply of clean, unread examples remains adequate. The only meaningful spread appears at the top end, where an unusually sharp copy submitted for grading enters a category with almost no competition and can be priced accordingly, though liquidity at that level is thin and dependent on finding the right specialist buyer.