What are they?

Most of the time, "variant" edition comics refers to those comic books with different unique covers by various artists. (*Other more rare variants are those with some printing error or those with different prices-- as in UK prices rather than US.*) The standard release of the comic book will feature one cover, but there may be 1 in 10 or 1 in 50 or even 1 in 100 that will feature a special cover by a different artist. For example:


Why are they made?

Two reasons mostly:

1) These variant comics are also referred to as "incentive-copies" because they are used as incentives to the comic book shops (and collectors) to buy more of that particular book. Why? Well the comic shops don't make much of a profit off of the regular comics sales, but these "incentive" books they can charge anywhere from 5 to 10 times more as a "collector's item"! These are real money-making items for the comic book stores.

In fact, very often these variants are sold exclusively to certain shops or distributors (ie: "Wizard" or "Dynamic Forces") and also to the Comic Conventions-- so they would be even more rare as they would be only available from those venues.

For the collectors who are serious about having every issue of a particular series, they then are willing to buy the same comic several times over, just to collect all the different covers.

2) The comic book publishers also use these variants to promote a particular "event" or the release of some other new book or series. Case in point-->



Marvel Comics recently had two new mini-series coming out: Sept's Marvel Apes and Oct's Marvel ZombiesVol. 3 (yeah, I know... sounds ridiculous). So as part of that promotion, you can see several of their regular series books have included either "Ape Variant" covers or "Zombie Variant" covers (and there have been so many of the Zombie ones in recent years that it merits an entire page in the store here!) See the Marvel Comics Releases page to hear more about these.

Are they worth anything?

Absolutely. For any collection, something that is less available or common is almost automatically more valuable. Add to this the fact that most variant covers are created by more "in-demand" artists (often more in demand than the artist who did the interior work on the comic!) and that adds another layer of value to the variant.

Take for example the "sketch" variant for June's Uncanny X-Men #500 done by the late Michael Turner-- now selling for up to $200!