The Four Color Media Monitor

Crypto Briefing has an article about a comics-style sports book with NFTs:

OneFootball has today dropped its new NFT project, Footballer’s Journey, ahead of the World Cup Final – now live on the OneFootball marketplace.

Storied Careers Through NFTs

Developed in partnership with industry trailblazers Dapper Labs and Animoca Brands, Footballer’s Journey tells the stories of seven elite players from childhood to stardom in comic-style books, each made up of different chapters containing special NFTs – called ‘panels’.

The collection features stars who have lit up the tournament, including Brazilian ace Vinícius Júnior and France’s stalwart defender and semi-finalist Raphaël Varane.

We could certainly use plenty of comics-style books about sports, that's for sure.

Next, Creative Boom has another item about a book on nostalgia with football and comic material, mixed with superhero elements:

14-year-old Nick Kidney spent most of 1974 repainting and remodelling a standard team of Subbuteo footballers into superheroes. The project went unfinished – he never got to the goalkeeper and eventually lost interest. That is until Kidney got his hands on a copy of Julian Germain's 1994 book In Soccer Wonderland twenty years later.

In Soccer Wonderland was conceived as a scrapbook collage of Germain's 'professional' photos mixed with other football-related visual ephemera including the table-top football game Subbuteo and the hugely popular football comics of the 1970s. Designed by graphic artist Andy Altmann, In Soccer Wonderland's aim was to show how football exists in the hearts and minds of the fans.

When In Soccer Wonderland found its way into Kidney's hands, Germain's many shots of Subbuteo inspired him to dust off his old creations and finish them, nearly a quarter of a century after he started them. But the story doesn't end there.

On a lark, Kidney reached out to Germain. The two hit it off, and before he knew it, Kidney had delivered his miniature team off to Germain to be photographed.

"They were tiny, carefully crafted and guaranteed to bring a smile to the face," author Harry Pearson writes in Subbuteo Superheroes, a new book featuring Germain's photographs of Kidney's creations. "Yet while the minute figures provided an instant, unashamedly nostalgic flashback to the 1970s, they also conveyed something deeper and more poignant. They spoke about being a teenager, and of the painfully slow and often awkward transition between child and adulthood, when we are clinging on to one and reaching out for the other."

I'll admit, this sounds pretty clever too, combining sports and superhero ingredients, so I wish them good luck in selling this book.

Labels: history, science