Amethyst #3 (1983) cover: Rejected, ripped up, restored

This DC series was a girl-friendly spin on Shazam, with a tween who could transform into a magical warrior princess. The first cover for issue #3 was rejected not just a little, but hard. It was torn into eight pieces! Ernie Colón was known for being his own harshest critic. Presumably this version was rejected because Amethyst's head would have been behind the mast head.

The published version (see additional images) was conceptually similar, with a large headshot of Amethyst in the upper left corner, a dynamic fight scene between a lizard warrior and Amethyst's half-orc looking bodyguard Granch in the middle, and young Amy in her Earth clothes in the bottom left. Instead of being menaced by a lizard man as on the rejected cover, the published cover showed Amy recoiling from a snake. Neither of those things happened in the interior story; Amethyst stays safe on Earth in her “Amy" identity the whole issue.

She wears a navel-baring Pac-Man T-shirt in the first half of the issue (as seen on the published cover) and a more prep-looking collared shirt, sweater-vest, and Adidas sneakers in the second half (as seen on the rejected cover). I like the mirrored expressions on the two Amys on the rejected cover. The adult head fills what would have been empty space under the mast head on the published cover, making this version more appealing as freestanding art.

The lizard man wears orange pants instead of a much briefer set of shorts in the published version, which may have been a Comics Code thing, or maybe the first one just looked too goofy.

Either way, it's always fun to see the "not this, but that" choices that ultimately make a published comics cover, and I've been wanting some of Colón's Amethyst work for a while. Some of the backgrounds are in magic marker which hasn't faded to purple so far.

After acquiring seven (the eighth is lost) fragments of this cover at auction, I asked James Pascoe to reassemble them. Colleen Doran was my first choice to provide the crucial Amethyst headshot for the missing shard, and she knocked it out of the park, perfectly delivering Colón’s style. As far as I know, this unused cover has never been seen intact in public before now. Here's to Colleen and Colón!