Is my comic
a variant?

"Variant" is one of those words that gets used for everything from a genuinely scarce printing to a comic that is worth exactly what the other copies are worth. Most days I see both in the same collection. This guide is the checklist I actually run through when a book lands on the desk: what to look at, what each kind of variant is, and which ones matter for the price. It is written for UK collectors, because we have a couple of kinds of variant that the American guides barely mention.

Start with three things, in this order

1. The price box. Top left or bottom left of the cover. What currency is it in, is there more than one price, and is there a barcode or a logo where the barcode should be?
2. The indicia. The block of small print inside the front cover or at the bottom of the first page, with the publisher, the date and the printing. This is the only place the printing is stated in words.
3. The barcode add-on. On modern comics, the five small digits beside the main barcode encode the issue, the cover and the printing. My barcode guide explains how to read them and the barcode checker does it for you.

Those three tell you what edition you are holding. Everything else is detail.

UK pence price variants

This is the one British collectors should know cold, because we are the people who own them. From May 1960 to December 1981, Marvel printed part of each run with a price in pence instead of cents, for sale in Britain. They were printed at the same time and place as the cents copies and are identical inside; only the price differs, and in the early years the indicia carried a UK address. DC did the same from July 1971 to September 1981.

From January 1982 Marvel moved to printing both the cents and the pence price on its direct edition covers, which ended the separate pence printings. So a Marvel with a lone pence price and a cover date between 1960 and 1981 is a UK pence variant. A Marvel from 1982 onward with both prices on it is not a variant, it is the ordinary direct edition.

Not every issue in the window has a known pence copy. The collector databases that track them put it at well under half of Marvel's output in the period, so a pence copy of some issues is a genuinely scarce object. For years pence copies sold at a discount in the American market, which is where most of the price data comes from, and in high grade they can be scarcer than the cents version. Treat them as their own thing: look up sold prices for the pence copy specifically rather than assuming it is worth the cents price, or less, or more.

Thorpe & Porter stamps

Before the printed pence variants there were the stamps. When the UK ban on importing American periodicals was lifted in 1959, Thorpe & Porter became the sole UK distributor for DC and Marvel. Unsold US copies of DC comics were shipped over and, on arrival, stamped by hand with a UK price in a small circle, usually somewhere reasonably clear on the cover, which occasionally meant the hero's face. Prices ran through 9d, 10d and a shilling, then 5p, 6p, 7p and up after decimalisation, until DC's own pence-printed variants took over.

A stamped copy is not a printed variant. It is an ordinary US copy with a mark on it, and graders treat the stamp as a mark on the cover rather than a separate edition. Some collectors love them as a piece of British comics history, some see a defect. Either way, it does not make the book rarer, and it does not make it a pence variant.

Newsstand and direct editions

From 1979 American publishers printed two versions of most comics: a newsstand edition with a standard barcode for shops and supermarkets, and a direct edition with a logo, a diamond or a different barcode box for the comic shop market. Same comic inside, different price box. Marvel stopped newsstand distribution in 2013 and DC in 2017, and for some books from the later years the newsstand copy is scarce enough to carry a premium.

I have written a full guide to spotting the difference, including what the split looked like from the UK, so I will not repeat it here.

Canadian price variants

From October 1982, when the exchange rate stopped making sense, Marvel and DC printed newsstand copies with a single, higher Canadian price for sale at newsstands in Canada. Marvel's run lasted until August 1986 and DC's until September 1988. They are newsstand editions, so they carry a barcode, with the Canadian price alone in the price box.

The catch is that direct editions of the same books often show both prices, the US one large and the Canadian one small. Those are not Canadian price variants. The variant is the newsstand copy with only the Canadian price. They turn up in UK collections occasionally, usually via a relative who lived in Canada, and they have a following.

Australian price variants

The same idea again, later and rarer: in the 1990s Marvel printed small newsstand runs with an Australian price for the Australian market. They are scarce, they are collected, and they are very rarely seen in Britain. If you find a 1990s Marvel with a dollar price that is not US cents, check the indicia and the price box carefully before assuming it is a misprint.

Retailer incentive ratio variants

The 1:10, 1:25, 1:50 and 1:100 covers of the modern era. The ratio is an ordering rule: a shop that ordered 25 copies of the regular cover could order one of the variant. It is not a print run. Nobody outside the publisher knows how many of a 1:25 were printed, and the answer depends entirely on how many shops hit the threshold.

So a ratio variant is scarcer than the main cover, and a 1:100 is scarcer than a 1:10, but treat the ratio as a rough guide, not a population. The ratio is usually printed on the cover or the barcode add-on will tell you which cover you have. Whether the scarcity turns into money is another question, and my post on manufactured scarcity is about exactly that.

Second and later printings

When a comic sells out and the publisher goes back to press, the new copies are a second printing, and they are worth a fraction of a first printing of a key book. Three ways to tell:

• The indicia says so. "Second printing" or "2nd printing" in the small print. This is the definitive one.
• The barcode add-on. On modern books the final digit of the five-digit add-on is the printing number. A 1 is a first printing.
• The cover. Later printings usually change the cover colours, the trade dress, or the background, and often say "second printing" on the front. Usually, not always.

On vintage comics printings are less of an issue, because publishers rarely went back to press, but reprints did happen, and the indicia is still the place to check.

Virgin, sketch, foil, glow and store exclusives

The modern cover economy in one paragraph. A virgin cover has the art with no logo, no barcode and no text. A sketch cover is the black and white line art. Foil, glow-in-the-dark, chromium, embossed and lenticular covers are exactly what they sound like. Store exclusives are covers commissioned by one shop or one artist and sold only through them, often in numbered runs. All of them are stated on the cover or in the indicia, and most of them are tracked by the barcode add-on.

They are all variants in the sense that they are different covers of the same comic. Whether they are valuable depends on the artist, the numbers, and whether anyone still cares in five years, and my honest answer is that most of them settle at or below what people paid. Look up sold prices for the exact cover, not the issue.

Error variants

Miscut covers, missing colour plates, upside-down interiors, wrong staples. A small number of famous printing errors have a following and a price. Most are just damaged copies. The difference is whether the error is documented and repeated across a batch, which makes it a variant, or one-off, which makes it a defect. When in doubt, search for the issue and the word "error" and see whether anyone else has the same one.

Things that look like variants and are not

• Facsimile editions. Modern reprints of classic comics with the original cover, the original adverts and a modern barcode. They say "facsimile" on the cover or in the indicia. They are worth cover price or a little over, and they catch out sellers and buyers every single week.
• Reprint lines. Marvel Tales, Classic X-Men, the various "true believers" and dollar reprints. Great reading, not the original, and the indicia says so.
• Collected editions and UK weeklies. The British Marvel weeklies of the 1970s reprinted US stories in black and white. They are a lovely part of British comics history and they are not the US first appearance.
• Thorpe & Porter stamped copies. See above. A stamp is a mark, not an edition.
• The direct edition with two prices. A cents and pence, or a US and Canadian, price together on the cover is the ordinary direct edition, not a price variant.

Describing a variant when you sell

Put the edition in the title and photograph the proof. "Amazing Spider-Man #300, UK pence variant, first printing" with a photo of the price box and the indicia will sell for more and with fewer arguments than "Amazing Spider-Man 300 RARE VARIANT" with a photo of the cover. The buyers who pay the most for variants are the buyers who know what they are looking at, and they want to see it, not be told.

And if you have a box of old Marvels and DCs with pence prices and stamps on them and no idea which is which, that is a normal Tuesday for me. Send the photos.