Welcome to the five hundred and seventeenth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the first five hundred (I actually haven't been able to update it in a while). This week, discover the amazing "Lost" Superman story by Dave Gibbons, Alan Davis, Brian Bolland and Garry Leach! What did the Brazilian version of Daredevil's Born Again replace a heroin needle with? Finally, did Marie Severin color panels all one color to obscure violence in old EC Comics?

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alan Davis and Garry Leach did a Superman story that has never been published!

STATUS: True

The year was 1988, Superman was celebrating his fiftieth anniversary and the city of Cleveland wanted to do something to celebrate the occasion. There were bold plans for a Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster museum, a Superman statue and a convention for Siegel and Shuster to celerate the anniversary. To help fund the project, a club (The Neverending Battle) was formed and they decided to do a tribute comic that they would sell to raise money for the museum. Tony Isabella was loosely in charge of the project (but very, very loosely).

As so many of these very well-intentioned endeavors go, the whole thing fell apart. There were only two stories completed for the project. One by Mike W. Barr, Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger (you know you've been writing about comics for a long time when Schaffenberger just rolls right off of your keyboard without looking twice) and one by a titanic team-up of some of the best British comic book creators of the 1980s, who all donated their art and their time for free (they are swell guys. Dave Gibbons is, like, some sort of alien prince, he's such a great guy). Loosely led by Gibbons, who wrote the framing sequence for the short story, the comic had three pages by Dave Gibbons and then one page apiece by Alan Davis, Brian Bolland and Garry Leach.

The original art for the project is sadly lost (at least hopefully lost and not stolen), but luckily for us, Gibbons' made copies of the original art at the time to help the other artists keep track of the story.

My good buddy Daniel Best has the entire story at his site here, so do go check out the whole thing there.

But here are pages from Gibbons...



Bolland...



Leach...



and Davis...



The Gibbons' page above was later used for the cover of TwoMorrows' Krypton Companion...



It'd be awesome to somehow still see this published, in color!

Thanks to Dave Gibbons, Gerry Turnbull (who provided Daniel Best the scans) and, of course, Daniel Best, because he is awesome.

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Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online to learn the bizarre true story behind Little House on the Prairie's "baby battering ram" episode!

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On the next page, did the Brazilian edition of Born Again also make an interesting edit to a controversial issue containing drug use?

COMIC LEGEND: The Brazilian version of Born Again replaced a needle with a razor in a scene where Karen Page almost does drugs.

STATUS: True

A while back, I wrote about how an issue of the Born Again storyline in Daredevil was released without Comics Code approval. At the time, I spoke about the violence in the issue, but commenters suggested that perhaps it was the presence of a heroin needle that got the Comics Code irked, as a fmaous sequence has Karen Page decide NOT to use heroin...





A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the Brazilian edition of Born Again was edited to make it fit with then-current Brazilian continuity. However, Born Again was ALSO edited to censor the use of the needle!

In the issue, the needle was taken out and replaced by a razor!



I love that. "Drugs are bad, kids! But cutting yourself is okay!"

Thanks to commenter Ivan for suggesting this one a while back and thanks to commenter Erico for the scan of the Brazilian edition!

On the next page, did Marie Severin color EC Comics panels that she found in poor taste all one color to obscure the content?

COMIC LEGEND: Marie Severin would color violent panels in old EC Comics all one color to tone down the violence.

STATUS: I'm Going With False

The legendary Marie Severin (who you all voted #15 on our recent countdown of the Top Female Comic Book Artists of All-Time) cut her teeth in comics as the main colorist for EC Comics in the late 1940s/early 1950s, where her brother John worked as an artist. Naturally, she worked on a number of gory comics back in the day. Severin was a religious woman, so the story has gone that she would color things a certain way to obscure scenes that she felt were too gory.

In his 1972 bio of Bill Gaines, Frank Jacobs wrote "There was Marie Severin, Gaines's colorist, and a very moral Catholic, who made her feelings known by coloring dark blue any panel she thought was in bad taste."

Dewey Cassell asked Severin about it in Cassell's recent book, Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics....

Cassell: The story has it that, on occasion, if you were coloring a book and felt like maybe a particular scene was a little too gory, maybe it might get colored a little more darkly than normal.

Severin: Well, people have said that. I would never assume an editorial position. What I would do very often is, if somebody was being dismembered, I would rather color it in yellow because it’s garish, and also you could see what was going on. Or red, for the blood element, but not to subdue the artwork. If it was too complicated with these gory scenes, I’d rather put one color on it because, number one, you can see more, and if you start coloring every detail of the knife throwing, the blood flowing, the shirt being ripped, all of a sudden, if it’s off-register, you get a mucky panel. It’s all messed up. Well, the whole page would be messed up. Frankly, I’d rather color with solids for, like, a murder scene, and yellow so you can see everything. I wasn’t trying to hide it. I mean, the main reason these people were buying these books was to see somebody’s head cut off, y’know? Lose fingers and everything.

Here's Severin's coloring on one of the most notoriously grisly EC Comics story, "Foul Play," by writer Al Feldstein and artist Jack Davis in 1953's Haunt of Fear #19. ...







I'm willing to go with Severin on this one. The scene IS clearly still pretty darn gory. I mean, the thing was brought before Congress on its gore! So I believe Severin's motives on this one.

As a bonus, here's how Severin colored the infamous story, "In Each And Every Package," from 1954's Crime SuspenStories #22 (written by Feldstein and drawn by Reed Crandall). This is the one that goes with the Johnny Craig decapitated head cover...



This also sure seems to back Severin up. Her coloring doesn't obstruct anything. I'd dare say it HIGHlights stuff. I think she was just being an awesome colorist.

Thanks to Dewey Cassell and Marie Severin for the information!

Okay, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends - half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...(click to enlarge)...



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Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!