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For over a year now, DC Comics' Absolute Batman has been the best-selling comic book in North America... and by a large margin. It's so big even competing companies like Image Comics says its helping sales of its book five-fold. It's been a rising tide for the entire Absolute DC line, and the term 'absolute' is entering comic parlance to describe a modern-day, 'better' version of something in the same way Marvel's 'Ultimate' moniker did two decades ago. But in all of this, the comic book collector/speculator market has flourished around it, to the point that DC believes there may be price-gouging going on by some brick-and-mortar and online retailers.

DC Comics has revised the terms of its retailer-exclusive variant cover program in several respects, but most notably to explicitly discourage price-gouging, to the point of setting a hard line of what they could consider gouging. While they are careful in the language to not be accused of price fixing, DC discourages stores from marketing up unsigned variant covers more than five times their listed sales price. For those that are autographed after the fact, DC is encouraging retailers to limit the mark-up price of those autographed versions to ten times the listed price.

The penalty? DC says it could cut off any offending retailers from the exclusive variant cover program for breaking the rules.

DC is also making explicit that homages to other media, which has become a popular in recent years to the point that even DC has commissioned some including popular Marvel Comics covers, and several full-on theme months homaging popular movie posters.

DC is now also strictly banning the usage of retailer exclusive variant covered comics to be included in any unapproved blind bags or similiar promotions.

Part of the collectibility of variant covers for some is the limited nature of them. While in the past some retailers have advertised very small print runs of DC retailer exclusive variant covers, the publisher has made public that the minimum print run for DC retailer variants are as follows:

• For Vertigo titles, 1000 copies "in any approved format"
• For Absolute Universe titles, 2000 copies "of which one thousand (1,000) units must be full trade dress and the remaining one thousand (1,000) units must be full trade dress, trade dress-free, or foil."
• For other DC titles, 1000 copies in full-trade dress

While variant covers have been a common part of superhero comic books since the '70s, in the early '00s the trend of some stores paying to get a special variant cover exclusively available to for their store has risen. It was one of the early successes of Dynamite Entertainment owner Nick Barrucci, through his Dynamic Forces collectible business. DC publisher/chief creative officer Jim Lee has a longstanding relationship with the retailer Torpedo Comics that have resulted in many variant covers exclusive to that store chain. In fact, some comic artists have opened up digital storefronts of their own to offer variant covers of popular Marvel DC comics that they themselves have illustrated.

Why comic book variant covers went from art experiment to sales strategy, and how a particular 1990 Hulk comic by Marvel set it all off.