Ray Smashfoot #7

This is the longest RS comic, and I'm not sure it's that successful - I was a bit sick of using the same strip every year so I used football manga for this one instead. Because of the more exotic look (and the contrast with the panels from the UK comic) it made sense to focus on the gulf between football heroes and fans who grow up in other places/cultures (Ray's imaginings of their training sessions at the end is supposed to be that, he assumes their world must be bananas). So it's about the ways fans other their heroes and their early lives - growing up there were rubbish football magazines that would ask famous players things like what they ate before matches and my brother would try copying it, and that fetishising banal things good players do is often extended by myth-making journalism when they're from very different cultures (as if being a good footbaler isn't about practising football and having physical abilities, but coming from a specific milieu with myterious ancestral gifts). So doing that with 70s/80s England I think makes it enjoyably ridiculous.

ANYWAY I think some bits are decent but it's a bit wordy and long and the tone's not right all the way through. It's here, anyway, as it exists and I might as well put it up.