For those of you that didn’t see my original post on this subject, stop reading this one for a second and go look over that one first. It’s important that you’re up to speed before you see this stuff.

Now that we’re all caught up… Oh, man. This came in the mail last Friday, but that happened to also be the day that I had start looking after my nieces for the weekend, so I’ve been so excited to show you guys this since then! The picture in the last post – which is the one that was listed in the original auction – didn’t show me near as many secrets as the page does in real life.

So let’s start out with the given baseline: As we can see in the original post, there are edits to the script that show that the lawsuit was indeed interfering with the comic. It seemed to be purely cosmetic, in that it was only getting rid of the word “Albion.” However, when the page came in the mail, I immediately noticed a few things.

I’m not sure how clearly this will come out once this is posted (since I’m not doing this in photo set format), but there are three major curiosities to be seen here: the non-photo blue notes that say “has been attacked” (aka what it says in the word balloon) and “remove” which leads to a splotch of white-out. The word balloon is especially noteworthy, because it actually has new words glued on top of it.

INTRIGUING.

I decided that this warranted further investigation. I decided to do the old lightbox trick and put a flashlight behind the page, directly over the areas in question. It was very, very revealing, to say the least.

The easiest specimen to examine reveals the Death Egg not only much closer to the foreground, but almost directly over the island of Albion. This came through so clearly that I didn’t even have to redline it, you can see exactly what it is.

As for the text, it was a little more muddled, so that’s when the red lines come in. Examining the word balloon from the front, I was able to make out the following:

As far as I could tell, it looks like the original line was, “Albion is under attack,” which would make perfect sense with the Death Egg hovering over the island. Some of the letters were really hard to definitely make out, however, so I decided to be extra certain. I turned the page around, and performed the same process on the reverse side.

I think it’s safe to say that the original line was, “Albion is under attack!” This has huge implications for this entire arc, because it means that we would’ve experienced the assault in real time, rather than long after the fact. The echidna population, more than likely, would’ve been facing its “endangered species” status from an entirely different perspective, and I don’t know about you guys, but I’m salivating from wondering what the original story was supposed to be like.

This also makes me even more curious than I already was about those other pages that I pointed out as having edits in the original post. I don’t know if any of them would’ve had edits this extensive, since those pages were clearly part of the second draft of this story; it’s just by pure lucky chance that this page has all of the information it does, since it was designed in such a way that it was still salvageable for the new version. Still, it makes me wonder.

I hope you guys all enjoyed this as much as I did, and I’m sorry you had to wait so long for me to post it! Let’s hope we can ever find out more about how the story was going to be!