TALES OF THE GREEN HORNET #2

Cover shows sharp corners and clean, glossy artwork with strong color saturation and no visible creases or spine stress. Minor handling wear may be present at the extreme edges but nothing significant is visible in this photo; there is slight softness at the top right corner. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is based solely on the front cover appearance.

NOW Comics held the Green Hornet license from 1989 and used it aggressively, spinning the ongoing title into companion books including this four-issue Tales of the Green Hornet miniseries. Issue #2 pairs a Neal Adams cover with interiors penciled by Dell Barras and a script credited to James Van Hise alongside Van Williams, the actor who played Britt Reid in the 1966-67 television series and who lent his name and input to the NOW line. The story continues the publisher's generational treatment of the character, following Britt Reid II and Kato rather than the pulp-era original, and sits in the broader late-Copper wave of licensed pulp and television revivals that NOW, Eternity, and Malibu were producing for the direct market.

Market behavior here is typical of high-print-run, late-1980s and early-1990s independent licensed material. Copies were absorbed almost entirely by the direct market, survive in quantity in high grade, and change hands in bulk lots, convention boxes, and low-priced online listings rather than through auction houses. The Adams cover is the single demand driver of consequence, and it supports interest mainly at the certified end, where the Adams cover-art collector base overlaps with Green Hornet completists. There is no meaningful certified population to anchor a high-grade figure, and grading economics discourage submission, so slabbed examples appear sporadically and price on name recognition rather than scarcity.

Buyers for this book fall into three camps: Green Hornet character collectors assembling the NOW run, Neal Adams cover-art completists, and dealers filling licensed-property boxes. Across the low and middle raw grades the book is functionally interchangeable with the rest of the series and trades accordingly, with condition making almost no difference to realized price until near-mint territory. The practical ceiling belongs to a certified high-grade copy, where the Adams credit does the work; below that, this is inventory rather than an investment position, and it is best moved as part of a complete miniseries set or a broader Green Hornet grouping.