Jim Crocker of Modern Myths, Inc. in Northampton, Massachusetts is back and offers some additional comments regarding DC's Darwyn Cooke variants for December (see "Jim Crocker of Modern Myths on 'Darwynian Selection'").
 
After my quick, tossed-off rant in this very space yesterday, I got a call from my DC rep (who I hadn't heard anything from in, what 8 or 10 months?) chiding me for also getting it wrong.
 
The "Darwynian Selection" of covers are actually "open-to-order variants."  That unwieldy term means we can order them in our desired QTY, so they're not as awful as the 'incentive variants' that squat upon the marketplace like a corpulent diseased toad. It's not clear to me whether they're going to be as freely available for reorder as any other comic, a requirement if there's unvarnished truth to the idea that they're not 'limited' in any way.
 
The first batch of these, the 'bombshell' covers, caused havoc with our inventory system because they weren't clearly labelled as variants, so when customers swapped them out for the 'standard covers' without actively informing the staff, our ComicSuite software did not catch the difference, resulting in problems that we're still trying to catch.  DC has led me to believe that they're going to actually clearly label these from now on to help prevent this particular problem.
 
It would be helpful to find another word for superfluous covers that aren't limited in scope (actually, I kind of like the term 'superfluous' to describe them).  90+% of the time, when an industry press release or blogger uses the word 'variant,' they're referring to something we're not offered the privilege of ordering without our store being a certain size.  So when we read about someone doing a month of 'variants,' unless they've done a really good job of making sure that every single mention of those variants appends the words 'open to order,' or 'unlimited' or uses a different word to describe them, they're inviting confusion.
 
So, TL/DR: the "Darwynian Selection" is not as bad as all that.  Still cynical!  But definitely more simply annoying than 'despicable.'  I was hasty in my response, and DC was correct to call me on it. Please, everyone, back to your regularly-scheduled slow death-spiral of selling more iterations of the same comics to the same people.  And sorry, Stuart, that you had to be the person who made that thankless call.
 
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.