SAMURAI CAT #3

Cover shows sharp corners and clean, glossy artwork with strong color and no visible creasing or spine stress. There is minor edge wear at the top left corner and slight softness at the bottom right corner tip. No tears, stains, or writing are visible on the front cover. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is based solely on this front-cover image.

Samurai Cat #3, cover-dated September 1991, closes the three-issue Epic Comics adaptation of Mark E. Rogers' prose satires about Miaowara Tomokato, the ronin cat who works his way through history and pop culture in pursuit of vengeance. Rogers supplied the painted covers for all three issues while Ralph Macchio scripted and Frank Cirocco and Jim Hummel handled interior art, with color by Joe Rosas. This installment, "The Empire State Strikes Back," is built as an extended Star Wars send-up populated by Dobi-Wan Gillis, Princess Pleia Piano, Wisconsin Solo and Darth Shatner, and it stands as one of the more visible comics appearances of a character better known through Rogers' illustrated Tor paperbacks.

Commercially the book sits at the tail end of the Copper Age glut, printed in the period when Epic's licensed and creator-owned one-offs were widely distributed and widely retained. Supply in high grade is ample relative to demand, and the series moves mainly as a complete three-issue run rather than as individual issues. Interest is driven less by the comic's place in Marvel continuity, of which it has none, and more by Rogers' painted cover work, by collectors of Star Wars parody and pastiche material, and by the funny-animal and anthropomorphic collecting niche. Certified copies are effectively absent from the market, which makes the slabbed tier a matter of grading economics rather than scarcity.

Buyers here are completists: Rogers followers assembling his comics output alongside the novels, Epic imprint collectors filling a short miniseries, and parody-cover specialists. Across grades the spread is compressed, since a reading copy and a presentable mid-grade copy occupy nearly the same price territory and the practical entry point is a full set. Grading costs exceed the certified value of anything below the very top of the scale, so the sensible approach for a dealer archive is to offer raw copies in bulk or as a run, reserving submission for a copy with genuine 9.8 potential where the painted cover's edges and corners have survived intact.