GHOST #1

Cover shows sharp, unblunted corners and clean edges with no visible chipping or tears. Spine appears tight with no stress lines or ticks visible in this image. Colors are vibrant with no fading, and the glossy foil-stamped logo shows no scuffing. No creases, stains, or writing are visible on the front cover; back cover and interior pages were not assessed.

Ghost #1 opens the second volume of Dark Horse's Ghost, launched in September 1998 after the original 1995-1998 series concluded with issue 36. Writer Chris Warner, a Dark Horse mainstay associated with Black Cross and the Comics' Greatest World line that introduced Elisa Cameron in 1993, took over with artist Christian Zanier, and the relaunch was pitched explicitly as a reworking of the character's look and a step toward resolving the long-running question of her origin. The volume runs alongside the tail of Dark Horse's superhero-adjacent line and shares its setting, Arcadia, with Barb Wire, X, and King Tiger. It is a first issue rather than a first appearance: the character, her supporting cast, and her central mystery were all established years earlier.

Market profile is that of a common late-1990s independent first issue. Print runs in this period were modest by early-decade standards but comfortably above collector demand, and surviving copies are plentiful in high grade because the book arrived at the end of the speculation era, when buyers routinely bagged and boarded new issues. Trading is sporadic and driven mostly by run collectors filling the 1998-2000 volume or by readers picking up singles instead of the Ghost Compendium collections. Certification is rare enough that a slab, when one appears, prices off scarcity of the holder rather than scarcity of the book, and the interest that does exist in the franchise attaches more strongly to the Adam Hughes and Terry Dodson covers on earlier Ghost material than to the relaunch.

The realistic buyer is a Dark Horse completist, a Ghost character collector, or a dealer assembling the full 22-issue second volume for a set sale. Low-grade copies function as reading stock and move only inside bulk lots; mid-grade sits at essentially the same level, since the supply of near-mint copies caps what any lesser grade can command. The spread between raw and certified is therefore almost entirely a grading-cost and scarcity-of-slabs phenomenon, and submitting a copy makes economic sense only if it is a strong candidate for the top of the census. Expect thin, patient liquidity at every level, with the run-lot route generally producing a better net than issue-by-issue sales.