Joe Krolik of Comics America in Winnipeg, Canada writes in and offers his take on comic book variants ("Interview with Dan Buckley, Part 3").
 
The Marvel and other companies' variants situation is being abused a great deal, not just "sometimes" as Dan Buckley noted.  This leads to inflated sales figures at the publisher side while leaving retailers with many, MANY unsold copies of regular titles and sometimes special cover versions.  It's a variation of the 1990s gimmick cover thing, except it inflates the regular cover circulations with no gimmicks.
 
DC Comics and IDW Publishing are not quite as bad as Marvel but they are still doing it. Image and Dark Horse use this tactic judiciously by comparison.  The big trend currently is the issuance of so-called "subscription" covers or "pullbox" covers offered by many of the smaller independents.  The idea is to double up the sales on the theory that comic book fans are completests and will want all the covers (one in their boxes and then go pick up the rack version).  Here's some news: with the economy the way it is, they don't.  Their budgets are stretched far enough without trying to double up on most of their purchases, especially at $3.99 and higher price points.  As this is most prevalent with smaller publishers it's actually having the opposite effect.
 
We for one have adjusted our orders whenever such a situation arises to split them among the available covers as opposed to adding.  If one of the covers sells through we try reordering.  If unavailable, tough beans and so be it.  Eventually some publishers may run into serious trouble doing this when enough retailers stop falling for it.  Then we'll have 1994 all over again, except this time it'll be worse.
 
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.