What is missing from this famous quotation? “A _____ and his _____ are soon _____.” You have three minutes. Ready, set, go!
–Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney, Bored of the Rings
Longtime reader and frequent correspondent George writes in (but always at the wrong email address–dude, it’s right here!) to bemoan the ever-larger number of variant covers cluttering up the racks of the Direct Market lately. Retailer extraordinaire Brian Hibbs spends the second half of his latest column doing much the same thing. Me, I just wonder how this industry got to the point where there’s apparently a massive amount of money to be made in catering to stupid people.
I mean, seriously, who buys these things? Is it the same people who buy Jet records when there’s at least one copy of Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak available in every record store in America? Folks, the bottom dropped out of the comics-collectability market a long, long time ago. These things now exist to have their prices artificially inflated through ridiculous publishing and production maneuvers in order to fleece fanboys who were sufficiently un-stupid to avoid buying them when they came out (or maybe they just walked to the store too slow–let’s not give them too much credit) but so fucking stupid as to want to track the damn things down and pay about forty times what they’re actually worth to own them.
And the variant covers are almost never nice to look at, by the way. I’m not sure how deep into the gimmickry we’ve gotten during this cycle, but holograms and foil embossing and blah, blah, blah–hideous, one and all. Or, it’s an ugly picture drawn by one of those artists who did five issues of an insanely popular comic, then dropped out to play video games. Or, it’s just another uninteresting pin-up looking image in a long string of uninteresting pin-up looking images, only now you get to buy the whole goddamn book over again for the privelege of owning it. People, they are not worth owning.
About the only impulse behind buying variant covers that I can understand on the consumer side of things is completism. This has resonance with me, as I’m currently waiting ever-so-patiently for the day when I have enough money that I can buy all the recently remastered Rolling Stones and Brian Eno and King Crimson and David Bowie CDs that I already own in less remastered versions. When you really like an artist, you want all the tip-top versions of that artists’ work that are available. But 9 times out of 10, there’s no qualitative difference between the original version and the one with the variant cover–they’re not digitally remastering Astonishing X-Men #1, you know? Occasionally publishers will throw in some DVD-esque supplemental material, like sketchbook pages, scripts, original pitches, and so forth, but quite frankly it infuriates me that all this stuff was lying around and being planned to be used to sucker people into buying a comic book over again after, having no idea such things were planned, they bought the first version. The big movie studios pull this type of nonsense all the time with DVDs, and that’s enough to piss people off too, even though in those cases you’re often getting three hours worth of bonus material for your additional expenditure, rather than, what, eight pages of costume designs?
And then we get into the larger issues, the ones Hibbs talks about in his column–how variants clog up market share and choke midlist and indie titles out of the stores, how they’re indicative of companies fixated on the bottom line instead of telling quality stories (which, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, is exactly how the superhero got turned around when New Marvel first came along–in other words, good storytelling makes good business sense), how they can potentially sink retailers by forcing their inventory into unnatural contortions, how the stupid fucking things can do nothing but turn new customers off of comics and often do the same to longtime readers who simply get fed up, and on and on and on.
Long story short, don’t buy variant covers. Don’t, don’t, don’t. They’re dumb. The end.