A Marvelous Personalized Touch

There’s always a wacky gimmick happening in the comic industry. Back in the 90’s it was the “Bad Girl” craze that makes @modernzorker go from 6 to 12 in an instant. Then they had all of the prism, diecut, holofoil, glow in the dark, connecting covers. Oh, and Chromium covers...can’t forget them.

That’s not to say that some of these things weren’t cool as hell. I’m still a sucker for Chromium covers and I appreciate some of the badass gimmicks from that time...so much so that I think I should do a piece devoted specifically to this in the near future. That’ll be fun.

An example of the “holofoil” nonsense that plagued many books in the 90’s.

Today’s gimmick is just straight up variant covers. Be it the gazillion regular variants, ratio variants, incentive variants, Con Exclusive variants, store exclusive variants...there are just an endless world of cool and not so cool variant covers to choose from.

In between there, Marvel did something that kinda goes unlooked at for the most part. Partially because, nobody except 1 person would/should care about it. I’m talking about the short lived Personal Retailer Variants. They called these the “Premiere Editions” and they did it on a handful of books. As I am slowly putting my Marvel “X” books in order and restocking the back issues, I came across one and it made me remember just how dumb and cool these actually were.

As I just mentioned, they offered these up for a handful of different titles around this timeframe but the one I’ll focus on today is Uncanny X-Force #1. This book came out at the end of 2010 and features a nice cover by the always awesome Esad Ribic. Below is the regular release cover that was available everywhere.

Here is the “Premiere Edition” Variant that is like to discuss a tad. I forget exactly how these were obtained but it was a qualifier for retailers. Basically opting into their marketing campaign to push the book and I believe ordering a specific amount of copies. By doing so you became a “Premiere” Retailer for that book. In return, they sent each shop 1 of the “Premiere Edition” Variants pictured below.

The big differences you’ll notice is that the trade dress (title/logo) is a different color, along with no barcode on the Variant. The “cool” aspect is what lies inside on the back of the cover. In this they personalized the book to your specific shop. In this case my shop Conquest Comics. It’s the same letter in all the “Premiere Editions” with just a different shop that it’s addressed to. The back cover is also different from the standard. On the variant, there is some spiffy Clayton Crain artwork where as the regular features an ad for Mazda.

Very cool for a Retailer but in reality, no collectors really care. Part of it is that this gimmick ran through some books that nobody gives a rats ass about to begin with. The other part is that equally, nobody gives a shit about seeing my shop’s name in a comic except...well...me! (and I barely care...)

So I’ll give Marvel credit for trying to do something cool to thank retailers, even if it didn’t really take off. Currently, these personalized comics can run anywhere from $10-$25 bucks on the secondary market. Not super sought after sadly. But I’ll hang onto mine as they are still a cool little token of our tiny presence in this vast nerdy world.

Blewitt