Comic nostalgia and Football celebrated in a new photography book, Subbuteo Superheroes

The painstakingly painted and remodelled miniatures were created  – and abandoned in an attic – by a teenage Nick Kidney nearly fifty years ago yet Julian Germain’s photographs of the hand-painted Subbuteo miniatures have now been published in a new book.

Subbuteo Superheroes comes twenty-eight years since Julian Germain and designer Andy Altmann worked together on In Soccer Wonderland and twenty-five years since the Subbuteo Superheroes portraits were originally made.

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 (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) twenty years later.

Dripping with nostalgia and potent creative joy, this collaboration between Kidney, Germain, and Altmann is a testament to the creative power of fandom and connection and a celebration of the visual style that dominated the comic and sports subcultures of the 1970s. The new publication combines the artful eyes of two career creatives with Kidney’s earnest and nostalgia-inducing Subbuteo art. The book captures the comic and sporting influences on Kidney’s creations with obvious joy and a clear appreciation for the fan culture in which Kidney’s miniatures were conceived.

While Germain’s photographs of Kidney’s miniatures have occasionally appeared in exhibitions around Europe, they have never, until now, made their full debut in the UK.

“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.”

The magazines pages combine nostlagic design references to comics with artful portraits of the decorated Subbuteo characters, blown up way beyond their natural scale.

Subbuteo Superheroes is available now.