With over half a billion in box-office receipts and counting, Iron Man 2's blockbuster reign continues unabated. But Shell-Head's also taking over Marvel Comics as well, with new variant covers from animation auteur Genndy Tartakovksy, psy-fi artist Alan Aldridge and more, as part of the publisher's Iron Man by Design series.

The singular Aldridge's variant cover for Avengers issue No. 2 (pictured above) is a perfectly destabilizing merge of 20th-century psychedelia and 21st-century militarism. Aldridge illustrated sci-fi covers for Penguin and even designed graphics for legends like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. But his rendering of Earth's capitalist superhero is a mind-wipe of another type.

Meanwhile, the mad genius Genndy Tartakovksy takes comics fans on a different kind of head trip in his variant cover for Invincible Iron Man Annual's first issue. It features the kind of raw mechanical sweetness found in almost of all his impressive work, from Dexter's Laboratory and Samurai Jack to Star Wars: The Clone Wars and his forthcoming animated series Sym-Bionic Titan.

Other variant covers (pictured below) also arrived this week from a pair of Pixar superstars partially responsible for the eye candy of Up, Wall-E and Ratatouille. Ronnie del Carmen rustled up a steampunk cowboy for Invincible Iron Man issue No. 27, and Bill Presing hit escape velocity with a recombined World War II variant cover for Iron Man Legacy issue No. 3.

All of the respective comics are released in June, but the burning question comes now: Do these all-star variant collectibles make a persuasive argument for the predominance of paper comics? Or do they call to your wallet just as convincingly in the age of the iPad? Take flight in the comments section below.

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