Variances, Here a variant...there a variant
I picked up the following book last week as an impulse purchase (I don't know what attracted me to the cover.) What surprised me is that it is listed as Cover D. For a 15th issue in a series that, when reading the issue, didn't seem to have any large necessary impact on a killer story line (I found it better than average, but...) That's when I realized, although I am aware of just about a few issues really having a variant cover over the last couple of years (maybe five...ten), but the amount of variants is almost becoming unwieldy. Back in the beginning days of comics, variants only happened by accident, either by a manufacturers defect (for example, double-stapled covers, missing inner pages, etc..), or a printer's error (number changes on issue, price changes.) There are very few examples of variants until just after the Second World War. At that point, Canada created true variants by limiting US cultural product importation (due to wartime import restrictions...