10 Comic Book Crazes You Totally Forgot Were A Thing

There was a time when the word "variant" wasn't solely limited to comic book covers, and it was a very dark time indeed. Fortunately, this was rare, but occasionally, publishers would print books that featured an altered story within the pages, making it difficult to distinguish one from another.

This was something like a Choose Your Own Adventure or the ending of the movie Clue; readers would open their books to find that their copy told a story different from their buddy's book, and the only way to get the complete story was to purposefully purchase the same comic as many times as necessary to get the whole thing.

On the surface, this was a novel idea, and it could have worked in limited ways, but for the most part, the fans didn't appreciate having to repurchase the same book over and over again. One of the biggest culprits in this practice was DC's Team Titans.

The book was a spinoff of The New Teen Titans, and the first issue contained two parts: a lead story, and an origin story for one of the new Titans. The lead was the same for all books, but there were five distinct origin stories, which meant readers needed to grab five copies of Team Titans #1 if they wanted the whole story. Fortunately, this craze didn't last long.