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It's Fun to Blame Star Wars
Jan. 12th, 2022 08:18 amVariant Covers And Why You Should Never Buy Them
http://www.needtoconsume.com/comics/variant-covers-never-buy/
The idea behind the incentive cover was that a retailer would buy x copies of a title and get another copy with a different cover. So if a variant was listed as 1:10, a retailer could buy nine regular copies, and the tenth would be the variant cover (though Marvel reportedly changed the system in 2009 to a ‘buy 10 get 1’ for their 1:10 titles, technically making them 1:11). It was meant as an incentive for the retailer as potentially they could sell the variant copy at a higher price based on rarity to cover the cost of any unsold issues of the standard cover.
The idea crept in slowly, publishers wary of repeating the debacle of the early 1990s, but by the late noughties it was a well established practice, with 1:250 and 1:500 variants, convention variants, retailer variants (larger retailers like Forbidden Planet buying enough copies could get their very own variant cover), sketch variants, LEGO variants, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
I don't care about superhero comics, but this is interesting. I did not know any of this.
My perspective on variant comic covers comes from hearing young(ish) fandom artists talk about how little they got paid to create these covers for Boom! Studios, even for NYT bestselling series like Adventure Time and Lumberjanes. They would be so excited to be "scouted" from Tumblr that they'd create a publication-ready cover illustration for less than I would generally pay someone for a commission. The lowest figure I saw quoted was a chilly $80. This was obviously predatory, but learning where this practice of variant covers comes from makes it even more upsetting.
http://www.needtoconsume.com/comics/variant-covers-never-buy/
The idea behind the incentive cover was that a retailer would buy x copies of a title and get another copy with a different cover. So if a variant was listed as 1:10, a retailer could buy nine regular copies, and the tenth would be the variant cover (though Marvel reportedly changed the system in 2009 to a ‘buy 10 get 1’ for their 1:10 titles, technically making them 1:11). It was meant as an incentive for the retailer as potentially they could sell the variant copy at a higher price based on rarity to cover the cost of any unsold issues of the standard cover.
The idea crept in slowly, publishers wary of repeating the debacle of the early 1990s, but by the late noughties it was a well established practice, with 1:250 and 1:500 variants, convention variants, retailer variants (larger retailers like Forbidden Planet buying enough copies could get their very own variant cover), sketch variants, LEGO variants, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
I don't care about superhero comics, but this is interesting. I did not know any of this.
My perspective on variant comic covers comes from hearing young(ish) fandom artists talk about how little they got paid to create these covers for Boom! Studios, even for NYT bestselling series like Adventure Time and Lumberjanes. They would be so excited to be "scouted" from Tumblr that they'd create a publication-ready cover illustration for less than I would generally pay someone for a commission. The lowest figure I saw quoted was a chilly $80. This was obviously predatory, but learning where this practice of variant covers comes from makes it even more upsetting.
