THE WEST COAST AVENGERS #25

Cover shows strong gloss and sharp corners with no visible creases or color breaks. There is a faint diagonal reflection/line across the mid-section that appears to be scanner glare rather than a physical crease, and slight surface sheen suggests a protective bag. No spine stress lines or edge chipping are visible. Interior and back cover were not assessed, so grade is capped below true near-mint.

Cover-dated October 1987, this issue lands immediately after the conclusion of Steve Englehart's "Lost in Space and Time" epic, with Englehart scripting, Al Milgrom on pencils and cover, and Mike Machlan inking. The lineup on hand is the classic Bonita Juarez-era West Coast roster: Hawkeye and Mockingbird, Moon Knight, Wonder Man, Tigra, Iron Man, and Henry Pym as compound manager, with Espirita in support. The Abomination serves as the antagonist in a story that leans on Wonder Man's Hollywood stunt-work subplot, one of the character threads Englehart used to give the California team its own texture apart from the Manhattan mansion book. It is a functional bridge chapter in a well-regarded run rather than a first appearance or origin issue.

Market interest in this title is concentrated at a handful of specific numbers: the debut, the Master Pandemonium issues, and above all the White Vision issues later in the run, which absorbed most of the streaming-driven demand of the early 2020s. Issue 25 sits outside that group and trades accordingly, as ordinary run inventory in dealer boxes and multi-issue eBay lots. Certified activity is effectively nonexistent, and the census for the surrounding issues is thin enough that graded values must be read off neighboring numbers rather than the book itself. Direct-market copies from 1987 survive in quantity, and high-grade raw examples are not scarce in absolute terms, which caps upside even when a certified copy does appear.

Buyers here are primarily run collectors completing the 1985 series, Englehart readers, and Hawkeye and Mockingbird followers assembling character runs ahead of that pair's continued screen exposure. In low grade the book is reading-copy merchandise, and mid-grade copies move at little premium over that. Only at the top of the scale does the arithmetic change, where the cost of certification exceeds the book's raw value several times over and the price paid is essentially for the slab and the scarcity of registered high-grade examples. Dealers are best served treating this as a solid fill for run sets and reserving grading dollars for the recognized keys elsewhere in the title.