Which isn’t to say I didn’t put ’em on eBay…look, I’ve got bills to pay.
(EDIT: I spend a lot of time in this post complaining about something that isn’t a thing…turns out the extra pages are from the following issue due in a month’s time, so wherever I complain about that here, just ignore it. Thought about just deleting the whole post, but let it stand as a warning against other publishers thinking about making new story material difficult to find for the fans, and as a warning against jumping the gun on writing complain-y blogs.)
So a few months back I placed my orders for the current issue of The Walking Dead, due out in your local funnybook venue this week. And then, a few weeks back, said issue of The Walking Dead turned up on the Final Order Cutoffs, where retailers get a last chance to fiddle with their order numbers before print runs are committed. At that time, as happens on occasion, additional items not offered in the original catalog are put up for order…in this case, a variant cover by Lorenzo de Felici was added that was “free to order” (as in “I can order as much as I’d like,” as opposed to “order 10 of the regular cover, get 1 variant!”). I placed my numbers and that was that. (As an aside, I got so used to ordering two covers for each Walking Dead a while back that just ordering one cover throws me off!)
Tuesday, I received my weekly Diamond shipment which included these two Walking Dead variants, broke everything down, sorted ’em, counted ’em, pulled them for comic savers, etc. At that point, I get a call from another comic shop owner, someone I’ve known for decades, who wanted to give me a heads up that there’s a rare variant of this new issue of Walking Dead. At first I thought he meant the de Felici variant just on its own…I’m sure some retailers may have missed ordering it when it came up on the Final Order Cutoffs (or wherever else it may have appeared…there’s more than one place for these things to be added after the fact), but I didn’t think that was enough to make it rare.
My friend explained further, that the variant itself had a variant, that a minor visual cue on the variant’s cover indicated interior variations…specifically, the letters pages and other editorial content were replaced by an additional seven pages of story not in the other versions of this comic, either the regular cover or, um, the regular variant cover, shall we say.
I know this is being compared to comics like that Team Titans #1, which had multiple variations of its contents, each featuring a different short story in addition to the main feature which was the same in all versions. But that had sufficient warning…people knew DC was going to pull that stunt ahead of time, so it wasn’t a surprise to find different/additional content in each issue, and if you wanted all versions, they weren’t hard to get. Or even Thump’n Guts by Kevin Eastman and Simon Bisley was mentioned to me, which had multiple variations on content, but even that was marketed as a part of the gimmick for the book.
But doing this to Walking Dead feels like it’s a little more frustrating. Yes, I’m sure the pages will turn up in the trade paperbacks, but the folks reading the monthlies don’t necessarily get the trades as well. Making part of the story an exclusive “chase” variant is different from just doing rare covers…basically it’s telling fans who have been following that particular franchise “hey, we’re hiding some of the story from you!” …Maybe it’s not as bad as all that, and I’m sure there are…illicit methods of finding those pages, but I’d rather not encourage that behavior.
My hope is that those extra pages turn up in a later issue, so people who don’t want to buy the trades ,and don’t want to go on a scavenger hunt to piece together the entire story, can read ’em. I know I’d be put out a bit if a comic I really liked suddenly decided to sneak extra pages past me so that only a lucky few got to see them. …Are they in the digital version? Maybe someone can let me know.
Anyway, here’s hoping they don’t do that again. I know they probably meant well and wanted to do something different and have fun and make people excited, etc. etc. But this can easily turn into an aggravation, and nobody wants that.
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