Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 01 Mar 2016

Football's Comic Book Heroes by Adam Riches with Tim Parker and Robert Frankland

It's important to say from the outset that to appreciate this book you don't have to be a fan of football, you don't even have to be an aficionado of comics and you don't have to be a boy. Although this fabulous limited edition, slip-cased overview of the boys football comic and its heroes seems to have a very specific audience, you'd be wrong to leap to that conclusion and you'd also potentially be missing out on a treat.

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What Adam Riches and his co-collaborators have produced is in fact something much more like a social history of the boys football comic from its very early origins right through to the 1970s - when arguably these stories went slightly over the peak of their popularity. The book is sub-titled 'The Ultimate Fantasy Footballers' but again this hardly does the accompanying essay justice and it most certainly doesn't give the truly outstanding graphics their fair due.

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I grew up with these kinds of comics, as did countless other working class boys, and these stories were the literature that spoke most directly to me in my pre-teens. It was on these pages that I was able to see and identify with 'heroes' who were themselves working class and watch them triumph over extraordinary odds to come out on top. The staple stories in the boys football comic format was one of the outsider who confounds his destiny - often prodigiously talented but financially and socially impoverished so that they couldn't afford proper kit or boots. In many cases they were reduced to playing barefoot or having to play a cup final after a night spent welding or shipbuilding. There was also a place for the misfit - the fat boy or the physically awkward who, as part of a team, could still excel and win the acclaim of his peers. This had special appeal to me at the time because I was a very fat boy and fantasies of this kind certainly helped me feel less isolated.

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The book also uncovers the unexpected early popularity of football stories involving girls' teams - something that tended to disappear when D.C.Thompson comics came to dominate the market. I suspect that with the newly growing popularity of women's football over recent years these might also have nostalgic significance for a different set of readers.

I have already mentioned the importance of the graphics in these comics and they have a set of conventions that are all their own. Rich colours are a must and the physical prowess of the players as they are drawn often defies real world logic. Outfield players have impossible thighs, are capable of the most eye-popping turns of speed and they can leap vertically like Harrier jump-jets; goalkeepers can turn like corkscrews in the air, have reflexes that defy the naked eye and, in one notable example, are capable of saving small children from the jaws of tigers.

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So this is a book that draws us an important snapshot of cultural and social history in the twentieth century and anyone interested in that - or just interested in football stories - will find this a delight. If I haven't persuaded you, ask yourself whether you can afford to miss a football story that has an elephant as a goalkeeper? No, you can't, can you?

Terry Potter

March 2016

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