There certainly all a lot of generic covers out there this month, isn't there? Nothing earth-shatteringly bad as things tend to go, but there were more than a couple that made me wonder what the heck was really going on. I can usually bank on finding a case or two of Weird Anatomy. But this time, the few cases I did find failed to compare to my shock of disappointment by Fantastic Four #574's Eaglesham Team Variant, on sale Dec. 23.
At first I thought this was a placeholder image. I mean, this can't *really* be the cover, can it? Dale Eaglesham was doing the alternate covers for a few issues now, and let me take a look at them-- November's #573 was the Thing, October's 572 was the Torch, September's 571 was Sue, and, yup, you guessed it, August's 570 was Reed.
So basically, either Marvel commissioned one piece from Eaglesham and then used it as clip art for four other variant covers, or they commissioned four variant portraits and then PhotoShopped them all into one montage as seen here. (To be fair, it's most likely the third option-- that they paid Eaglesham for all appearances of his artwork.) But no matter which way you slice it, it smacks of Bad Form. I don't know what the economics of variant covers are, but isn't the point to have something *special*? Why would I want to collect a variant cover that is simply the same images as all the other variant covers?
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