As mentioned elsewhere, we were recently given copies of the original Shuster Studio artwork of the formerly lost pages 2 and 4. (More on that later)
While working on page 2, I ran across a puzzling difference:
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 Shuster Studio artwork, it reads 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.
It turned out 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.
Turns out it wasn't exact.
The mimeograph of Jerry's script reads "
a SUPERMAN", Mark Waid's reproduction of that mimeograph (presumably unintentionally) omits the
a. It was Waid's duplicate that was copied and distributed around the DC offices, and that is the copy we were working from.
Does the "A" make any difference?
That's a question that may turn up again in future installments...
(It turns out the Shuster Studio usage of the more correct "through" for "thru" was, in fact, a minor edit made by whoever was doing the lettering - Siegel had written "thru" in both versions of the script)
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