John Prigent wrote:I'm curious. I can understand that having four cover designs for the first graphic novel allowed Honorverse fans to comment on them, but why were all four actually used? It meant that collectors had to buy four copies of the same story for completeness spending extra money. At a look at the Forbidden Planet website shows two covers each for the next two parts (though one of them shows both covers with the same image, which will no doubt be corrected eventually). What's the point? Is it only being done to get more money from fans wanting complete collections? Or is there a sensible reason?
Cheers
John
Keep in mind, I'm just guessing here.
Possible reasons:
1) Each of the four covers was done by a different artist. There's the possibility that they wanted to get examples of each artist out with the intent of finding out which was preferred by the customer, and settling on that one for future covers.
2) They couldn't decide among which cover to use, and just threw caution to the wind and decided to use them all.
3a) A money grab. Especially from those who are already fans of the books (*I* got all four).
3b) A money grab from collectors.
3c) A money grab, because of all the people (like me) who bought all four, which pads the sales numbers, which they can point at and say, "Look, we sold *this* many copies of Issue #1. It's pretty damn popular and we should continue the series."
4) A way to get non-fans interested by portraying four different aspects of Honor.
5) A marketing ploy. By having the first issue of a new series have four different covers, it tells non-Honorverse fans that maybe this is pretty popular, and might be worth buying (whether they buy all four or not isn't as important as getting people interested to begin with).
6) All of the above.
7) None of the above. The reasons are murky to those not in the industry.
I also subscribe to a couple of PC Gaming magazines, and every so often, they will do multiple covers from the same game, or from different, highly-anticipated games. I never really thought much about it (usually because I couldn't care less about whichever game(s) is/are being featured), but it always struck me as a way to generate interest in the subject.
That's quite possibly the only reason Top Cow did it, and overall, I can't really say that generating interest, if it works, is a bad thing for the Honorverse in general. If it gets someone to buy the books (due to the full-page ads for them inside the comic), that's good, right?
