If I were going to buy a physical copy of this for the cover, it would be the blank sketch variant (but not if it has that horrible block text logo shown on the "not-final-I-hope" image). At least you know having one or more of those around might come in handy if your ever had any inclination to commission a drawing from a pro artist (or even a talented amateur).
Otherwise, this is where going digital has it all over print comics. Who needs 25 variant covers over the exact same interior story filling up boxes in their house, when you can just save any of the images off the internet for free to look at whenever you want? I don't need to purchase the same story multiple times for $4 a pop when there are plenty of other comics to spend my money on.
I guess if you want to look at it that way, it's nice to have 25 flavors of cover to choose just one from, but I don't know if the idea of cultivating comic collectors instead of comic readers is a particularly good one. It sort of changes the basic nature of the hobby to make it more like stamp collecting. The cover art is nice to look at, but what does that have to do with reading comics? I can't argue against the fact that it does help inflate sales for any given issue, since if it didn't work the practice wouldn't continue, but it does feel a little creepy, sort of as if the comic book industry is only surviving on life-support. On one extreme they're pushing cover variants, and on the other extreme they're pushing digital, but the traditional middle ground of one single copy of a printed comic for one reader seems to have just fallen by the wayside. More and more the industry depends on a single comic book collector to carry the burden of being a heavy consumer by purchasing multiple titles and multiple variants of the same issue. And yeah, as it happens, I AM that heavy consumer... I just choose to allocate my money among as many different titles and publishers as possible. But... fewer individual readers, each of whom is depended on to purchase more than was the case in the past, can't be a good publishing model, can it? Whenever a single heavy consumer suffers burnout, it's like losing ten or twenty readers that the industry had in the past. Just my two cents.
Otherwise, this is where going digital has it all over print comics. Who needs 25 variant covers over the exact same interior story filling up boxes in their house, when you can just save any of the images off the internet for free to look at whenever you want? I don't need to purchase the same story multiple times for $4 a pop when there are plenty of other comics to spend my money on.
I guess if you want to look at it that way, it's nice to have 25 flavors of cover to choose just one from, but I don't know if the idea of cultivating comic collectors instead of comic readers is a particularly good one. It sort of changes the basic nature of the hobby to make it more like stamp collecting. The cover art is nice to look at, but what does that have to do with reading comics? I can't argue against the fact that it does help inflate sales for any given issue, since if it didn't work the practice wouldn't continue, but it does feel a little creepy, sort of as if the comic book industry is only surviving on life-support. On one extreme they're pushing cover variants, and on the other extreme they're pushing digital, but the traditional middle ground of one single copy of a printed comic for one reader seems to have just fallen by the wayside. More and more the industry depends on a single comic book collector to carry the burden of being a heavy consumer by purchasing multiple titles and multiple variants of the same issue. And yeah, as it happens, I AM that heavy consumer... I just choose to allocate my money among as many different titles and publishers as possible. But... fewer individual readers, each of whom is depended on to purchase more than was the case in the past, can't be a good publishing model, can it? Whenever a single heavy consumer suffers burnout, it's like losing ten or twenty readers that the industry had in the past. Just my two cents.