“How Do We Right Size It?”: On the Insane, Explosive Growth of Retailer Exclusive Variant Covers
116.
226.
147.
Those numbers aren’t a code, like some mysterious sequence from the show Lost. They’re how many retailer exclusive variant variant covers that Chainkata #1 and Dungeon Crawler Carl Special Edition #0 had and how many overall variants (most of which were retailer exclusives) Absolute Batman #24 had respectively — at least so far. 22 Not to use overly inside baseball terms on you, but that is a boatload of variants. We tend to think of 10 to 20 being a lot for a single issue. But triple digits?
That’s preposterous.
These aren’t your run of the mill variant covers, though, and they shouldn’t be treated as such. Retailer exclusive variants 23 are versions of an issue ordered by an entity — say, a comic shop, an online retailer, some sort of brand, or an artist even — that feature specially commissioned cover art. Once assembled, these aren’t open for just any retailer to order. They’re exclusive to the commissioning shop, which will then presumably put however many copies they get 24 up for sale at some much higher than cover price number.
That’s the technical explanation. The simpler one is they’re big business, and something that’s become a meaningful part of direct market comic sales even though the average Wednesday Warrior may never know they exist. It’s clear they’re going to someone, though, as the sales velocity on some of these releases is astonishing.
It’s also worth noting what they aren’t. When Image Comics announced that the first issue of Daniel Warren Johnson’s Chainkata would have that towering number of retailer exclusives, its social posts were flooded with commentary about how insane it was that Image would do that to one of its books. But this isn’t Image doing anything. Retailer exclusive variants are — and have been since the concept was born in 1996 25 — a tool that’s available to be used if a shop is willing to order a certain, and significant, number of copies of one comic. They’re not really something publishers control. It’s just something retailers can do, if they so desire.
So, this isn’t new. What is new is they’ve absolutely exploded in use. Anyone who went to New York Comic Con, an event that is part comic convention, part candy store for retailer exclusive variant hounds, knows this firsthand. But while the heat is growing both from a retailer and consumer standpoint, so is the level of concern. As any number of people have put it to me at this point, retailer exclusive variants are becoming a problem — and to a degree that I’m not sure many are aware of.
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These numbers always seem to be growing.↩
Which really come in two flavors: ones built for retail sales and those created for events like comic conventions that will later be sold as retail products. There’s so much overlap between the two I’m combining them into one for this piece.↩
This number depends on who published the comic. More on that soon.↩
That’s when someone suggested to me the first retailer exclusive variants came to be thanks to Steve Milo’s American Entertainment line.↩
These numbers always seem to be growing.↩
Which really come in two flavors: ones built for retail sales and those created for events like comic conventions that will later be sold as retail products. There’s so much overlap between the two I’m combining them into one for this piece.↩
This number depends on who published the comic. More on that soon.↩
That’s when someone suggested to me the first retailer exclusive variants came to be thanks to Steve Milo’s American Entertainment line.↩
Although I’ve heard rumblings that some of those numbers will go up soon.↩
Which is when the cover doesn’t have any trade dress. Related but unrelated: I really hate that term.↩
That’s when a small drawing is done on the cover as a complement to the original piece.↩
I went through and manually checked every single one of them.↩
Both run of the mill variants and retailer exclusive ones.↩
Like, full-trade dress, foil, virgin, etc.↩
Shouts to the Key Collector Comics app, which is where I got these numbers for Absolute Batman.↩
#18 is a bit of an anomaly relative to the rest with 57, but it’s the tip of the iceberg of what was to come, so I’m separating it.↩
And it should be noted that plenty of the retailer exclusive variants for Absolute Batman #1 came well after the issue actually debuted. They were just on later prints.↩
Which is for the direct market only and comes with a small margin of error because some covers may have gone unnoticed.↩
Here’s a bonus bit of data for you. Everyone worries about the growth of regular variant covers, but retailer exclusive variants have been rising at more than twice the rate of those over the past decade.↩
One person suggested these covers might even open publishers up to different art styles after they sell as a retailer exclusive variant. That may be true, but it wasn’t as routinely emphasized, thus its place as a footnote.↩
There will be more on this subject in another piece.↩
These numbers always seem to be growing.↩
Which really come in two flavors: ones built for retail sales and those created for events like comic conventions that will later be sold as retail products. There’s so much overlap between the two I’m combining them into one for this piece.↩
This number depends on who published the comic. More on that soon.↩
That’s when someone suggested to me the first retailer exclusive variants came to be thanks to Steve Milo’s American Entertainment line.↩