Entering the 1980’s, Marvel and D.C. each sold comics through two distinct distribution channels: “Direct Edition” copies were directly sold to comic shops on a non-returnable (but discounted) basis; “Newsstand” copies meanwhile were distributed to newsstands across North America, and unsold copies could be returned. In the beginning of the 1980’s, all of North America got the same identical newsstand copies.

But starting in October of 1982, due to currency fluctuation, publishers could no longer afford to charge the same 60¢ price on newsstands in population centers like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal — i.e. places where buyers would be paying in Canadian currency. For this reason, publishers started to demand 75 cents from those newsstand customers north of the border. But instead of placing both US and Canadian prices on newsstand copies as they eventually did, from 10/1982, out to 8/1986 for Marvel and out to 9/1988 for D.C., these publishers produced two distinct batches of newsstand copies: a higher cover price batch and a lower cover price batch.

Each batch was produced simultaneously with the other copies by the publisher on the same manufacturing equipment, so all are 1st print copies (each batch involving only a change of the black/key plate), but the number of copies created for each batch was different, with each batch sized to fit the corresponding market: the Direct Edition batch size was informed by comic shop order levels, and each of the two Newsstand batch sizes were informed by the size of the target market and newsstand sales trends. The smaller batch of higher cover price newsstand copies — the copies today known as “Type 1A” variants — were therefore sold in vastly smaller numbers, were purchased mostly by readers, and have estimated survivorship of ~2% of copies (CGC census data for most issues shows variant rarity between 1-2% of census copies)

The Examples shown below are showing the Marvel Price Logos but the percentages for the DC price variants are the same.