Wild ~ this wasn't good enough for Curt Swan! A rejected Swan piece is better than most of today's published covers, don't you think?

And here's the published version, depicting a totally different scene:

Well today they would just release both...

The funny thing is that I've seen the unpublished piece before somewhere, but the published cover is unfamiliar to me!

Me, too. I've never seen the published version, but I'm 95% sure I saw the unpublished one in Superman From the 30's to the 70's.

That's it, Chaz. I checked my copy, and it is reproduced in the "Superman in the 60s" cover montage. Here's another wild cover from the same era.

Interesting story about that book: I checked it out several times from the library when I was a kid, and I recently bought it from an Amazon dealer.
The copy I bought has what looks like Curt Swan's autograph inside!

I always wanted to read the stories in the 70's cover section that weren't included. Time to track them down, too.

I wanted to read them too.