In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn the true origins of the famous multi-colored variant covers of Legends of the Dark Knight #1
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and twenty-ninth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
DC gave Legends of the Dark Knight #1 four different-colored variant covers to try to increase the sales on the comic.
STATUS:
False
Eighteen years ago, the world said goodbye to the acting talents of the Gene Hackman, who made his final acting appearance in the dreadful Welcome to Mooseport (which at least co-starred Maura Tierney, so that was cool). At the same time that we bade farewell a terrific actor in a terrible movie, we said hello to Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin, which celebrates its 18th anniversary today. I mention this for two reasons. One, well, the obvious one, I just wanted to congratulate Mike and two, the legend for today is actually something I learned from him and that’s a fun coincidence!
1989 saw the release of Tim Burton’s Batman and as I pointed out in a recent piece, that thing was NUTS. It was so crazy that even the Marvel Universe kept talking about the movie (again, as noted in that same recent piece). When the Batman TV series was released in January 1966, it started not only a Bat-mania with fans, but also saw a big comic book boom where pretty much EVERY superhero comic book got a sales bump and every terrible superhero TV pitch was instantly greenlit without looking much past the idea that the show was about superheroes (“Captain Nice? Sure, I bet that this will be good for no good reason. At the very least, we might want to use this guy to voice a car decades from now!”).
Almost 25 years later, Tim Burton’s Batman somehow had a very similar effect. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the 1966 Bat-Mania, but it was still a really big deal. Topps did a trading card tie-in that somehow went through, like, three volumes due the demand being so high (yes, kids, there was a time before streaming where people loved a movie so much that they wanted to collect trading cards with scenes from said movie on them for…reasons).
During all of this hysteria, DC released two major new Batman projects in September of 1989, a graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean….
and a brand-new series, Legends of the Dark Knight (with Denny O’Neil, Ed Hannigan and John Beatty the initial creative team) (the series didn’t initially have Batman in its title, but I included it in the headline so that, well, I could have Batman in the headline)…
That same month, the Batman/New Titans crossover, “A Lonely Place of Dying,” was in the middle of its run and that, of course, was also super-hot, out-selling Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men….
There was something unusual about Legends of the Dark Knight #1, though…
The book’s regular solicited cover was covered by a special “protective” cover that came in four different colors…
The covers specifically SAID “Collectors Special,” so it sure seems like DC basically invented the idea of doing variant covers to up the sales of a comic book, right? That’s what was discussed in Mike’s Progressive Ruin post last April.
As it turned out, while people came to believe that that was why the variants existed, it was actually almost the exact OPPOSITE. You see, DC felt that retailers had ordered TOO many copies and they were freaked out over the idea of retailers being stuck with too many unsold copies and blaming DC for it.
My pal John Jackson Miller wrote on his awesome comic book sales history site, Comichron, “Preorders were colossal — so high that Paul Levitz and DC’s sales staff grew concerned that retailers wouldn’t be able to sell all the copies they had ordered. Looking for a way to add some value to the release, they directed the printer, Ronald’s, to divide the print run into four and add wraparound covers to each grouping featuring a bat image in four different pastel colors: teal, pink, orange, and yellow.”
So retailers didn’t know that the books would have four covers until the received the comics. Of course, customers all wanted all four colored covers of this “first new ‘solo’ Batman book since 1940” and the distributors quickly sold out of all of the reorder stock, which is crazy considering just how many copies of this comic book that was published.
Now, while the original INTENT of the comic covers weren’t to get people to order more copies because of the variants, it obviously quickly showed comic book companies that people WOULD order more copies based on variant covers and, well, the rest is comic book history (not necessarily the best part of comic book history, but comic book history nevertheless and hey, who doesn’t have at least one variant cover that they really love, right?).
Thanks to Mike Sterling and John Jackson Miller for the information!
SOME OTHER ENTERTAINMENT LEGENDS!
Check out some entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:
1. What is the Secret Origin of Lily Aldrin on How I Met Your Mother?
2. Did Back to the Future Always End With “To Be Continued…”?
3. Did Barbie Once Come With a Weight Loss Advice Book That Simply Read “Don’t Eat”?
4. How Did Bambi Lead to the Creation of Smokey the Bear?
PART TWO SOON!
Check back soon for part 2 of this installment’s legends!
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either [email protected] or [email protected]
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