Chromium. Embossed. Foil. Die-cut. Lenticular. Why choose?

In honor of December's debut of the new Quantum and Woody! series from writer Daniel Kibblesmith and artist Kano, Valiant Entertainment will bring together nearly all of the comic book industry's most infamous cover gimmicks into one cheekily self-aware monstrosity of a variant -- specifically, the "Most Variant Cover of All Time."

The cover will sport a main image by Valiant mainstay artist Clayton Henry, featuring Quantum, Woody and perennial supporting character/mascot The Goat in an homage to Barry Windsor-Smith’s 1992 cover for the original Valiant's Unity #0. While that would surely be a fetching image by itself, the fun really starts with the chromium bar at the top of the cover, the embossed and foil logo (using genuine '90s foil -- more on that later), iridescent fifth ink, "die-cut Goat bite," lenticular back cover and sticker featuring a random fourth Valiant character drawn by one of the publisher's artists -- making each cover different, and meriting individual hand-numbering. The cover doesn't glow in the dark, but the company says it tried to make that happen.

The cover will be available to retailers who order 250 copies or more of December's Quantum and Woody #1, with a limit of one copy per store.

Not only does the cover aim to bring attention to the new series and somewhat satirize the current variant craze, it also, as you may imagine, is labor-intensive to produce -- an idea years in the making, first sparked a few years back during Valiant's previous Quantum and Woody launch.

"This really took a village. Every single person in the company was involved in this in some way. This is something that we've been working on for about three years," Dinesh Shamdasani, Valiant CEO & Chief Creative Officer, shared with CBR. "We wanted to figure out a cost-effective a way to build as many gimmicks as you could on one cover, and to do that in a way that looked cool in the cheesiest way we could."

In the process of researching how to make this cover a reality, Valiant discovered the Montreal-based printer that produced many of the '90s most famous gimmick covers -- including WildC.A.T.S. #2, Doctor Strange #50 and Adventures of Superman #505 -- and, in the ultimate '90s tribute, are using actual materials from those covers, including leftover reams of foils, to bring The Most Variant Cover to life.

"This guy ran this company with his father, who did all the gimmicks in the '90s," Shamdasani said. "Everything you can think of from the '90s, he did, except chromium. All the foils, all the embosses, all those crazy covers that were one silver color but embossed, they did those using a press that's never been used in printing before. They got a car press, I think from Dodge, that puts something like a hundred tons of pressure on a piece of paper to get this thing to emboss."

While variants and flashy cover gimmicks are most commonly associated with the speculator boom of the 1990s, they've made a major comeback in recent years, ranging from lenticular covers at DC Comics and dozens of variants for high-profile Marvel releases like Star Wars. Valiant itself has employed multiple gimmicks in its current incarnation, ranging from the QR-activated "talking comic book cover" for the 2012 launch of X-O Manowar that kicked off the revived phase of the publisher, to the many other covers planned for the new Quantum and Woody #1, including the "Extreme Ultra-Foil Chase Variant."

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Breaking Variants, The New Quantum and Woody']

While Valiant is as guilty as any publisher of dipping its hand in the variant cookie jar, the message sent with The Most Variant Cover is that it's something the company aims to have a sense of humor about.

"Our goal here is to break variants," Shamdasani told CBR. "Just completely break them, have some fun with them. People take variants too seriously. There's certainly a demographic of fans that love variants, we're all part of that -- we love it, especially when they accentuate story. But people take them too seriously, they get upset by them, and certainly some of the publishers misuse them. We want to remind people, 'Hey, these things are silly, and they're fun, and look how innovative they can be, and how much stupidity can go into them, and how fun that is.'"

Alongside that, Valiant's executives stress that in employing splashy tactics to promote a comic like Quantum and Woody, the focus remains on making sure it serves the story that's between the foil-enhanced covers.

"All of these initiatives that we do are always in service of getting the book in front of new people, and people who are going to support the title in their local comic shops," Hunter Gorinson, Valiant's Vice President of Marketing & Communications, told CBR. "Whether it was the talking cover back in 2012, or whether it was something more subtle like the preorder editions that we introduced for X-O Manowar earlier this year, both of those accomplished the same things, which was getting people into comic book shops, talking about the books, and hopefully talking about the incredible stories we have coming up."

While the Valiant that exists today is a different one that existed in the heyday of '90s variants, a tradition of marketing stunts has endured, something that's been key to every iteration of the company -- with the common goal of getting readers to take notice when your superheroes aren't as recognizable as Batman or Spider-Man.

"The original Valiant was very adamant to break new ground," Shamdasani said. "They wanted to be very innovative, and it did two things for them: It allowed people who didn't know who they were, because they didn't know the characters yet, to get excited about certain ideas. And it allowed them to showcase that they were going to change the medium in their small way and be innovative. We've done the same thing."

Quantum and Woody, like Valiant itself, has its roots in the '90s -- albeit in the late '90s, following the company's ill-fated acquisition by now-defunct video game publisher Acclaim Entertainment. Created by Christopher Priest and Mark Bright, the series stars adoptive brothers Eric and Woody Henderson, who, as a result of the incident that gave them their superpowers, must clang their metal wristbands together every 24 hours, lest they get dissolved.

The new series -- which comes at a time when the property is in development as a TV series from the Russo Brothers -- finds the duo in another challenging spot: at odds with each other after Woody discovers Quantum has kept the identity and location of his biological father from him.

"I think Daniel Kibbelsmith really is one of the funniest guys in the medium," Valiant Editor-in-Chief Warren Simons told CBR. "He's come up with a really wonderful story here, which at its foundation is about the brothers, about the relationship, about what it means to be Quantum and Woody in this day and age."

Given the series' tendency towards humor -- the tagline has long been "The World's Worst Superhero Team" -- it was a natural fit, tone-wise, for Valiant to have fun with something like "The Most Variant Cover of All Time."

"It's a story with heart, but obviously Quantum and Woody are the one opportunity we have to be a little bit more silly, a little bit more absurd," series editor Danny Khazem said.

Variant covers can be absurd, excessive and at times harmful for the industry, but the goal is (usually?) a noble one -- getting more people to read comic books.

"In the '90s, Marvel ran towards these things because it helped sampling," Shamdasani said. "They had an issue they were trying to sell, how are you going to get them to jump on their first issue of Incredible Hulk when the numbering is 300-something? Put a little bit of a foil on the cover, and that helps them pick it up. If you pick up a comic book, that's 80 percent of your work done there. You've got to make sure the book is good, that's the key thing. That's where the '90s fell down -- they stopped worrying about the books, they just worried about the gimmicks."

Quantum and Woody! #1 -- and all of its many wacky covers -- is scheduled for release on Dec. 20.