What Is the Naruto Volume 72 New York Comic Con Variant Cover?
Volume 72 is the end of the series, chapters 689 to 700 plus the finale material, and Viz timed its English release for October 6, 2015, the week of New York Comic Con. For the convention, Viz produced an exclusive variant edition whose cover is not the standard one: Kishimoto drew a new illustration specifically for this edition, making it one of the very few pieces of Naruto cover art created for an American release rather than inherited from Japan.
Convention variants are a Western comics tradition that manga rarely borrowed in that era, which is what makes this one notable. It was sold at the show rather than through normal book channels, so its print run was bounded by the event, and copies entered collections directly from the convention floor instead of from store shelves.
Viz followed the finale with the third English box set, collecting volumes 49 to 72 with a double-sided poster and a mini manga sampler, released in January 2016 at a list price of $195.99 at the time. Between the variant, the box set and the standard edition, the ending of Naruto generated three distinct English objects within about three months, a small case study in how a finale gets packaged.
How to identify a genuine copy
The variant is an English Viz volume 72 in every internal respect: same contents, same trim, same indicia family as the standard edition. The difference lives entirely in the cover art and its convention provenance. Because the value sits in the wrapper, condition of the cover itself matters more here than on a reading copy, and a listing should show the front, spine and back so the variant art can be matched against documented examples.
Why Kishimoto drew for an American edition
By 2015 Naruto was a genuinely global property and its ending was an international event, not only a Japanese one. A new Kishimoto cover for the American finale was both a thank-you to the English-language readership and a marker of how far the series had traveled since Viz launched the English edition in 2003, when a gesture like this would have been unthinkable for a manga volume.