Comic Book Collecting
With a Foreign Variant Focus
continued from issue 1
What exactly is a foreign variant?
To understand foreign variants let’s seek out the generally accepted definition of what an American variant is. Traditionally, an
American comic book variant has been a comic book that was
printed with a different cover, cover price, printing error, or special insert. Repeated printings of that same comic much later
than the original print date in America are called reprints and are
usually stated in the indicia.
A foreign licensed comic book could be considered a reprint
having been printed at a later date than its American counterpart, but many foreign variant collectors ask a couple of fundamental questions. Disregarding the later print date for a
moment, what if this is the first time a particular story or cover
has been printed in a particular language or country for the very
first time? What if for the intended audience, the foreign readers, this is the very first time the
comic cover or story has been
available to them? Especially
considering that with foreign
books printed through the 50s 70s there wasn’t an American
option. With the exception of
maybe American military bases,
for these specific readers these
books are the original printing.
Because of these questions,
foreign variants don’t fit neatly
into known traditional American
classifications in the argument
of variant versus reprint.
Strange 107, French edition
Further complicating the matter that collects multiple american
issues including the important
is the fact that many foreign
1st appearence of the puncompanies chose to take Ameriisher. Is this a French 129 forcan editorial contents and comeign variant? Yes, but the
bine them into their own unique
editorial decision to use different art instead of the classic
specific release. Lets say for exAmerican 129 art on the cover
ample the French decide to limakes this variant much less
cense Batman issue 227. They
desirable.
use a version of 227’s American
cover, but include not only the editorial content of 227 but 228’s
and 229’s story in the comic as well. So which variant is it?
227’s, 228’, or 229’s? The easy answer is all of them are. Playing devil’s advocate you could say the answer being 227’s only,
however, for a key piece of the others is missing, the cover.
Even more perplexing is some companies decide to use completely different cover art than the American books. Ei-
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(Part 2)
ther brand new art created by
foreign artists or even different
American issue art! So you
could have a Batman 227 story
in a book with 229’s cover. This
mis-marriage of covers and interiors or lack of defined parameters is another reason
why some American collectors
choose not to deal with the
complexity of foreign comic
books.
Desirability
So what is more desirable?
Superamingos 18, Brazilian edition
Just like collecting American
that collects 3 american Batman iseditions there are different
sues but does not include the interior of Batman 227. This issue
camps of collectors that prefer
features 227’s art after it has been
certain things. Certain trends do
altered to reflect the publishers destick out though. One thing for
sire to feature Robin on the cover.
sure is the closer the foreign
Is this a 227 variant? Maybe, but
some collectors might say no. This
print date to the American print
does not however change the fact
date the more desirable the
that this issue is of interest to
book.
foreign 227 collectors
The proper marriage of cover
and interior content is also preferred as well, or at least a foreign cover that still uses the American art as a general guide instead of completely new original artwork. This issue is up for
debate though among some foreign collectors considering some
original art created by the local artists can be considered quite
desirable from a technical and novelty perspective.
Print runs are also important just like in America. Rarity is a
good indicator of what is desirable. For example, unlike in America where most comics printed after 1970 are plentiful, many
foreign variants are incredibly rare even in their countries of origin. This is because some of these countries or provinces were
quite small and therefore didn’t have large print runs. These
books can be incredibly hard to find and source. Some foreign
variant collectors speculate that some key books might be so
rare that the population numbers of them in North America could
be counted on one hand.
Considering the rarity of some of these variants one would
think values would be high. This interestingly enough is not the
case with these books.
A comic book’s worth in the comic collecting world is inextricably tied with price guides which help in determining value. Being