Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 — Signed with Sketch, CGC 9.6 (1984)

Published in December 1984, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 is one of the most consequential single issues in Marvel's history: it introduces the black costume that Spider-Man brings back from the Battleworld, the suit later revealed to be the alien symbiote and the origin of Venom. Few objects in the hobby mark so precisely the point at which a character's mythology turned.

The book belongs to the crossover event that taught the industry how to build a shared narrative at scale, written by Jim Shooter and drawn by a rotating team of the publisher's strongest artists. That a single costume change in an event tie-in could generate a villain who would carry films and merchandise four decades later is a measure of how efficiently Marvel's editorial machine could plant a story.

This copy is graded CGC 9.6 and is signed by Jim Shooter, the series' writer and Marvel's editor-in-chief of the period, and by Bob Layton, whose inking and design work shaped the look of Marvel in the 1980s. It also carries an original sketch by the two artists, which makes the slab a unique object rather than one of many graded examples: signature and drawing together turn a key book into a documented meeting between two authors and the story they built.