Nightstalkers #1 Newsstand, Ron Garney Cover, CGC 9.6 (19), Marvel '92

1st team appearance of the Nightstalkers (Blade, Frank Drake, Hannibal King) in their own series. Newsstand edition, Ron Garney and Tom Palmer cover.

Nightstalkers #1 is the debut issue of Marvel's 1992 ongoing series uniting three of the publisher's supernatural street-level hunters: Blade, Frank Drake, and Hannibal King. The series emerged from Marvel's early-1990s horror-adjacent expansion, placing the trio in a shared ongoing for the first time and leaning into the gritty, noir-inflected tone that defined Marvel's supernatural output of that era. Writer D.G. Chichester and penciler Ron Garney launched the book with a cover by Garney and inker Tom Palmer, whose linework set a brooding visual register that carried through the run.

For collectors, this is the number-one issue of a series that brought Blade into his own ongoing corner of the Marvel Universe well before his mainstream film breakthrough. The Copper Age Marvel horror wave produced a handful of titles that now command steady collector attention, and Nightstalkers #1 sits at the origin point of that grouping. The CGC 9.6 grade places this copy in near-mint-plus territory, presenting sharp corners, flat color, and clean pages consistent with a carefully preserved first printing. This copy is the newsstand edition, the version sold at newsstands and grocery racks, which turns up far less often in high grade than the direct edition sold through comic shops.