Printing Style

Over the span of 30 years, there were two genres of menko printed: the menko and the bromides.  Menko images were hand-drawn while bromides were actual photographs.  The subsets of menko are color and gold proof, while the subsets of bromides are color and b/w.

Color printing improved over the 30 years of sumo menko and bromide production.  The trend over the years went from simple colors like red, blue, green and yellow on one menko to thousands of different colors on one menko.  As technology got better and better the amount of colors that could be printed got better.  Since color printing is based on the principles of mixing magenta, cyan, yellow and black colors to get the whole array of the color spectrum, technology is the biggest limiting factor on what colors can be printed and how they are printed.  The three color printing laid down the three  colors (Magenta, Cyan and Yellow) one color at a time. The result were menko with vibrant colors, but little variety in the amount of colors.  One big downside of this style of printing was that often the colors weren't laid down precisely on top of each other resulting in a ghost image, or shadow, of the misprinted color offset of the main image.  The ink pixels are easier to see as well and consequently the images are less crisp.  This printing style is common on the early menko as companies expected these cards to see lots of battle and ultimately destroyed.

The second genre of sumo menko mentioned above is the bromides.  Bromide is actually a borrowed English word which refers to a photographic print treated with bromine and silver.  Bromide refers to any color or b/w photograph menko sets that were common in the late 1950s, and typically were images of popular actors, ball players and singers.  Bromides typically are larger and are on thinner paper or cardboard than menko.