Have you seen the number of variants for the upcoming DCeased event? After the onslaught of variants from Detective Comics #1000, I'm tapping out.
There were just so many of them, but that has become the norm. There's variants for practically every issue on the market and, depending on the print run, they can be quite expensive. That DC #1000? Including the virgin and sketch covers, there are over 60 options to choose from.
My email has been swamped with so many variants to choose from, each touting a superstar artist with a hefty price tag. Over the past few weeks,I've gotten ads for Silver Surfer: Black, DCeased, White Widow, Symbiote Spider-Man, Cult of Carnage, Naomi, Thanos, and that's just to name a few.
The bulk of the variants I'm being urged to buy lately ("very limited print run," supposedly) are for DCeased. The tagline for the story is that a technovirus of some sort (because technology is the new magic, I guess) has been unleashed on Earth, and it is basically turning all of humanity - including some of the superheroes - into zombies, more or less. In the end, I don't see this story being memorable, and the extra price spent on a variant will be lost.
That's the thing with variants: most of them don't hold their values for long. Last year, comic fans were inundated with a metric ton of variants for Batman #50, the Red Goblin story arc, and Action Comics #1000. Each of those carried a swath of variants from basically the same artists, and all three were listed among the Most Over-Hyped Comics of 2018. Out of all those variants from those three titles alone, practically none have held any sort of value compared to last year.
Where things are really getting out of hand are the ratio variants. We've reached a point where Marvel has begun issuing 1:25 ratio variants (for the newbies out there, that means that shop owners can get one copy of this particular variant for every 25 copies of the standard cover they order) for second prints. Let that sink in: there is a ratio variant for a second print of Immortal Hulk #16.
I'll have to say that I do enjoy the occasional variant. My personal favorites are those with art by Gabriel Dell'Otto, and I will fork over the extra money for his work. I recently pre-ordered the Cult of Carnage #1 Skan Srisuwan variant, which is exquisite. However, I am under no illusion that it will appreciate in value in the coming years. If anything, it will peak with the Total Carnage story arc then drop month by month afterwards. I'm okay with that because I wasn't looking to make a profit; I bought it because I am a Carnage fan, and Skan's art is amazing. The same goes for my small collection of Dell'Ottos. Sure they're more expensive and the comic has the exact same story as the standard cover, but I buy his variants simply because I love his artwork.
From reading comments on various comic forums, I'm preaching to the choir when it comes to wanting fewer variants. I don't see them as the bane of all comic collectors, but I would like to see less of them. Then again, I admit that I'm part of the problem, too. If we want publishers and retailers to limit the variants, as a collecting community we have to stop buying them. I for one promise to never again buy a variant...unless it's really cool and/or super rare. Who's with me?
