When the idea of my doing 3,500 sketch cards for OS 1 was presented to me, I calculated that to produce this amount of cards with decent drawings on 'em from scratch would take me approximately six years. To cut down the time involved, I decided to do 100 or so repeat drawings of the same character. To further cut down the time, I drew each character in pencil backwards on a sheet of tracing paper and rubbed off that image onto 100 cards to use as penciling. Then I inked over the rubbed-off penciling. But even with those time-saving devices, it still took too long. Since the time involved rubbing off each card from the tracing paper penciling took almost as much time as the inking took, for OS 2, I had Topps print the penciling instead. And STILL it took too much time to do.
The only alternatives to this is in order to maintain the quality of the drawings is to get 50 or so artists to each do 100 cards, or to reduce the quality of the final images on the cards to quickly executed stick figure drawings. I could have easily done 3,000 or so crude pencil drawings on these things where the characters would be unidentifiable...reducing Captain Crud to an asymmetrical Have-a-Nice-Day face with a crude indication of a pirate hat...but what does that prove? That I can hold a pencil?
The complaint that pre-printed guide lines under these things diminish the value of the sketch cards is like complaining that the hundred dollar bill that you get free in a fifty dollar pack of trading cards has a few wrinkles in it.
