In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn the secret reason why DC put a special protective cover o the cover of Legends of the Dark Knight #1.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirtieth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment's legends. Click here for the second part of this installment's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

DC had another reason why it had the covers of Legends of the Dark Knight #1 covered up in 1989.

STATUS:

True

Recently, I did a legend about the release of Legends of the Dark Knight #1, the first all-new Batman solo ongoing series in many many years. Let me refresh what the setup was for that legend before I explain the secret additional aspect of the story.

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Released in the mini-Batmania that accompanied Tim Burton's blockbuster film, Batman, Legends of the Dark Knight (with Denny O'Neil, Ed Hannigan and John Beatty the initial creative team of the series that was intended as a anthology series featuring stories of Batman at different points in his crimefighting career) was one of two major atman releases in the fall of 1989 (Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean being the other)...

The book's regular solicited cover was covered by a special "protective" cover that came in four different colors...

Yellow...

Blue...

Pink...

and Orange

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I explained that the reason for the multicolored protective covers is that DC thought that retailers, hot off of the Batmania, had ordered far too may copies of the book ad were afraid that retailers would be stuck with tons of books and would blame DC for the piles of unsold merchandise.

So retailers didn't know that 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 the distributors quickly sold out of all of the reorder stock, which is crazy considering just how many copies of this comic book that was published.

Now, while the original INTENT of the comic covers weren't to get people to order more copies because of the variants, it obviously quickly showed comic book companies that people WOULD order more copies based on variant covers and, well, the rest is comic book history.

Ad that part of the story is accurate. However, that's only why there were MULTI-COLORED protective covers for the book. Former DC editor Robert Greenberger explained to me that there was going to e a protective cover o matter what for a interesting reason.

You see, DC's VP of Sales and Marketing, Bruce Bristow, did not agree with Legends of the Dark Knight's editor, Andy Helfer, to have the first cover of Batman's first solo ongoing series in many years to, well, not feature Batman on it. So Bristow came up with the idea of having the protective covers with an approximation of Batman on the cover.

Then someone (perhaps 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, comic book cover history.

Thanks to Robert Greenberger for the fascinating extra piece of information about this rather interesting point in comic book history.

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OK, that's it for this installment!

Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it's fair enough to still thank him, I think.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that's fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don't mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!

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