EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 30 © 2020 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

84 cluded a photo of the player with a facsimile autograph, the player’s name, and his team and its logo on the front; and the player’s height, weight, bats, throws, birthplace, stats and short biography on the back. That same basic design is still in use today. Around the 1960s, Norman Saunders (1907-1989), a popular illus‐ trator of pulp magazines saw that fewer magazines were carrying painted covers, and began taking odd jobs from elsewhere. Among his oddball jobs came one from the Topps Bubblegum Company, and consisted of doing corrections on some of the colour photographs for their sporting trading cards. Some of the baseball and football players on the cards had been traded to new teams, just as the cards were ready to be printed. Without time to re-shoot the players, Saunders’ work consisted of retouching the images, painting on the new team’s shirt (and cap) on the actual photographs. As Saunders’ son, David, related, “Nowadays they’d just use a computer Photoshop pro‐ gramme, but in 1958 Dad took his paint box—an old spattered green tin tackle box, filled with paint tubes and a palette, his ‘nose dabber’ ABOVE: Spikes of Death , gouache on board, 1966. Batman Trading Card Series One: ‘Black Bat’ set (Topps, 1966), card No. 17. Note that Batman's eyes are detailed on the original art, while for the printed card they have been whited-out (in the tradition of the comic book stories). This painting has a size of 4.75 by 3.5 inches, and is reproduced here much larger than its actual size.