THE INCREDIBLE HULK #138

Cover shows moderate wear consistent with a well-read Bronze Age book: visible spine stress with light color-break ticks along the spine, mild corner blunting at top left and bottom right, and some surface scuffing/soiling near the top edge and upper right corner. There appears to be minor waviness/staining on the paper stock and a small crease near the bottom left corner. The book is protected in a plastic sleeve which adds slight glare; interior pages and back cover were not assessed.

The Incredible Hulk #138 (April 1971) arrived in the midst of Herb Trimpe's long, defining run on the title, pitting Bruce Banner's alter ego against the Missing Link, a lumbering ape-man foe crafted for the era's monster-adjacent superhero storytelling. The issue is representative rather than pivotal: it introduces no enduring character and marks no origin, death, or landmark creative shift, but it captures Trimpe's kinetic, Kirby-influenced pencils at a point when he had fully claimed the visual identity of the series.

Market data shows a typical mid-run Bronze Age curve: values stay compressed and modest through the low-to-mid grades, with a pronounced premium opening up only at the top of the census, where 9.6 and 9.8 copies command multiples of the mid-grade price. Sales volume is thin at both extremes of the grade spectrum, meaning pricing at 9.8 in particular reflects a small handful of transactions rather than deep liquidity, while mid-grade copies trade steadily as reading and run-filling material.

This is a book bought primarily by Hulk run-completists and Bronze Age Marvel collectors rather than speculators chasing a key. Raw copies in low and mid grade move at modest, stable prices with little urgency; the real value differentiation appears only at the high end, where clean, census-topping 9.6/9.8 slabs draw competitive bidding from collectors assembling premium Trimpe-era Hulk sets. Expect it to trade as a steady, unspectacular constituent of larger collections rather than as a standalone target.