DC Comics and Variation A for Main Cover

[Casey Weston]

I am a collector that really only collects the main covers for Marvel/DC. 

I noticed recently that DC comics listings have changed from just an issue # to Issue #/A for the main cover. 

1. Is there a good reason for this?

2. It breaks the feature for viewing just regular covers (which I find very useful). Now I have a lot of variant cover spam in my grids.

Can we go to a consistent numbering of main cover just being the issue # across titles so that when I want to just see the main covers, it actually works. Currently, it only consistently works for Marvel comics. 

[Mark J. Castaneda]

This is due to solicitation data Lunar (who handles DC releases to comic stores) implementing an A, B, C variant system. When an upcoming issue has variants (ex: Action Comics), variant cover letter designations are already set by Lunar. We noticed a lot of online stores (like Midtown) have adopted what is being set by Lunar which makes ordering easier and less confusing. As of early 2023, our stance going forward is we'll just stick with what is provided and go with what Lunar says. This cuts down a lot of editorial time indexing future releases for our team which has been a headache since Lunar has been handling DC releases.

[Casey Weston]

On 12/11/2023 at 12:44 PM, Mark J. Castaneda said:

This is due to solicitation data Lunar (who handles DC releases to comic stores) implementing an A, B, C variant system. When an upcoming issue has variants (ex: Action Comics), variant cover letter designations are already set by Lunar. We noticed a lot of online stores (like Midtown) have adopted what is being set by Lunar which makes ordering easier and less confusing. As of early 2023, our stance going forward is we'll just stick with what is provided and go with what Lunar says. This cuts down a lot of editorial time indexing future releases for our team which has been a headache since Lunar has been handling DC releases.

I understand and agree that this makes sense, however is there a way to just show the variant A covers and/or regular covers in addition to those that I own? I feel like the only place this feature now works are on Marvel comics.

[Randall J. Paske]

It's not a big deal for me, but I have wondered if certain functions could default to the Variation A entry when a plain, non-variant entry does not exist.

[Casey Weston]

I was printing some Collection Overview reports and was looking at Action Comics and noticed once the /A variations began, issues no longer aggregated, they simply enumerated.

Rather than have Issue # - Issue #, it listed them individually. For some long-running series that will become a pain. 

I understand that for most there is a "regular" issue # and an /A variant, which makes this difficult, but I think there need to be a rethink and redefinition of what a "regular" issue is. You cannot have a system that uses the concept of "regular" issue and then stop using it. 

For me, and I am being a bit selfish here, I rarely get variants and I would prefer them to be subsheeted or sublined underneath a particular issue.

For example, each issue should have a parent stub - Action Comics 1056 for example, that's the "regular" issue. Underneath that stub (or parent) are the covers. Whatever numbers in the sublines is summed in the stub. This way each issue will only ever have 1 stub/parent and have X lines for covers (regular, variant, whatever). If you want to view only the stubs on a grid, you can. If you want to expand to add information like quantity, you can. I vastly prefer this solution as it makes the grids much more browsable.

Edited December 21, 2023 by Casey Weston