Legends of the Dark Knight #1
In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, find out the secret reason why DC put a special protective cover on the cover of Legends of the Dark Knight #1.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirtieth episode where we examine three comic book legends and determine if they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three captions. Click here for the first part of this episode’s captions. Click here for part two of the captions from this episode.
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COMIC CAPTION:
DC had another reason for covering the covers of Legends of the Dark Knight #1 in 1989.
STATUS:
True
Recently, I captioned the release of Legends of the Dark Knight #1, the first all-new single-player Batman series in many years. Let me refresh the setup of this legend before explaining the additional secret aspect of the story.
Released in the mini-Batmania that accompanied Tim Burton’s hit movie Batman, Legends of the Dark Knight (along with Denny O’Neil, Ed Hannigan and John Beatty, the initial creative team for the series which was intended as an anthology series featuring stories of Batman at various points in his crime-fighting career) was the one of the two main releases of atman in the fall of 1989 (Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Land by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean being the other)…
The book’s regular solicited cover was covered with a special “protective” cover that came in four different colors…
Yellow…
Blue…
Pink…
and Orange
I explained that the reason for the multi-colored protective covers is that DC thought the retailers, fresh out of the Batmania, had ordered way too many copies of the book announcement feared the retailers would be stuck with tons of books and would blame DC for the piles of unsold merchandise.
So retailers didn’t know the books would have four covers until they received the comics. Of course, customers all wanted all four colored covers of this “first new ‘solo’ Batman book” since 1940″ and distributors quickly ran out of restocking stock, which is crazy considering how many copies this strip has. comic that was published.
Now, while the original INTENT of the comic book covers wasn’t to get people to order more copies because of the variants, it obviously quickly showed comic companies that people would order more copies based on variant covers and, well, the rest is comic book history.
Announce that part of the story is accurate. However, it is only for this reason that there were MULTICOLORED protective covers for the book. Former DC editor Robert Greenberger explained to me that there was going to be protective coverage no matter what for an interesting reason.
You see, DC Vice President of Sales and Marketing Bruce Bristow disagreed with Legends of the Dark KnightBatman editor Andy Helfer for having the first cover of Batman’s first ongoing solo series in many years to, well, not feature Batman in it. So Bristow came up with the idea of having the protective covers with an approximation of Batman on the cover.
Then someone (maybe even Bruce Bristow himself, or maybe Bob Wayne) came up with the additional variant aspect of the comic book release and the rest is, as I noted earlier , the comic book cover story.
Thanks to Robert Greenberger for the fascinating additional information on this rather interesting point in comic book history.
DISCOVER A FILM LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest Movie Legends Revealed – did Paramount Pictures force Francis Ford Coppola to have a “violence coach” on The Godfather to make sure the story was interesting enough for a mass audience?
MORE LEGENDS!
OK, that’s it for this episode!
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