I was recently contacted by TTM collector John Schrader
who also received a Gretzky Autograph through the mail, and he expressed his concerns that both our autographs may be autopen signatures.
Luckily he sent me a link to his success, and I was able to use photoshop to examine the autographs more closely.
So far all the Autopen Signatures I've seen are usually on some pre-printed item the player supplies (Nolan Ryan, Muhammad Ali). Since I received my original request item back, I figured this was legit.
To the naked eye they looked fairly similar, so I took the signature portion of my success and superimposed it over John's, and they were exact matches.
I decided to dig some more to see if anyone had ever accused Gretzky of sending out autopen signatures, and came across this article Zipper's Fakes, Phonies and Frauds.
Luckily the site also had a Gretzky Autograph to compare against, and that one too was almost 100% identical.
After comparing the three signatures, I looked over John's scan more closely, and you can clearly see areas where the autopen stopped before raising leaving behind "ink spots" which would never happen with a human signer.
Related Articles
Autopen Signatures
