Grimm Fairy Tales as always continues to frustrate me in its depiction of women.  I have gotten somewhat used to the covers though as a necessary evil to get to the interior of well written female characters which are sometimes lacking in this medium.  I even go so far with this as to read the swimsuit editions as so far out of two of them, one of them contained a nice (and almost even touching) backup story.  Zenescope is one of the few companies that consistently puts out a swimsuit issue (only for its Grimm Fairy Tales characters though) but I have noticed that in the past year that they have been somewhat doubling up on their swimsuit pictures.  By that I meant that they commission a swimsuit style picture as an alternate cover and then use it later in their swimsuit issue.  These issues are used for promotion mostly though occasionally they are just more generally exploitative.  In the most recent issue of the Grimm Fairy Tales Universe (Godstorm #0) Venus is posed in the cover pretty much with this exact purpose in mind as it really does not tie into the issue whatsoever (she was not surfing at any point.)  I can understand why the covers are being used like this, as it likely increases sales and gets the story told, which I don't mind.  Still the doubling up of these appearances means that there is likely to be more such covers in the future as opposed to less.  

I'm unsure of what your complaint is here. Is it that the alternate cover has nothing to do with the story or that they reuse the images in their swimsuit books?

Or is it something else? Just the quantity of swimsuit covers?

Either way, allow me to provide my take on either.

Most comics have a variant that has absolutely nothing to do with the story inside. In fact, I have probably hundreds of issues that the main cover has nothing to do with the interior. That drives me insane, whereas I just accept variants just being variants.

As for reusing the images in other issues, I don't have a problem with that because most of the time books have awesome variants I simply cannot afford (or refuse to pay for). So if I could collect them all in one place for a low price, I would jump on that.

But you are correct about the drawing in of the males. Parts of our brains just never stop being teenagers. The teen in my brain helped me find this blog. ;P

@RazzaTazz: Are they 50/50 or limited, more expensive variants?

most of their variants are for trade shows or select retailer editions (RE). I'm surprised you didn't mention them reusing art for covers with different colors, I can remember a few occasions where they used the same exact art but changed the colors used to make different characters by changing outfit color, hair color, eye color, etc., extremely lazy.