10 Biggest Comics Controversies Of 2017

8. Marvel's Legacy Variants

Rorschach Doomsday Clock
Marvel Comics

As part of a line-wide refresh after the end of their controversial Secret Empire event, Marvel launched Marvel Legacy, which was set to include a wave of lenticular covers upon its release (because that's the thing you do with comics these days it seems).

However, these covers caused quite a stir with retailers. Variants, as a marketing technique, often rely on retailers ordering specific numbers of an issue in order to qualify for the variant cover fans will seek out. The sticking point here, however, was that Marvel requested retailers to order upwards of an extra 100% (or even 200%), of their regular orders of an issue to get the lenticular covers.

To say such numbers are prohibitive is putting it mildly.

Naturally, many retailers began to voice their concerns, and some even refused to stock the lenticular covers in protest.

Obviously, this was definitely not the kind of talk Marvel wanted surrounding their refresh, certainly not, after a year of troubling image and PR issues for the publisher.

Contributor
Contributor

Joe is a comic book writer out of South Wales, writing LGBTQ+ superhero series The Pride and also co-writing Welsh horror comedy series, Stiffs. He's also a comics reporter and reviewer who works with Bleeding Cool and now WhatCulture too. So he makes comics and talks about comics, but there's more to him too. Somewhere.