Great googly moogly.

I'm glad I decided to collect every Transformers cover and not every TMNT cover. Even at the 7th print for Transformers #1, the number of covers are half of that TMNT.

I'm glad that IDW broke me early on with TMNT on trying to grab every cover. Their multiple store only special covers made me realize my insanity. By issue 50 I started only getting more than one variant of an issue if I especially liked a certain cover.

That is just obscene. To channel my inner Jeff Foxworthy: If you have 10 Blank Cover Variants, you know you have too many cover variants.

A hundred and sixty-two variants?

Why? I mean, I know that the reason why anybody does anything is "because they can" but really? Are they expecting people to buy all of the variants? To me it just devalues the issue.

If someone were to get all of those it would fill half of a long box.

The publishers had a good thing going when they used to court the "completist" collector. It was a precarious relationship. Don't abuse them too much and you could get away with offering five variants to X-Men #1, or five different cards with X-Force #1. They'd reward you with multi-million selling books.

Now....not so much. They were abused into the ground, and now shop owners tell me they pretty much don't exist anymore. So it's baffling to me why publishers will produce so many different variants today. I wish there was some way to parse out the sales numbers to determine if offering so many variants actually results in a significant increase in copies sold.

I assume publishers do some sort of study showing them that it is somehow worth it to print 100+ variants of the same book.

I think it's Dynamite that seems to have 20 variants for every single book they produce, there must be someone buying them.

I figure the store exclusives, the store itself pays the publishers something to print the exclusives for them, so it's not really a loss by the publisher. Though in a way it is a loss because you then run off people from buying every copy when there were only 2 or 3 each issue. The stores upcharge the mess out of them because of that one or two people out there that get the bug and drop several hundred dollars buying 10 copies of the same book.