Canadian Mutant

Color and Sketch versions of the same Comic. I am a huge fan...are you? I have always been a fan of the sketch version of a cover. Seeing the foundation for an issue prior to adding color and then looking at the result has always been just plain cool. As a collector I love the idea of tracking down the different covers. Going after the hard to find variants, finding that elusive sketch the 1:200 or 1:300 in a good grade is just awesome, if I can get them signed even better. Sadly, while I enjoy the collecting hobby it can be a little on the expensive side. Even for the modern stuff that makes up most of my collection. When I first started collecting comics back in the 70's some of my favorite stories involved the Avengers and the X-men. I was thrilled that there was going to be a major storyline where they would fight each other. Lots of different covers promised, just awesome! Well mostly awesome I found myself liking most of the rare / variant covers. The just changing the color on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th covers on the early issues (0, 1 and 2) was just disappointing / money grab. Although I did appreciate that the 6th was a sketch and did find myself liking the Gold version 7 (bad me, don't do that...we are supposed to be upset about what we consider to be a blatant / lazy money grab). Each of the main issues 1 -- 12 came with a full color Team Variant 1:25 and two team variants ("I'm with the Avengers" and "I'm with the X-men") where the opposing character was in black and white. I found this a little confusing with issue number 2 featuring the Hulk vs White Queen (sue me I am still old school where Emma is concerned) and issue number 4 Spider-man vs Iceman. Seriously, both White Queen and Iceman are White...pretty near a sketch to begin with. At the end I found myself (wanting - slash that) expecting a little more effort from Marvel. All in all I enjoyed the story I found it lagged a little in parts and lacked some of the comic humor that has made me a long time fan, but it was pretty good. Some of the battles were epic and I thoroughly enjoyed consequences - note second printings are all sketches -- too cool! At some point I decided, I think when I picked up the hard cover trades, I decided that I would like to collect the set. I took a look and holy there are 204 comics in this set. This is a serious undertaking! Well I decided to start with the rare sketches...my logic being that these 1:200s will only go up in price and then I will go after their color counter parts as they are 1:100s with my logic being the same. In my first post I wanted to share both my interest in the Sketch covers, how I got here and my luck in getting one of the rare covers is a coveted 9.9! Here is Avengers vs X-men #9 both the 1:00 color version and the 1:200 sketch version: Thank you for Reading, The Canadian Mutant, Eh. To see old comments for this Journal entry, click here. New comments can be added below.