Adding in a photo of a second blue man card; my research notes file indicates I have 3 of them but darned if I can find what box I put #3 in. It is a very small minority of Mecca 649 cards, that's for sure. Left is man at left Silver, two middle are the blue man variation, right is the white border normal with a faint black outline of the mystery man.
Taking a close look again, I notice that on the blue man cards the yellow ink from the entire outline of his hat is still present as well. On the final version of the card on far right (and all 8 other examples I have in hand to examine closely), there is only a very faint and thin dash line of yellow behind the burgundyish line in the lower roof. There is also a very small change to the bottom of the upper roof, going from tan to stray yellow to the final light burgundyish color. Second attachment circles these spots for clarity. There is also a grey streak through the mans right leg that doesn't seem to be offset ink (the color layers never really line up exactly on ALC cards), as there's no reason to produce this color in that spot. It seems more evident than before to me that this was a sloppy erasure of the man that was then again corrected (but never quite properly). N54 limits my pics to about 80kb, making it harder to show so clearly, but in hand it's a lot easier.
Second, the more I think about the Donovan, the less able I am to come up with any reasonable hypothesis. Typically we have many plausible theories and no direct evidence with these old T cards, but this one I can't think of any theory that fits. I'm no artist or printing expert, but if it was a broken printing plate, then why would they not just use the painting they had on file from the art department (or contractors or whoever was being paid to produce the artwork that then led to the plates and actual production) to produce a new one? Why would they go commission the artist to redo the entire background, and then make a new plate from that? Clearly they still had the artwork, or they would have had to redo the bottom ~70% of the card as well instead of just the background.
In no other ATC/ALC set did they make such odd and even pedantic changes to a card. I have no idea what to make of this still and keep going in circles every time I tackle this set instead of working.
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