By Benjamin Nobel, June 20, 2016
As one of Marvel’s most popular titles, Uncanny X-Men had some excellent creative teams working on the title. Newsstand copies are difficult to find out there published during the 3.99 price variant “window” (when regular direct edition copies were priced at $2.99). Pictured below are two issues out of that $3.99 window that have particularly stunning artwork, #499 and #511:
Uncanny X-Men #499, $3.99 Newsstand Edition cover price variant.
Uncanny X-Men #511, $3.99 Newsstand Edition cover price variant.
This price variant window occurs close to the point in time when Marvel’s David Gabriel confirmed that newsstand sales to bookstores had ended, and that two years prior, Marvel had ended newsstand sales to other outlets (and interestingly he also indicated that after newsstand sales to bookstores ended it was months before anyone even noticed). Based on the time of that quote, that wind-down of other newsstand sales would have been circa 2010-2011; the $3.99 variant newsstand comics shown above were published in 2008-2009.
Although neither copy above currently appears on the CGC census in $3.99 Newsstand Edition, it will be interesting to observe the accumulation of census data for these and other variants in this very interesting “class” of newsstand comics that CGC has chosen to “break out” making them one of the few CGC-recognized newsstand variant categories of comics.
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