Halftone, paper tooth, and cropped digital panels
Printed Marvel pages carry halftone dots, gutter overlap, and printer’s hold lines that digital crops often shave away. When we sit with a paper issue beside a listing, we mark whether a splash lost its caption box or whether a character was trimmed at the elbow.
Those marks belong in a variant or condition-of-file note, not in a price speech. The question is bibliographic: is this the full page or a poster-style extract?
Collectors using the Issue Ledger can add a field for “crop suspected.” It is a yes/no, dated to the day you compared copies. It prevents a later argument with yourself about why a panel looks unfamiliar.
We still use original decorative bursts on this website. They are not scans of copyrighted splash pages. Review language about Marvel pages stays in words, plus independent photographs of books, paper, and city streets.