Just when you thought it was safe to read Previews, the variant cover is making a comeback. God help us all.

The official sales charts for May saw the top three titles - ASTONISHING X-MEN, SUPERMAN/BATMAN and SUPERMAN - all selling tens of thousands of copies more than their competition, thanks in large part to a programme of variant covers. The gimmick seemed to have disappeared off the radar for a while, but results like that practically guarantee that we can expect to see a lot more of them.

This is, needless to say, something to be utterly depressed about. Marvel and (at least for its superhero books) DC both seem to be caught up in worrying signs of nostalgia for the early 1990s. That period saw some delightfully high selling books. It also saw the market flooded with a deluge of absolute drivel that led to the comparative collapse of the market in the mid-nineties.

It became commonplace in the nineties to blame the whole mess on those darned speculators. With their beady eyes and carefully slabbed price guides, they cruelly schemed to destroy the medium.

Of course, this was nonsense. The speculators did nothing whatsoever to harm the industry. For the most part, they were just a bunch of dupes with money to burn and a disastrously rudimentary grasp of the laws of supply and demand. They were bound to wise up in the end, but if they wanted to pour some money into comics in the meantime, so be it.

'May's top three titles all sold more copies, thanks in part to variant covers.' The fault lay with the publishers who decided to pander to that audience, thereby alienating actual readers, throwing quality control out of the window, and generally doing everything in their power to ensure that the inevitable demise of speculation would be not just a disappointment, but a market crash. That's what caused the problems. The speculators would have kept on merrily speculating whatever the publishers had actually produced.

The variant cover is a particularly bizarre gimmick, since it's hard to imagine who actually buys the damn things. You would have thought that only particularly obsessive collectors would feel the urge to pick up two copies of the same comic with the same interior, no matter how delightful the range of art available. When CD singles are released in two different versions, at least they tend to change the B-sides.

No doubt there are some perfectly legitimate sales gains to be made from variant covers. Presumably it increases the shelf space given to a particular title, and by having more than one piece of art on the shelves, it increases the chances of catching somebody's eye. But then, that rationale applies more sensibly to newsstands, where casual purchases are not entirely unknown. Variant covers are a direct market gimmick. It is hard to believe that many copies of ASTONISHING X-MEN #1 were sold to people who were unaware of its existence until they entered the shop.

Unfortunately, it does seem alarmingly as though people are actually buying more than one cover - either through speculation or obsessive collection. If nothing else, retailers appear to be ordering on that basis. This, in itself, is harmless. If readers want to give extra money to the publishers, then that's their business. In principle, you can sell as many variant covers as you want, and still leave the story content unaffected.

'The speculators were just a bunch of dupes with money to burn.' But American publishers have a rather poor track record for that sort of thing. Faced with idiots who want to give them money, their reaction has tended to be simple. Dollar signs appear in their eyes, and they start thinking of more ways to pump cash out of the rubes. The pressure for big events and silly gimmick covers ends up detracting from the actual content.

Some readers may, perhaps, be too young to remember the full, dismal horror of 1990s gimmick covers. Chrome covers that could only conceivably look attractive to magpies and the visually impaired. Thirteen variant covers for GEN13 #1 - one of which was largely blank. Holograms. Holofoil. And the worst idea in the history of the medium, the variant interior.

The variant interior was an economically brilliant, and yet creatively bankrupt, concept. The passably intelligent average reader (assuming he hadn't already abandoned the entire medium in a fit of despair) might decide that he only needed one cover, because the story was the same in all of them. But if you had four variant editions, with key scenes different in each one, and the rest repeated, then you could make people buy all four! And because most of the story was the same in each comic, it didn't cost all that much to do.

The most egregious example is probably DC's 1992 atrocity, TEAM TITANS #1, which shipped in five different versions. Each contained the origin story of a different team member as a back-up strip, and therefore all five were essential reading. Readers were therefore compelled to buy the same lead story five times. One would have to be cretinously stupid not to realise that this kind of thing annoys readers, but that involved thinking beyond next week, and people didn't do that in the early nineties.

'The pressure for big events and gimmick covers detracts from the actual content.' DC weren't the only offenders. Image did it with FATHOM. AVENGERS/ULTRAFORCE had a go as well. Fortunately, Marvel's SLINGERS #1 - four variant editions featuring nothing of any significance at all - bombed almost immediately, and seems to have killed off the gimmick.

Nonetheless, once publishers get it into their heads that there's a goldmine to be pursued, this is where they can easily end up. As variant covers return to the big time (or what passes for it in the direct market, anyway), it's worth remembering what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope.

Of course, that kind of brazen exploitation is a long way off. Then again, temptation can be difficult to resist. Marvel have recently developed a fondness for (ahem) "Director's Cut" editions. These delightful editions don't feature any extra story material, thank god - albeit that that makes the term a bit of a misnomer. But they do feature extra features, scripts and so forth. The brilliant thing about these is that they don't come out until a month or so after the original book - leaving readers who actually want the extra material with a choice between waiting a month for the expanded version, or buying the thing twice.

Perhaps in these modern days of waiting for the trade, that isn't such an unreasonable expectation. And it has a precursor in the DVD industry's successful (and cynical) strategy of releasing the same films several times with an ever-increasing volume of extra features. Still, it smacks of a desire to try and get people buying the same comic twice. It's at least a little concerning to see that kind of approach gathering ground again.

The industry of 2004 has one saving grace that didn't apply in the early nineties, however - the increased prominence of the trade paperback. With publishers desperate to find a way into the bookstore market and the manga audience, there does seem to be an awareness that actual content is required for that purpose. In any event, the recognition that a comic has to justify its existence in trade paperback format as well should hopefully provide some sort of brake on the publication of complete garbage just to provide a basis for a promotional gimmick.

One would hope, anyway.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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