It's been a while since there's been a new K-Metal page and I'd like to explain the delay.
Page 7 is a bit of a unique page. In
Alter Ego #45, Roy Thomas published an illegible and extremely fuzzy thumbnail photo of the original artwork, along with the following explanation:
Another page from the "K-Metal" story! Charlie Roberts, bless 'im, sent us a copy of this ninth page known to exist (so far) of the 26-page "K-Metal" story that was covered in AE #26 & #37 by Mark Waid and Will Murray. It's repro'd here from a mediocre photo which is all that Charlie has... but we wanted to document the page, whatever the quality of the reproduction.
In short, page 7 wasn't a non-existent page that could be drawn from scratch; but neither was it a completed page that could be re-finished and colored as is. Instead it was an unusable collection of smudges.
So Angel painstakingly drew an all-new, full-size page 7 - attempting to decipher and match as much as he could from the extremely blurry and lossy photo.
Once his pencils were finally complete and Bob had just begun to ink them; we received an email from Thomas Andrae: He very kindly offered to send us a photocopy of the original page seven! The timing was an incredible coincidence.
Of course we took him up on the offer, and after a few email exchanges, we sat back to wait for the page.
It just arrived the other day and....
It turns out to be a copy from an art-auction catalog. Although it is very crisp and legible, it's not quite usable as-is since it's distorted in spots and is missing some details.
We're currently deciding on whether to finish up Angel's pencils; or to attempt a complete reconstruction based on the art-catalog reproduction; or to do some sort of combination.
But whatever we do, it's going to be a bit more time.
Dilber MC Theme by HarzeM