Curt Swan inked by Joe Giella… I understand they were going for a Golden Age retro look for this 40th anniversary story but Joe Giella would wash out a lot of detailing and expressiveness when he inked Curt Swan. Also, see Lois’s face on the first three panels; her head shape and hair is inconsistent from one panel to the next, something Swan would never do.
When I recently found out Giella erased pages and then inked over the grooves and outlines that remained, I was really not surprised. It explains how he smoothed and prettified messy pencillers but obliterated tight/cartoony or tight/illustrative pencillers. All things considered, this is not as bad as Joe Giella on Kurt Schaffenberger. And Joe Giella on Jose Luis Garcia Lopez was a fucking crime.
This story was originally published in Action Comics 484 but this page is the version published with today’s technology and de-sloppified color restoration (my Rao, the mechanical color plates for the original printing (click here to see it) are atrocious) in Retroactive Superman — The 1970s #1, published earlier this year.
