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Fantastic Four #3
March, 1962

ROLL YOUR MOUSE OVER THE IMAGE
TO VIEW THE UNPUBLISHED VERSION

Both versions of this cover were pencilled by Jack Kirby and inked by Sol Brodsky.  This is just a guess but it would seem that editor Stan Lee tossed the first cover and had it redone because he felt it was important to make Fantastic Four look more like a super-hero comic and to emphasize that fact on the cover.  Previously, the comic had eschewed some of the more common conventions of such books, and some have speculated it was because of a problem with the distributor.  Marvel's line was then being distributed by Independent News (see the "IND" up there?), which was a division of National Periodical Publications, otherwise known as DC Comics.

The theory is that in the first few issues, Stan and Jack tried to make their new creation look somewhat unlike a super-hero comic because the folks at DC would have felt this encroached on their area and refused to distribute it.  Then — and again, this is all speculation — they became emboldened and began to sneak in more of the trappings of a super-hero team such as a super-vehicle and costumes. That may have been the reason the change in this case or it may just have been that the unpublished version wasn't that great a composition and the published version had more punch to it.