Printing Style

The very first sumo menko in the 1800s and early 1900s were actually woodblock prints.  Woodblock printing is just that; an artist would carve out pieces of wood with raised surfaces, paint the surfaces with ink then press the block onto homemade paper called washi or an early form of cardboard.  Each color would have a different raised surface and would be pressed onto the piece of paper to produce an image.  Color printing improved over the 30 years of sumo menko and bromide production.  Colors are very simple, but the images are nice and vivid and usually of high quality.

Menko in the early 1900s to the 1950s used four color printing which laid down four colors (Magenta, Cyan, Yellow and Black) 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 colors often weren't laid down precisely on top of each other resulting in a ghost image or shadow.  This problem is known as having bad registration.

Color bromides from the 1950s and 1960s used a more refined method to print the four colors and resulting in ink pixels that are easy to see.  Unfortunately, color bromides images are less crisp than other menko.  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.