In "When We First Met", we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, "Avengers Assemble!" or the first appearance of Batman's giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man's face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.

Recently, I did an article about Gen 13 #1 in 1995, which had a then-record 13 variant covers! My pal, Ben H., asked me if the blank sketch variant cover for that issue was the first blank sketch cover.

Let's take a look!

Not really a blank cover, but Marvel's Generic Comic Book #1 definitely had a lot of blank space on the cover...

As I wrote about in a recent Comic Book Legends Revealed, DC accidentally published the cover to Wasteland #6 on Wasteland #5 and thus, when Wasteland #6 came out, DC released it without cover art, so it had a blank cover...

In 1994, DC did a big crossover event called Zero Hour, where the series counted DOWN from #4 to #0, and as the series progressed, the covers got whiter and whiter until the final issue was a blank cover...

A year later, Gen 13 #1 and sure enough, J. Scott Campbell's "Draw your own cover" variant was, indeed, the first blank sketch comic book cover.

A few years later, in 1998, Billy Tucci began doing them with Shi...

Tucci noted that it was tough to draw sketches on covers that were filled with images, so he came up with the blank variants and they became popular for conventions...

About ten years ago, the practice became very popular and now every company does them for pretty much every new #1, like Spider-Woman #1 the other week...

Thanks for the question, Ben!

If anyone has a suggestion for a notable comic book first that they'd like to learn, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!