What's the point of variant covers? Is it just collectors speculating on something that will never be worth anything?
When the comic industry was healthy it was a much rarer occasion and was only done for special key issues. It was also done to give customers more variety to pick from (have an issue that has two popular characters? Do a cover with each so people that like one get get the one with that character). Certain cases it was done as promotion for actual physical stores, certain retailers would get certain covers so you would have to go to certain stores to get them (at one time the industry actually cared about the health of the people who sold their products..
Even the physical copies of the TV Guide Booklets did something similar ages ago. certain retailers getting one of two variants and then subscribers to TV guide would get a separate 3rd variant cover for special releases. It was always a sales gimmick but it was tame and customers in general liked it when it was done.
In the modern day it's just to milk the same shrinking customer base to make up lost sales, you need one customer to buy 3-5 variants to make up for the sales of all the customers comics has a medium have lost over the last 15 or so years, it's why almost every comic release has multiple variants (both mainstream and indie).
It's why comic sales numbers have been very misleading for some time, take King Spawn which was a "hit" when it's first issue dropped. It had decent sales numbers but it had
ELEVEN DIFFERENT VARIANTS for it's first issue, speculators/ collectors obvious impacting it's sales compared to successful comics from when the industry was healthy and you could reach those numbers with only 1 version on the market. It's not even a first issue thing for King Spawn, issue 2 and onward also have multiple covers, though not nearly as many as the first.
As much of a pro ai defender i an to mock takentless hacks in pedowood. Maybe it shouldn't be used by literal talentless hacks who uses it to write z movies. Ai should be a tool to help ideas to flesh out ideas or cool or wacky photos, not the replacement of writing or illustrating of a comic book company
I'm actually fine with that. You can make incredible things with AI, especially if you already have a background in art but the person doing has to both care and have a drop of talent to do so, Zack has neither.
This cover is terrible, a reflection of how little the person who made it cares. I have no background in art but know the basics of photoshop and other software for work, even I've managed to make things generated from AI look better than this.
The joke is also terrible. Wow, he used JESUS in mocking manner to make a joke!? Very mid-2000's reddit Zack, incredible stuff from a totally not Obama era democrat who TOTALLY voted for Trump I'm sure.