Show...me...your print variations!

[mintacular]

Anyone here know what the hell this is?

[mintacular]

Bump, found picture

[swarmee]

Looks like the sheet got snagged and ripped in the middle of the printing process.

[steve B]

Except black is last, and the inside of the cardboard is usually dark like the back. A peel of the surface is possible, but would be pretty crazy. Usually the entire surfaced side pulls away. I'm thinking a solvent spill that eventually dried. That would keep the colors from printing, and mostly dried would give the fuzzy look to the black layer at that corner.

Pretty cool card no matter how it happened.

Steve B

[swarmee]

That was my first thought, like the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas NNOF, but that affected like 12 cards. If this was a regular thing, many more cards would have been affected in this set. I was thinking the fuzzy black line was due to a thinner paper depth from the top layer being torn off.

[Cliff Bowman]

If the card was actually printed that way from the factory and made it out in distribution to the public, then the other affected cards to look for would be Matt Alexander, Dickie Noles, and Glenn Abbott. They were the three cards that bordered Comer in the upper right corner. Comer is on the left side, third card from the bottom.

[philliesfan]

Here are some football cards.........

[steve B]

Originally Posted by swarmee

That was my first thought, like the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas NNOF, but that affected like 12 cards. If this was a regular thing, many more cards would have been affected in this set. I was thinking the fuzzy black line was due to a thinner paper depth from the top layer being torn off.

The NNOF was a bit of something making the black plate faulty across those several cards.

A solvent stain would usually only affect one sheet. Maybe 2-3 if it was really bad, but usually just one since the surfacing keeps the stuff from soaking through. The thinning would have affected all the colors the same way.

Here's a card printed on thinned stock. It's from a makeready sheet where the corner was torn off to mark where the test sheets ended and the good ones began. The borders and blue are the most visible, and in person you can see how they both just fade out. The blanket presses into depressions, but it can only go so far.
I saw the sheet the card was from intact at the dealers before it got cut into singles. Tried to buy the whole thing, but couldn't afford a wrongback sheet. Settled for the corner card with the torn off corner.

Steve B

[savedfrommyspokes]

Found a red factory print line that crosses over 2 separate cards. Starts on the bottom of the Muffett card and crosses onto the Heman card which appears on an uncut sheet to the left.