The Issue With Variants

Joe Douglas
7 min readNov 4, 2020

They almost killed the industry, so why do comics publishers keep producing them?

Examples of three of the variants released for Spider-Man #1

Variant covers for comic book issues have been a staple of the industry for some time now. The first comic book to have a variant cover was 1986’s The Man of Steel #1. While there were technically variants before this, they were all due to small differences such as distributor logo. Man of Steel #1 was the first “true” variant; an…

--

--

Joe Douglas

Collector. Writer. Artist. Geek. I write mostly about the hobby of collecting. Check out my full portfolio at JMDWorks.org.