DOCTOR STRANGE, SORCERER SUPREME #73

Cover shows sharp corners, strong gloss, and vibrant metallic gold ink with no visible creasing or color breaks. Spine appears tight with no stress lines visible in this image. The book is protected in a plastic sleeve, which limits full assessment of edges; no major defects are visible on the front cover. Interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

Published with a January 1995 cover date, "Threshold of Ashes" falls deep in the David Quinn run that reshaped the title after the Siege of Darkness crossover, when Stephen Strange had ceded the field to his enigmatic proxies Strange and Vincent Stevens. Peter Gross provided the cover, with interior pencils by Tom Tenney and inks by Andrew Pepoy. The issue advances the conflict with Salome, the ancient Sorceress Supreme whose claim on the office drives the back half of the series, and includes her ill-advised handling of the Cloak of Levitation inside the compromised Sanctum. It is connective tissue in one of the more experimental stretches of Marvel's mystical line rather than a milestone chapter.

Market profile is that of a common mid-1990s Marvel direct-edition book from a period of high print runs and heavy speculator retention. Supply remains ample in high grade because most copies went straight from the shop into bags and boxes, and completed sales cluster at or near the low end of dealer pricing, with reader copies most often moving inside multi-issue lots. There is no meaningful certified market: the census carries no recorded entries for this issue, which means slabbed examples trade on scarcity of the holder rather than on demand for the book, and any certified price is effectively grading cost plus a thin premium.

Buyers are principally run collectors completing the 1988-1996 series, Quinn-era and Midnight Sons readers tracking the Salome arc, and Doctor Strange completists whose interest has been sustained by the character's screen presence. Across grades the spread is compressed: low-grade and mid-grade copies are functionally reader material and priced accordingly, while unread direct copies command only a small step up. Certification makes economic sense here only as part of a broader run submission or for a collector who wants a registry-quality example of an issue almost nobody has bothered to submit.