DARKHAWK #45

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creasing or spine stress lines. Slight softness at the top right corner tip is noted, and minor light handling wear is possible but not clearly visible through the protective sleeve. Colors appear vibrant with no fading or staining evident. Interior and back cover were not assessed, and the book is in a plastic sleeve which may obscure minor surface defects.

Darkhawk #45 falls in the final year of Chris Powell's original ongoing, by which point Danny Fingeroth had moved the series away from its street-level Queens roots and out into the Marvel cosmos, with Tod Smith penciling over Fingeroth's scripts and Ian Akin inking. The issue turns on Portal, the teleporting mutant introduced earlier in the run, and sets up the off-world sequence that carries through the following issues and toward the series conclusion at #50. It is a connective chapter rather than a debut or origin, and nothing in it registers as a first appearance, death, or landmark.

Market interest in Darkhawk concentrates almost entirely on the 1991 first issue and a handful of early crossover appearances, leaving the #40s as run-completion material. Print runs had fallen sharply from the title's 1991-92 peak, so surviving copies are less plentiful than the early issues, but the collector base is small enough that scarcity has not translated into price. Copies most often move inside multi-issue lots rather than as singles, and certified examples are uncommon simply because submission costs exceed any plausible raw return.

The buyers here are Darkhawk run collectors, cosmic-Marvel completists, and CGC registry builders chasing high-grade sets of an under-submitted title. Low-grade copies function as reading material and carry only nominal value; mid-grade sits barely above that, since 1994 books are widely available near the top of the raw range. The meaningful spread appears only at census-topping certified grades, where the absence of competing copies rather than underlying demand drives the result, and where realized prices vary widely from one sale to the next.