Review #22: Variant covers on comic books

Ever since Jim Lee and Scott Williams did four different covers for the first issue of the new X-Men series in 1991, variant covers seem to be a gimmick that won't die, like foil and chromium covers eventually did by the end of the 90's. The most outlandish display of this, I think, was the first issue of Image's Gen 13 ongoing series wich sported THIRTEEN different covers! This kind of gimmic only appeals to collectors who believe that these issues will be worth more than the initial investment sometime in the future. It is my opinion that efforts to sell so many copies of a comic book that wont even be read is the work of noneother than Satan himself. There are a couple of other reasons for variants that aren't nearly as malicious. One is to show what printing a book is, and that's what spurred this review in the first place, but I'll get to that later. The other one is when a book is offered at a comic book convention. This is completley ok in my view because it is a souvenier from a once-in-a-lifetime event. There SHOULD be more value assigned to is both monetarily and sentimentaly. The last reason for variants is to show what printing a book is. When a comic sells out and there is still a demand for it, they print a second run which is usually less valuable than the first. It's not uncommon for a book to have three runs of a single issue. Something happend to me today that pissed me off a bit. Back when Superman "died", DC had a lot of runs of those issues, and they were noted by a small roman numeral by the issue number. For instance the second printing of the issue when superman dies would have said 75 where the issue number was and a "II" next to it. Fast forward to today. When a second printing comes out now, the cover is some variant of the original. For instance the superman covers from the One year Later storyline are replaced by pencil sketch versions of the original printing. Then theres Batman. An issue of Detective comics came out last month with Harvey "two-face" Dent's human half of the face on the cover. The next moth was going to have the warped, monster half of his face on it. I saw an issue in the store today with both of those pictures together, basically just showing an image of two-face. So I bought it thinking it was the one I wanted, but in reality it was just the second printing of the issue with harvey's human face. I got all mad. That's why I wrote this. Why didn't I just look at the issue number? It was issue # 818. I kind of stop looking at the numbers when they get that out of hand. Silly me.