The Variant Cover Conundrum Part 1
One of the continuing hot-button issues in the comics industry is variant covers. Retailers have made no secret of their feelings about them – mostly negative – but the fact remains that their customers demand them, and they can make a lot of money for stores. To borrow from John Oliver, we’re going to look at some of the root causes of the variant cover conundrum – what it is, how it came to be, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Until a few decades ago, there was no such thing as a variant cover on a comic book. The only times you’d have a cover that might fit our current concept of a variant – that is, an alternate cover with something different about it – was when something unusual happened, like the famous misprinted cover of Fantastic Four #110, or, in the case of underground comics, an issue got reprinted over and over again and the publisher made a change in the art. But in the 1980s, publishers started to use variant covers as a way to incentivize orders. The first issue of the DC miniseries Man of Steel had an alternate cover aimed at collectors, and not long after, other titles started to offer different covers for newsstand and direct market distribution.
Before long, the big two were using variant covers on prestige projects of all sorts in the hopes of getting fans to buy more than one copy. They were relying on their collector’s mentality – that obsessive itch to have a complete set of a series, which for most completists would have to include all the covers on the same comic. But that was just the beginning.
In the 1990s, publishers started using variant covers as a bribe to retailers: “Come to our event and we’ll give you a variant edition you can’t get anywhere else.” Retailers not only showed up at these events, but some would attend with their staff, spouses and children in tow in the hope of getting more copies. In the early days of eBay, a couple of fresh, hard-to-find variant covers could cover the cost of the trip and then some, especially when a publisher like DC would pick up most of those costs.
In 1995, WildStorm Studios busted the dam open with the wildly anticipated Gen13 #1, which had, fittingly, 13 variant cover images. Most had different art by J. Scott Campbell, Simon Bisley, Arthur Adams, and others, and a few presented another cover image on fancier paper.
This was without a doubt a lot of covers. The big difference between this array and what we see today is that now, most of these covers would only be available to order if a retailer meets a specific qualification. And that brings us to today’s typical variant cover situation.
What does it meant to have to qualify to order a cover? Well, as an example, you might be able to order one copy of cover D (these covers are usually distinguished from one another by letters) only if you’ve already ordered 25 copies of covers A, B, and C combined. Usually, the higher you go in the alphabet, the more copies of the other covers you have to order to meet the qualification. So by the time you get to cover M, let’s say, you might have to order 500 copies of the rest to get just one copy of this very rare version.
One of the perceived benefits of variants like these for publishers is that if a retailer was planning to order 18 copies of a comic that’s available with a 1:20 variant, he might increase his order to 20 copies just to get that more valuable variant. Ratio variants are often called ordering incentive variants for just this reason. (Publishers generally ignore the potential opposite response – that is, a retailer who was going to order 22 copies might see that 1:20 variant and decide to cut his order down a little.)
Theoretically, that rarity would drive up the price a retailer can charge for a particular variant cover. The rarer the variant, the higher the price. The rarest variants I’ve seen came in at around 1 in 1,000 copies – that is, a retailer would have to buy a combined 1,000 copies of a comic to qualify to order one of this variant edition. Sounds practically unachievable, right? Well, that’s where a whole different sort of variant comes in, and we’ll look at that kind of variant soon.
Meanwhile, next time, we’ll look at the proliferation of variant covers and their impact on the marketplace.