We were recently given copies of the original 1940 Shuster Studio artwork of the formerly lost pages 2 and 4.
Our versions of page 2 and 4 had already been completed— as part of the original K-Metal restoration mission, we had created new pages, working from our copy of the Jerry Siegel’s script, as placeholders to fill the gap where the original 1940 artwork was missing. But we had always planned to replace our placeholder versions with restored versions of the 1940 artwork as missing pages are discovered and we are able to restore them.
The first thing I noticed while working on the original page 2, was that Angel’s layout of the first panel was almost identical to the Shuster Studio layout! This kind of synchronicity seems to occur on a regular basis with this project, yet I am continually surprised by it.
As I looked closer, I ran across a minor, puzzling difference. Here is the first panel from our version of page 2, created before the 1940 version had been discovered:
In our version of the page, the narration box reads,
“Hurtling thru inter-planetary space, a stellar fragment fated to change the destiny of SUPERMAN”
But— in the original 1940 Shuster Studio artwork, it reads a bit differently:
“Hurtling through inter-planetary space, a stellar fragment fated to change the destiny of A SUPERMAN”
I was puzzled by this difference, at first assuming that either I or the Shuster Studio had made a mistake in reading the script; or had done a minor on-the-fly edit.
But I eventually discovered that the solution wasn’t that simple, and the more I looked into it, the more puzzled I became.
Here’s what I tracked down:
When Mark Waid discovered the original K-Metal script in 1988, he didn’t actually discover the original typed document – he discovered a mimeograph of it.
In the interest of historical preservation, he painstakingly typed what he thought was an exact duplicate of the frail, faded, and brittle document.
Turns out it wasn’t exact.
The mimeograph of Jerry’s script reads “A SUPERMAN”, but Mark Waid’s hand typed reproduction of that mimeograph (presumably unintentionally) omits the A. It was Waid’s manually created duplicate that was copied and distributed around the DC offices, and that is the version that we were working from.
Does the “A” make any difference?
That’s a question that you may see addressed in future installments of the Saga of the K-Metal.
(You can see both versions of the complete page 2 here)