The Variant Cover Conundrum Part 2
In last week’s episode, we looked at the origins of the variant cover concept and the advent of variant covers designed to incentivize retailer orders. Now, let’s look at the many types of variants a publisher can crank out, and what they signify.
These days, virtually every comic from the bigger publishers has at least one or two variant covers. For the debut issue of a major new series, that number can be significantly higher. Cover A of a big #1 issue might be illustrated by a major cover artist like Alex Ross, who is so popular that fans will buy his covers regardless of where they appear. There aren’t many artists who have reached that level of popularity. These covers tend to be poster-like: heroes looking heroic, flexing their heroic muscles and such.
Cover B might be drawn by another hot artist. A few years back those covers might have been more situational, more story-driven, but lately these, too, tend to be poster-shots
After that, you might get more artists’ depictions of the heroes, the villains, or something else. You might then get a virgin cover (the art from cover A with no logo or other design elements – gross name, but it’s what we’re stuck with), a black and white version of the art, a blank sketch cover for artists to drawn on, or a variety of weird color variations that probably appeal only to a small number of collectors. Also popular: the homage cover, which borrows the design elements of recognizable movie posters, albums, or books and combines them with story art.
Most retailers believe that they need to have some, if not all, of the open to order variant covers on their shelves just in case, because the one thing a retailer does not want is a customer sauntering into his shop looking for a particular variant cover, not finding it, and walking right out again to go buy it elsewhere. (This doesn’t apply to ratio variant covers, because they are more valuable than the open to order covers. I recently visited a shop to pick up a comic a couple of weeks after its on-sale date to find that the only copies left were 1:10 variants priced a couple of bucks higher. Yes, I sprung for it.)
Of course, there are other types of variant covers, including:
• Book variants – for example, Barnes & Noble says they will take 10,000 copies of your book if you give them an exclusive cover.
• Convention variants – a convention has a big name guest writer or artist with a new #1 issue coming and orders copies of issue with an exclusive cover.
• Polybag variants – These ship in an opaque polybag to hide the naughty (or ultra-violent) image inside. Usually offered at a higher price to cover the cost of the polybag. Marvel’s Blood Hunt event features this type of cover.
• Unlocked variants – the ordering incentive cover’s cousin: Order a specific amount of open to order covers and you can order this cover in any amount you want.
• Store logo variants – DC did this several times on promotionally priced (read: cheap) comics. There are two versions of this that I know of. One way to do this is to have art created with, say, a store window in the background. Retailers who order a predetermined minimum quantity of those covers would have their logo dropped into the store window. The other version is to give the comic an extra cover that flaps over part of the front cover (you used to see these all the time on the newsstand edition of The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker); that front flap would carry information from the retailer.
There are certainly other variant cover variants as well – these are just some of the better known ones. Are they good or bad? That depends on your point of view. The store logo variants are a great, cheap way to promote a shop or an event, but they’re a lot of work for virtually no money. Books don’t really have the collectability factor of comics, so I’d say that one is net neutral.
In our next and final installment on variant covers (for now), we’ll look at retailer exclusives and more.