Not the same. Sure, we do variant covers (as does DC, as does pretty much all of the big outfits), but those variant covers are in the service of selling the content.

What DC is doing in September is promoting a series of covers and a bunch of solicit copy written up by who-knows-who to promote books for which they’ve admitted they have no idea who will be working on (at least for half of them.) So what they’re selling you and selling the retailers here is shiny, attractive covers. Nothing wrong with shiny, attractive covers, I just wish that they were being done in the service of some actual creative content that didn’t come out of an editorial meeting somewhere. Put one of those on Geoff and JRJR’s SUPERMAN, and I’m fine.

It was strange to me–and maybe it happened in DC forums that I don’t typically visit–that nobody much complained about the last time they did this a year ago. Virtually none of those books was produced by the regular team. It was a month of fill-in comics, and yet the only reaction people seemed to have was when their lenticular covers melted in the heat.

I want to believe that you guys in general care more about the characters and the stories and the creators than the doo-dads–but stuff like this certainly makes it seem like the opposite is true.