Paying tribute,
or cashing in?

If I copied your work, used it to make money, and you did not see a penny of it, would you call that paying respect?

That is the thought that will not leave me alone about homage covers. And I want to be careful here, because I am not the angry man on the internet shouting that everything is theft. I love a good homage. I sell them, I collect them, I have talked people into buying them. But the more of them I handle, the harder I find it to give the whole practice a free pass just because we have all agreed to call it a nice word.

So let me actually make the argument, properly, and you can tell me where you land.

What a homage is meant to be

Start with the version that is easy to defend, because it is the real thing.

Pick up Amazing Spider-Man #252, from May 1984. Ron Frenz draws Spidey mid-swing, arm out, city behind him, and every collector with a pulse recognises it instantly: it is Amazing Fantasy #15, the 1962 book that introduced Spider-Man in the first place. That is a homage doing exactly what a homage should. It is Marvel, on its own character, nodding to its own history, on a cover that also happens to matter in its own right as the first appearance of the black suit. Same house, same family, tipping its hat to where it all began.

Nobody sensible has a problem with that. And to be fair to the practice, homage is everywhere and most of it is harmless fun. Todd McFarlane put Spider-Man in Superman's pose from Action Comics #1 on Amazing Spider-Man #306 back in 1988. George Perez's Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 in 1985, Superman carrying the dead Supergirl, has been recreated so many times it is practically its own genre. John Byrne's Uncanny X-Men #141, the Days of Future Past wanted poster, gets homaged constantly. The whole Marvel Zombies run had Arthur Suydam redraw a famous Marvel cover, zombified, for every issue. This is the visual language of the medium talking to itself, and it is genuinely lovely when that is all it is.

The trouble starts when the tribute stops being a tribute and quietly becomes a sales tactic wearing a tribute's clothes.

When a tribute becomes a tactic

There is a useful old distinction in comics between a homage and a swipe. A homage wants you to notice. The whole point is recognition, a wink, a reference you are supposed to catch. A swipe wants you not to notice, so the later artist can pass the work off as their own. The line between them is whether the source is being honoured out loud or borrowed on the quiet.

Now hold that distinction next to the store exclusive variant.

Here is how that machine works, and I am not sneering, I understand the appeal. A shop commissions an artist to recreate a famous cover composition, strips it of the usual branding or gives it its own, caps the print run small, and now that shop has something no other shop can sell. It turns the store into a destination. Collectors chase it. It gets marketed as a limited exclusive, which, as I have written about before, is not the same thing as rare, but it sells.

The part I cannot get comfortable with

So I went looking for the thing that would settle it: when a new comic or a retailer variant recreates an iconic composition, does the original artist get credited, or paid?

And the honest answer is that there is no standard practice either way. I could not find one. Sometimes there is a credit, often there is not, and payment to the artist who created the original composition does not appear to be a documented norm at all. It is case by case, handshake by handshake, and frequently it is neither.

That is the bit that sits badly with me. Not because it is always wrong, but because the word we use, homage, quietly implies the original creator is being honoured, when in a lot of commercial cases they are simply being used. Recognition by the reader is not the same as respect to the artist. One costs nothing. The other might cost a credit line or a cut, which is exactly the part that tends to go missing.

I want to be fair, though, so here is the other side of my own argument. The composition is often the only borrowed thing. A genuinely new drawing, a different character, a fresh joke or idea layered on top, that is real creative work and real hours from the artist who actually drew this one. A homage is not a photocopy. It sits somewhere between original and copy, and pretending it is purely one or the other is how these arguments go stupid.

Even the publishers are twitchy about it

Here is a detail that surprised me and probably will you too.

DC has been tightening the rules on retailer exclusive variants, partly over price gouging. And according to comics trade reporting, part of that tightening is that DC will generally not approve exclusive cover designs that lean on homages, outside likenesses or other tie-ins, because of the extra rights and copyright questions they drag in.

Sit with that for a second. A major publisher, looking at homage variants specifically, and deciding the rights picture is messy enough that it would rather say no. That is not a moral verdict from me. It is a business deciding the practice carries enough risk to police. When the people printing the books are being careful about it, the "it is just a harmless tribute" line gets a little harder to say with a straight face.

Is it even legal? (and why that is the wrong question)

Quick honesty, I am a comic dealer, not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice.

Broadly, copyright protects the specific expression of an idea, not the idea itself. A pose, a layout, a general composition sits closer to the idea end, which is a big reason most homage covers are not slam-dunk infringement when they are newly drawn with different characters. Parody gets even more room: US courts have long accepted that a parody has to borrow from the original to land its point, and can qualify as fair use when it transforms the thing into something with new meaning.

But, and this matters, none of that makes a homage automatically fine. Copy too much, or churn out commercial copies to sell, and the risk climbs. So legality is genuinely blurry, decided case by case on the facts.

Which is why legal is the wrong question anyway. I am not asking whether someone could be sued. I am asking whether it is really paying respect. Those are two completely different questions, and the second one is the one that actually bothers collectors when they stop to think about it.

Borrowing a picture is one thing. Borrowing a brand is another.

Now here is where I think the conversation gets genuinely sharper, and it is the bit that made me want to write this at all. Because there is a version of this that is not about copying a composition at all. It is about borrowing a brand.

Look at what "Absolute" now means in comics. DC launched its Absolute Universe in October 2024, overseen by Scott Snyder, reimagining its heroes as stripped-down underdogs with none of the usual wealth or backup. Absolute Batman #1, by Snyder and Nick Dragotta, gave us a working-class Bruce Wayne with no inherited billions, and it was reported as the best selling comic of 2024. The word "Absolute" on a cover now instantly signals that line, a specific tone, a specific concept. DC spent real time and real money making the word mean that. And that is before you even get to DC's older Absolute Edition hardcovers, the big oversized Watchmen and Sandman slipcases, which spent years teaching collectors that "Absolute" signals premium in the first place.

So when a completely unrelated book wraps itself in Absolute-style branding, it is not nodding to a drawing. It is reaching for a reputation somebody else built. And this is happening constantly right now. The Absolute Batman #1 cover has become one of the most borrowed trade dresses in the business. A small indie book called Robocat ran an Absolute Batman homage cover limited to fifteen copies. That is the tell: the branding is the product, and the fifteen-copy cap is there to make the borrowed reputation feel scarce.

You have probably seen the Bart Simpson version doing the rounds, Bart done up as Absolute Batman. I could not verify who drew it or what it is officially attached to, so I am not going to pretend I can, and there is a reason it is murky: Bongo, who actually published the Simpsons comics, shut down in 2018, and DC as a rule will not sign off on covers that borrow outside likenesses or brands like this because of the rights mess it creates. Which tells you what it is. It is unofficial. It works purely because "Absolute" and the Batman silhouette already carry weight that someone else paid to build.

What is actually borrowed, and what is not

To be fair, and I keep coming back to fair because it matters, a mashup like that is not nothing. There is real work in it. So here is the honest ledger, the thing I do in my head with any of these before I decide how I feel about it.

Look at the two columns. That is why this is interesting rather than obvious. It is not a photocopy. But it is not wholly original either. The more of the value is sitting in the left column, the borrowed reputation, and the less is in the right, the harder it is to keep calling it a tribute with a straight face.

The receipts, in case you think I am reaching

I am not the only one treating this as a real problem rather than a bit of fun. DC has been tightening its rules on retailer exclusive variants off the back of exactly this frenzy, capping how many exclusive covers it will approve, telling shops to keep them under a set multiple of cover price or risk being cut off, and refusing to sanction the homage and outside-brand designs entirely.

And the scale of it is genuinely daft. Comics trade press tracked over a hundred different variant covers for a single issue, Absolute Batman #20, with more still coming. Over a hundred covers. For one issue. When a title is generating that many versions of itself, we are miles past tribute and deep into the cover as a product in its own right, sold on recognition rather than on anything between the covers.

A quick word on Dungeon Crawler Carl, since everyone keeps asking

Worth clearing this one up, because it comes up in the same breath as Absolute right now and it is actually a different thing entirely.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a hit LitRPG book series by Matt Dinniman, and its comics moment is a graphic novel, Crocodile, from Vault Comics with Michael Moreci and Brett Bean. When it crowdfunded on BackerKit in late 2025 it pulled in over 2.3 million dollars from more than twenty three thousand backers, one of the biggest comic crowdfunders there has ever been.

Here is why I mention it in a piece about homage covers: it is the opposite case. Nobody borrowed a brand to make that happen. That is real, earned demand, thousands of people who already love the thing putting money down for more of it. Which is the whole distinction I keep banging on about. Recognition someone else built and you borrowed is not the same as demand you actually earned. Dungeon Crawler Carl earned it.

So where do I draw the line?

Here, roughly.

A creator or a publisher honouring their own history, or openly tipping a hat to a classic so that everyone is in on it, that is homage, and it is one of the best things about this medium. Amazing Spider-Man #252 is not a con. It is a love letter.

But when the borrowed thing, a famous composition or a brand somebody else made valuable, is the main reason the book sells, and it is capped small and sold as a limited exclusive, and the person whose idea is doing the selling gets no credit, no cut, and sometimes no idea it is even happening, then "homage" has quietly become the polite word we use so we do not have to say "cashing in."

The test I use is simple. Is the original being honoured, or just used? Recognition is not the same as respect. One is free. The other is the part that keeps going missing.

And for you, as a buyer, the takeaway is the same one I always land on. Buy the homage because you love the picture, or the joke, or the book. That is a brilliant reason. Just do not let a borrowed composition or a borrowed brand talk you into believing you are buying something rare or important, when what you are often really buying is someone else's reputation, sold back to you at fifteen copies a go.

That is where I land. The video that started all this asks you the same thing, so I will too: where do you draw the line?

Get an honest valuation