Least Favourite Comic Covers Part 3

I could just say, "This cover stinks!" and leave it at that, because those who know me, know I really can't stand Todd McFarlane... or his artwork! And certainly this is a cover image that completely leaves me cold, unlike a generation of comic fans in the early 90s who creamed their jeans over it. (And, as Tammy would say, "it's a total crotch shot!")

But what I'm really griping about here is the variant cover. For those who don't know, comic publishers hit upon the idea, sometime late in the 1980s, of occasionally producing more than one cover for a single comic. It's the sort of thing that, to people outside the industry, must seem absolutely silly: why go through the expense of paying for and printing more than one cover for the same comic? And the only answer is: because it always seems to sell more copies! Why? Well, the really die-hard fan will want to have all versions of the issue in question, despite the only difference between them being the cover! I decided, early on in this phenonom, that I wasn't going to be that sort of a fan, but lots of others didn't. And so, we had a rash of variant covers about 15 years ago, and then they thankfully went away when the Speculator Boom busted, and now they're back.

For the most part, I just ignore the whole thing. If a comic I wasn't going to buy gets multiple covers, I couldn't care less. If it happens with one of my titles, then I just pick up the cover image that appeals to me the most. If there happen to be two covers that I really, really like, I might buy both, but that almost never happens.

But I dislike the whole concept because it seems like such an obvious money grab by the publishers. It's a lot like putting out multiple Special Editions of a DVD, hoping that some fans will buy all of them. It's not like it's criminal; it just doesn't seem very customer-friendly. At the very least, include the other cover(s) at the back of each comic that gets variants, so the fan who buys one copy of the comic gets all of them.

Up to now, I've been talking about 'equal quantity variants', meaning comics that have 2 or 3 versions of a cover, all printed in equal numbers. I haven't even described the 'limited availability' ones, where a variant cover will be shipped in a 1:10 ratio to the regular cover (for example), meaning that the average fan would have to buy 10 copies to get one with the 'special' cover, or pay 5 to 10 times cover price in order to get it from the comic shop wall. (You can tell a lot about a comic store owner, actually, by examining what they do with these comics as they come out. But that's a post for another day!) Variants also make the Price Guides pretty messy to read, since so many issues have different prices depending on which cover you have, all stemming from an artifically-created supply-and-demand situation for comics that are often only weeks or months old. It's one of the things most comic fans were happy to see go away over a decade ago, and sad to see it return and catch on, all over again, in the last few years.

Oh, and of course this McFarlane cover would be a piece of crap, even if it weren't a variant! He can draw better than I can, but that's about as much as I can say for his style.