10 Comic Book Crazes You Totally Forgot Were A Thing

Comic books have been around for nearly a century, and over the years, the publishers have done some wild and crazy things to drum up business and increase sales. After all, you can only tell so many stories about a character before they get dull and repetitive, so why not try something new every once in a while?

Over the years, the various gimmicks and crazes have come and gone, with many sticking around far longer than they were welcome. For the most part, these types of sales gimmicks die out when the customers grow weary of them, but not all disappear, and some, like variant covers, stick around forever.

While those covers may still be around, there are more than enough gimmicky covers, and tweaks to the printing process publishers have thrown at customers, and those don't get to play in the world of comic books forever — many are long gone.

If you've been buying and reading comics for more than a few years, odds are, you're aware of many of the comic book crazes that came and went. Still, some of these ten comic book crazes that were, unfortunately, a thing not too long ago, may include some you've thankfully forgotten.

If you collected comic books throughout the 1990s, odds are, you haven't forgotten about gimmick covers, but for everyone else, they were ubiquitous throughout the decade. Not only were they slapped onto just about every book a publisher put together during that period, but they also helped lead to the collapse of the industry.

Marvel and DC were notorious for gimmick covers back in the 1990s, and it was pretty ridiculous. The publishers printed gold, silver, and platinum foil-embossed covers, hologram or reflective foil covers, die-cut, glow-in-the-dark covers, and more.

This practice flooded the marketplace and helped tank the industry for years due to driving the speculative market for would-be collectors looking to buy something rare only to find out there were millions made, making them anything but rare or collectible.

Technically, the craze hasn't entirely gone away, but it has changed over time. Instead of buying a foil-embossed, hologram, platinum, or whatever else kind of cover a publisher makes for a book, fans eat up variant covers, and they are far better than the old gimmicky stuff.

Variant covers released nowadays feature entirely different artwork and depending on the book, there could be more than a dozen options, each one printed in a limited quantity. This doesn't hurt collecting like the old gimmicks did, and in many ways, it reinforces it, as some variant covers are scarce and highly sought after by collectors.