Prior to Mark Waid's discovery of the lost K-Metal script, the only evidence of the story's existence was the reproduction of four of the original pages in Steranko's famed 1970 work, History of Comics. Those four pages were identified only as being from "an unpublished Superman story," with no mention of why the story was unpublished nor what it had been about.
Page 8 is the first of those four pages to be used in the K-Metal restoration project.
One of the challenges Shane faced in refinishing the page was that the source material was a very small, poor and washed out reproduction, with much of the detail missing.
As one example: In these two panels from the original page 8, the radiator grill, the headlamp, and the tire details are completely missing from the automobile.
In order to extrapolate the automobile's correct appearance, we looked ahead in the story and examined how it was drawn on page 9. This also enabled us to determine the actual make and model of the car:
Although the Chevrolet has a split windshield, it was identical in many other respects to the automobile that appeared on page 9 and served as a sufficient reference.
We were then able to reconstruct the auto as it must have originally appeared on page 8, restoring the missing radiator grill, headlamp, and whitewalls.
After doing this research and reconstruction; we then discovered that the 1940 Chevrolet had already been used on the cover toAction Comics #30 , the issue directly precedingSuperman #8 . Not only that, but we had chosen the same color for the car.
