Page 5: HIDDEN GOLD!

[Great Rao]

Those of you following the K-Metal saga may already be familiar with the extended debate that occured a while back regarding page five.

Well, the wait is finally over.  Here at last is the completed page five, "Hidden Gold."

And this page truly is hidden gold - of the 26 pages drawn back in 1940 for  the story, only 10 are known to have survived.  And page five is the first of them.

When we began work on the K-Metal restoration project, one of the earliest things that Angel did was to create an all-new, completely pencilled full-size version of the original 1940 page five, using the low-resolution reproduction that was published in Alter Ego #26 as reference.

But because of a couple of crossed emails, Bob went ahead and enlarged and re-inked that same poor copy instead of inking Angel's new pencils!

Although in our opinion Angel's new pencils looked fantastic and might even have even resulted in a superior page, we all agreed (after seeing the brilliant end result) that it was better to use every bit of the original artwork when we could, and thus we stayed with Bob's restoration.

The end result:  An all-new page, with brand new sharp inks and vibrant colors - yet with pencils by Joe Shuster and Studio.

[MatterEaterLad]

An excellent page with a real 40s look to it...

And a lesson for all, never partner with dudes called "Gizzard and Buzzard"...

[Super Monkey]

Looks really good, the pages are really coming along much faster now.

[Criadoman]

I thought you'd like that.

[sandmountainslim]

Awesome!
I have just stumbled across this site and this project after recently getting back into Superman comics after a ten year hiatus and I cannot believe that something this momentous is finally seeing the light of day! Great job so far fellows and hats off to Siegel and Shuster,  cannot wait until the next page is posted.

[Great Rao]

Thanks, glad you like it!  I agree, it's incredibly momentous and we're all pretty exicted to be working on it.

Page 6 should be up soon - pencilling, inking, and lettering are all complete.  The coloring and dialog-ballooning are in progress:  In this case, I did the lettering over Angel's pencils (to make sure it all blocked out OK).  Then later I started working on the balloons over Bob's inks, while he is now simultaneously finishing up the coloring.

[sandmountainslim]

Momentous indeed!
This is most likely the final unseen Siegel/Shuster Superman story to ever see release anywhere,  that would be big news even if the story wasn't as good as this one seems to be.
Hat's off to you fellows and thanks for sharing with the world.

[Criadoman]

I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say "Thank you very much!"

When I 1st thought of doing this project, much of it had to do with seeing this site and seeing Rao's efforts in basically attempting to create a bit of a time capsule of the pre-Crisis Superman.  When I saw the K-Metal project that he was attempting to pull together, I thought it would be simply incredible to make it available to everyone.  Since I am an avid believer that when you consider something should be done, you have pretty much named yourself the person to see it become a reality, and considering I wasn't gonna necessarily make DC see the light and publish it, I guess I was gonna be the guy to do it.

Took a while, but thanks to Bob's and Rao's efforts, I am actually pretty happy with the results so far.

So - seeing posts like this is quite a reward for our efforts.  Thanks again.

-Angel Criado