Unused Adventure Comics Cover: Plastic Man

Only the lower right corner section, with Starman, was used on the published cover of Adventure Comics # 469, cover dated March 1980. Aparo's Plastic Man was replaced with a Joe Staton-drawn illustration:

Staton (who pencilled the interior Plastic Man story) has kept the same basic layout, but Plas is defensive and intimidated rather than fighting back, so the editor must have wanted to convey threat instead of a more active engagement.
It's interesting to see Jim work in a more intentionally cartoony style, hearkening back to his earliest comic book work. The villain is clearly in the vein of Ramona Fradon, who had recently handled Plas in his self-titled series, ending in October 1977. Other than Joe Staton, who was penciller on this run in Adventure Comics, Aparo was the only other artist to have drawn Plastic Man in the intervening years, in Brave & Bold #148.
Jim did the full cover of the previous issue, Adventure Comics #468.

Unpublished Detective Comics #481 Cover, featuring Batman and Hawkman

As promised, here's my other example of excellent but unpublished cover art. From Detective Comics, scheduled for issue 481:

Why was this one never used? In this case, it's fairly easy to deduce DC's decision. With issue 481, 'Tec was suddenly merged with the recently-cancelled Batman Family, expanding from a then-standard 50 cent format to a jumbo "Dollar Comic". The merged series featured characters from the Batman family exclusively, so Hawkman was dropped. The nifty little Hawkman shot (Jim did a great Carter Hall!) would have had to go, but that's far from the only problem preventing the use of this cover. As a Dollar Comic, 481 had lots of extra features: Robin, Batgirl, Man-Bat, and a second Batman yarn. DC needed some cover space to advertise these new additions to the contents, and there's just not enough available space on Jim's cover to fit it in. DC replaced it with the jam-packed Michael Kaluta Jim Starlin (thanks for the correction, Groovy Agent!) cover on the right. Just look at all the additional blurbage, the cameos, and the Marshall Rogers panel--that's a lot of cover real estate. They could have simply reduced Jim's artwork--they'd done that back when Brave and Bold was a Super-Spectacular, to make room for shots from the reprint backups, but I think most comics fans would agree that that reduction really hurt the impact of the art. And Jim's original for this issue was a pretty detailed rendering which would have suffered significantly (Note that Kaluta Starlin, with less space for the main image, went with a far simpler design: Batman and a skull). And thus, alas, DC had to scrap a heckuva good cover. Nowadays, with generic pin-up covers in vogue, covers are frequently so generic that they could be slapped onto any issue at all, but Jim's art was too tied to the actual contents of the comic, as was expected back then, to be useful, say, on the next issue of the standard-format Batman comic book. And thus, into a drawer it went, until after entering the original art market in the Internet age, it finally emerged into the light at last.

Unpublished Dynamic Classics #2 Cover, featuring the Phantom Stranger and Manhunter

Here's an unused cover from Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. This was originally intended for Dynamic Classics, a reprint anthology that was cancelled in the infamous "DC Implosion". That comic, which was cancelled after a single issue, was scheduled to reprint the entire Archie Goodwin/Walt Simonson "Manhunter" in individual installments, with different lead features in each issue. This issue would have featured a reprint from one of Jim's Phantom Stranger issues, and he got to revisit the story with this nifty cover (I apologize for the quality; CCC scans always look awful, but there's enough left that one can see this would have been a really fine-looking cover). Unfortunately, DC was left with nowhere it could use this unpublished piece, since the "split-screen" image would only be appropriate for that particular reprint. About 15 years ago, Chris Khalaf asked around at DC and was informed that there were very few unused Aparo covers in the files; DC usually managed to find a home for everything he turned in. I've got another real winner of an unpublished cover coming up later, and those are the only two I know of right now.

Unpublished Deadman Art

The infamous "DC Implosion" was a cancellation of several mid-70's DC Comics series shortly after a highly-publicized expansion (officially called the "DC Explosion") of both page count and number of published comics. One of these cancellation victims was DC's recently-revived Showcase, which had been scheduled to launch a single-issue Deadman solo spotlight in issue 105.

Unfortunately for Aparo fans like me, Jim was the artist on that feature.

DC did later find a home for that story, which had been completed before the Implosion. It was published in Adventure Comics #454, a "Dollar Comic" with a larger page count than the standard comic book of the time, and featuring several different stories in an anthology format. Adventure had already been running a Deadman series by Aparo and writer Len Wein, but those stories were shorter than the Showcase spotlight had been scheduled to run. So when this tale found a slot for later publication, revisions were made from the originally-prepared story: the page length was shortened by a total of two pages. Today we present (from, I am sorry to say, less-than-high-quality scans) the unseen panels from the uncut version, as taken from DC's highly-limited release, the legendary Cancelled Comics Cavalcade.

The published version included the first two panels of this, page 4 of the story. It did not include the bottom four panels, where Deadman spots the "stupid kid" on the ledge.

The published version deleted page 5, seen above, entirely.

The published version deleted the first two panels, and joined the rest to the portion of page 4 that had been retained. That worked out quite neatly, removing Deadman's rescue of the boy (and, perhaps unfortunately, the demonstration of his supernatural abilities and acrobatic skills), and the absence of the sequence was indetectible. But I always wanted to see what was cut, and there it is.

Hidden Words in Aquaman?

Here's an interesting page. Click and have a look at this scene from Adventure Comics #441. Can you guess what's unusual about it?

There's probably not much chance that you guessed, unless you've recently read the published comic. Here's the story:

Back when I was first assembling the complete Jim Aparo Checklist in the early 90's, I forwarded a copy to my pal Chris Khalaf for corrections and additions. One of his corrections was: "Aparo didn't letter Adventure 441. Ben Oda did." I took another look at the comic, and sure enough, Chris was right. That wasn't Aparo lettering. (At the time, I didn't have the skill to recognize Oda, but after this incident, it was suddenly simple to spot Oda).

But why? In this era, Aparo always did his own lettering, along with the inking! And these were Aparo's inks...I couldn't imagine what situation would have arisen to require his pencilling the pages, then sending them in for lettering, then getting them back for inking! (And I didn't know it at the time, but I later learned that his usual technique was to do the lettering first!) It was a mystery.

The mystery was solved when I moved to Nashville for a year in 1992. At one of the local comics shops, I found a stack of original art that included one Aparo page: the one shown--sort of--above. The answer was simple: Ben Oda's lettering was pasted over all of Jim's original balloons and captions. Aparo had lettered, pencilled, and inked the entire job, but after his part was done, editor Joe Orlando had, for some unknown reason, rejected Paul Levitz's script, and had David Michelinie rewrite the entire comic. Oda then lettered the new script and pasted it over Aparo's work.

Look close through the issue as published and you'll see several traces of evidence, such as orphaned word balloon "tails" and obvious touch-up with white paint and ink.

The version linked to above is what I found when I stripped Oda's paste-ups off of the page. It's the original Levitz script, in Aparo's lettering, unseen for decades!

Unpublished Pencils

Back in the early 90's, Jim sent me a note updating me on his assignments. One of them was an inventory issue of Detective Comics, featuring Batman and Robin, during the period when the "real" Batman was out of commission (Aparo noted that his story featured the legit Bruce Wayne). The story was never published. In fact, it may never even have been inked. But here's a page of Jim's pencils (back then, DC was having someone else ink his work).