Sex Criminals #11

The story of how these variants came to existence and why they were destroyed is explained in the "Letter Daddies" column in "Sex Criminals (Image, 2013 series) #12."

Series creators, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's plan for these variants was to have 1000 of them printed, which they would autograph and draw sketches on at the Cadmus printing plant in Richmond, VA. Their reasoning behind this was that they wanted to have an issue that had 1000 different variant covers. This was to make a mockery of comic book publishers over glut of different variant covers that every new comic book seemed to have at the time.

Once signed and sketched on, these 1000 variants would be sealed, along with all of the regular editions of this issue, in opaque pink polybags and distributed (secretly) among the regular editions of the comic.

Halfway through this process, the creators realized that they were very far behind schedule as Chip Zdarsky had to catch a flight back home early the next morning. After dinner, they went to a dollar store and bought a bunch of stickers so that they could save time by applying them to the covers along with each of their signatures. Some of the stickers that were purchased included, "...Spider-Man, Batman, the Avengers, Hello Kitty, the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Disney Princesses..." They ended up completing all 1000 of the covers.

Then, the creators' lawyers got involved and they highly recommended that none of these variants be distributed due to possible copyright issues. All 1000 of these variants were supposedly destroyed, but a few have turned up on eBay and online message boards. It appears that only a handful of copies survived.

NOTE: Part of this cover contains an individual sketch and signature, and they will vary from issue to issue. We have included a version of our cover image as a sample. Normally the GCD does not include sketched-on covers in its gallery collections.