Pero esa página es de Steranko, ¿no? ¿Por qué no la modifica él, en lugar de Romita?
El hombre de confianza de Lee era Romita. No es que fuera la única vez que le mandaron cambiar cosas, creo que Romita lo comentaba en el juicio de los herederos de Kirby y Starlin les lanza puyas en el número de Warlock y los payasos.
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2013/06/01/meta-messages-jim-starlin-makes-clowns-out-of-stan-lee-and-john-romita/Aquí la declaración del juicio de Kirby en la que habla sobre los cambios, no la encuentro en castellano:
Q: Why would Jack Kirby have been making changes to a Steve Ditko cover?
JOHN ROMITA: Because of Stan’s long-honored tradition. Whoever was caught in the office when he needed a change was subject to the assignment. If you came in, you had to have a pencil with you. If you didn’t have a pencil with you, you were out of luck. But Jack was amenable to making the change. Stan didn’t like something Ditko had done on the cover and Jack changed it. Whenever I — even in the first seven years before Marvel Comics existed I would go in and deliver a mystery story, four pages, and hope for another script. Stan would say, “while you are here, can you do me a favor and change — this is Arthur Peddy’s romance story here. Would you change this expression, would you change this figure, would you add a car in this scene.” He did it all the time. No pay. “Just do me a favor.” You know, and the inference was you want a script, do me some corrections.
Q: Did you ever make any changes to any of Jack Kirby’s work?
JOHN ROMITA: Yes. And it was hard for me, because I idolized the man’s stuff. I used to change occasionally girl’s faces. Now, Jack used to do girls that I loved. I loved his girls. But Stan used to find sometimes something that he didn’t like, an expression, two wide a face, too narrow a face, mostly too wide, and he would ask me to adjust it. He liked the way I did one of the female characters in Captain America better than the way Jack did it, so I would occasionally change the faces. Much to my chagrin, people accused me of being an egomaniac, again, because they thought I was the one changing it. Since I was a de facto art director, they said, “look this Romita, he is changing everybody’s work.”
Barry Smith almost put a contract out on me because I changed somebody — a girl’s face on a Conan cover. To this day I still don’t know why he is talking to me. We are friends, but I know he wanted to kill me then.
Q: Whose idea were those changes? Were they ever yours?
JOHN ROMITA: Uh-uh, never. I would never change anybody — I had to change Jack Kirby’s work, Gene Colan’s work, John Buscema’s work. I idolized all of these guys. I would — it violated me to have to do it. I cringed. And I will tell you, the worst thing is initially we didn’t have the equipment or the technology to do it less obtrusively, because originally we didn’t have photostats and Xeroxes to work with. I erased things. To this minute I -the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I am thinking I am erasing a Jack Kirby face and putting my face in there. That, to me, is a criminal act. I did it because I had no choice. Stan asked me to change it. We had no technology. As soon as I was art director and Stan was on the west coast and we had the technology to have a Photostat, I devised a system with iodine to erase things on a Photostat with iodine and I would get a clean Photostat, perfect surface, and eliminate a face. So I would take a Photostat of a page or a panel, I would iodine the face out, I would put in the face that stand wanted or the editor — Roy Thomas or whoever was the editor then, and we would paste that over the artwork. At least I could say to myself when the art goes back to the guy I idolized, he could peel it off and you could see his original art. Then I felt better. But until we had the technology, I used to actually deface artwork that I idolized. And it was not fun, but I did my duty as I was instructed.