DC Comics has gone variant cover crazy. Since the end of Infinite Crisis last year, we've seen no less than five issues of The Flash featuring variant cover artwork. Your copy of The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #13 might feature the Black Flash or it might feature the Flash's empty costume. This week's All-Flash special is available in two varieties, with covers by Joshua Middleton and Bill Sienkiewicz respectively. Kelson Vibber has updated Those Who Ride the Lightning with a guide to those issues of the scarlet speedster's comic that were published with more than one cover. Additionally, Vibber's blog spotlights the holofoil-emblazoned centennial issue variants that DC Comics published back in 1995.
Update: ComicsPRO, a trade organization for direct-market comic book retailers, has released its first official position paper--and it just so happens to concern the use of variant covers to influence sales! Newsarama has posted the press release, and it's worth a read.
2 comments:
Thanks for the links! Some interesting things I noticed while putting that page together: DC has really lowered the threshold for what type of issue gets an alternate cover. In the 1990s, the heydey of multiple and gimmicked covers, there were only two variants on The Flash. And both of them were milestones.
In fact, I had to use other sources for the images on those books, because in each case, I'd carried the issue to some convention and gotten it signed. I'm not going to have any reason to get, say, Flash: TFMA #11 signed. I was hard-pressed to come up with anything to say about why the issue might have two covers.
I think the reason why the series was getting two covers over the last few months to bring some attention to the book and to let people know that some significant changes or storylines were coming. The "Full Throttle" arc was about (basically) the death of Bart, and of course All-Flash #1 and The Flash #231 are events in their own right.
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