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What if the artist of All-Star Superman did an almost-all-nude Lobo one-shot? That actually happened, but DC has been holding onto it in one of their most private of drawers for the last 30 years. But with Lobo now on the verge of his big-screen debut in the Supergirl movie, DC has been quietly asking artist Frank Quitely if he'd be open to publishing it now with Lobo approaching what could be his most popular moment in his entire history.

"I was talking to Larry Ganem recently, he's DC’s VP in Talent Relations. I’ve known Larry for decades, really like him," Quitely tells the Comics Journal's Jake Zawlacki. "We were chatting over dinner in the summer, he was saying, 'What about that Lobo story you did for us all those years ago, have you still got those pages?'"

Related: DC brings Supergirl & Lobo together in comics just in time for DC Studios' Supergirl movie

Quitely says that he completed the entire story, and that he believes it "was absolutely the best thing I'd ever done to that point in my life."  According to Quitely, however, the then-top DC editor Dan Raspler (Kingdom Come, Hitman) had extensive notes on Quitely's pages, intended to improve the storytelling, but as Quitely has said previously, sent him for a loop.

"Dan Raspler was the editor and he sent me eight, ten, twelve pages of notes for the first twelve pages of boards that he got and he said, 'I'll leave it there because I don't want to swamp you,'" says Quitely. "[A]nd it was basically that these are great drawings but start with an establishing shot for this fight. We don't need to see two full figures in medium shot for every punch that's thrown after that. Zoom in and the fist knocking a tooth out. Tilt the camera. He sent me all these pages of notes for things I should have done differently or should have thought about at the layout stage."

Popverse obtained a copy of the letter, and in it Raspler admits that he might be going too far, saying "I'll stop the notes here for now, because I'm very worried about freaking you out. Like everyone else, I'm knocked out by your style and drawing ability. But unlikely many of your other editors, I feel strongly enough about your layouts that I want to work with you on them."

Now, however, Quitely says DC actively wants to print Quitely's original pages as-is, but it's the artist who is reticent to do that. And if Ganem is asking Quitely if he still has the pages, it's possible that DC somehow lost the pages in the intervening decades.

Related: Portrait of a Bastich: Simon Bisley and the longevity of Lobo

"But I actually feel to do that, it’d be more satisfying for me and would be more useful for other younger artists if I actually redrew the story the way I would do it now," Quitely says, saying ideally DC would print both versions side by side.

Quitely says it's on his mind, but for almost two decades now, he has been wanting to stop doing work-for-hire comics and focus exclusively on creator-owned work.

"Yeah, it's not quite in the cards yet, but it's on the back burner," he says.

What is Lobo: The Hand-to-Hand Job (AKA Lobo: It's A Man's World?)

Alan Grant, the writer of the issue, has previously called  Lobo: The Hand-To-Hand Job a "22-page Lobo sex story, which they refuse to release." The story begins as Lobo is hired to find Manosphere-esque kidnappers who abducted the head of the universe's most lurid of porn magazines, and includes extensive shots of a fully-naked Lobo, and a pivotal scene with "10,000 asteroid miners masturbating," according to Grant (via Bleeding Cool).

In attempting to make it palatable for the '90s era DC editorial staff, the name of the one-shot was changed to Lobo: It's A Man's World, but issues remained that prevented it from being published as-is. And as that happened, Quitely became more and more busy within DC with Batman: The Scottish Connection (1998), The Kingdom: Offspring (1998), JLA: Earth 2 (2000), The Authority (2000 - 2001), We3 (2004-2005), All-Star Superman (2006-2008), and Batman & Robin (2009), so having him pause to circle back to a Lobo project would seem easier said than done (and financed).

Need more? Here's our picks for the best DC Comics stories of all time, and here's a list of all the free DC comics you can look forward to as part of this year's Free Comic Book Day 2026 and Comics Giveaway Day 2026.