Ian, who sent us his 'gory' version of "Kung Fu Kombat" for examination, also sent us this used set which we all believed would turn out to be a 'gory' version as well. However, although there certainly is a lot of blood, & blades running people through, we thought we had no record of a cleaner version of this transfer sheet. This seemed to be as clean as it gets!
Just to show you can't be too careful, Ian pointed out that I should be more careful. And he was right.
There are forty transfers on the sheet, & it seems that only four transfer figures were altered; in each case, a pool of blood has been removed. This could be very easily missed, & it seems a very minor change given the expense of preparing new gravure rolls.
I've highlighted the differences here. With only one of the two panels on the transfer sheet affected, there's no point in showing the whole sheet, so here is the left-hand panel of two sheets:
- TO THE LEFT — is the left-hand panel of the 'vanilla' sheet shown above;
- TO THE RIGHT — is the left-hand panel from a 'gory' sheet which Stylelove kindly photographed for us.
All other figures remain unchanged.
Original gory photos courtesy of Stylelove
Here's a close-up montage from Ian's gory set, in case it still isn't clear. Note that the centre top figure is slightly paler than the others; this is because it's printed on the background, & isn't a transfer figure at all. All the presses of Ashford will not sweeten this little spot.
Who would have thought the set to have had so much blood in it?