The comic cover contest imbroligio

First of all let me apologize, and take responsibility, for the ill-will being felt here.  I was the one who set up the contest and I was the one who screwed up.I need to make a mea culpa as we had two posts on our site that said opposite things.  As several of you have pointed out in the original post we did say the comic cover contest would be "decided by the vote of the fans".In the post that accompanied the announcement of the five finalists (BEFORE VOTING OPENED) the language was changed to: "and we want you, the fan, to HELP us choose who gets the coveted win."I get why you guys and gals are pissed - if you vote for something and feel your vote doesn't matter then "why on earth did these a$$wipes hold a vote?"It didn't occur to me (and I wish it had) to set up a SEPARATE POST to make sure people saw the contest rules had changed BEFORE VOTING OPENED. At least then you could have chosen not to vote if you felt the voting system was unfair.So again, I made a mistake, and I want to apologize.Now I want to explain WHY the change was made - it was for two reasons:1) Because our social marketing advisor told us that, sadly, FB and Twitter contests are often "gamed". Instead of the contest being decided by a group of critical feedback it becomes about spamming, bots or other tactics.This held a lot of weight with us because we feel we LOST a contest like this (to get tens of thousands in financing from a Canadian entrepreneurship foundation) after a rival's vote totals soared by a couple of thousand in just a minute or so. Clearly bots were involved and while the award was given, the organizers had told us they were going to be scrapping the format.Now, I'm not saying that is what happened here, I think we had a fair contest, I don't think we saw any bots being used or anything like that -- but we were worried we might.2) The SECOND reason was more business concerned. Our publisher wanted a say in what went on the front of the cover. They didn't make the final decision, but they wanted to have their input.I realize had I made sure this was explained earlier none of this would have happened. So, again, my apologies.We did make sure that the vote was weighted towards the votes (and in fact the two covers that had the most support finished 1-2). As I mentioned on FB once I saw this huge gap between two of the covers and the remaining three I asked IDW if we could perhaps do TWO alternate covers and declare the contest a tie. But, because retailers had already made their orders on a two-cover issue IDW said no.I do want to remind everyone that ALL the work will be published in issue #11. I have also contacted our runner-up, Allyssa Pirone, about a future cover or pin-up when the second series is launched.Again, I want to apologize if this contest left fans of Kill Shakespeare and Allyssa feeling disempowered and/or lied to.Conor(And just to show that this wasn't a "What the creators say, went" decision - I organized the contest and the cover I voted for finished a distant third.)