When is Original Art not what it appears?

Danny boy continues his great writings about the original art fandango that exists with the published version, or the credits on the published version not being what they appear. I love reading this stuff, of course, the behind the scenes being fascinating to me.

I recall all the different pages of the Good Guys #1 that we went through, including the notorious page 8, notorious to me at least. Here is the story: Defiant contacted me to a sample page of inks before I had ever broken into the industry and sent out a xerox of page 8, pencilled by Grey. A pretty good copy too, by the way, and I set about to light boxing it and inking it on 1 ply vellum, a killer paper that strathmore no longer makes. they specifically told me to keep it very clean. so I did. I then fed ex'ed it to NY and waited to hear. Of course 4 days later I got a call telling me that it was too "clean" and not what they wanted. I fully admit, I was crushed, and proceeded to tear the damn thing into pieces. I knew that the work was good, and was enraged that nothing was ever going to let me get my big break.

Here's where it gets interesting. Of course, two weeks later, they call me back to tell me that the veteran inker they ended up sending the first batch of pages to ruined them and they wanted me. But, since I was new and in California, I would have to come out and work under their eyes at the offices in New York. So they fly me out there and I see that they have only photocopies of the pencils of the first 8, but they aren't the nice photocopies, they're ghostly white. And they say, "Well, at least, we have your good version of page 8."

Page 8 was, I stress again, shredded. Shredded into the types of pieces that only truly righteous anger can lead one to making.

So I end up re-inking, via lightbox, the first 7 pages, and then using the poor xerox and my own xerox of page 8 to recreate page 8.

So what happens? They end up cutting up the xeroxes and condensing pages 1-8 into pages 1-6 and just glue the xeroxed panels onto bristol anyway.

And that's just the first quarter of the book.

Scans to come.