In the new FourFourTwo â out now, folks â we profile the work of Middlesbrough fan and artist Steve Welsh. A former cartoonist for iconic fanzine Fly Me To The Moon, Welsh set up MiniBoro.com to collate interviews but also to showcase his art. And we should all be glad.
Far from being Boro-centric, the site celebrates cult heroes from around the world and across the decades. Welsh's often simple yet brilliantly executed images tend to concentrate on a well-known aspect of a player or team and play with the visual iconography â so Stuart Pearce is celebrated with an image of the blood circling out of the shower in Hitchcock's Psycho, while Edgar Davids is represented as a pitbull with the simple byelaw-quoting 'no fouling'.
While their opponents had their half-time oranges Celtic's 1967 European Cup-winning 'Lisbon Lions' would obviously eat raw meat, and Maradona's complex relationship with the English psyche is summed up with the legend 'tainted love' and a fingerprinted football.
FourFourTwo's current favourite â and Welsh's images adorn the office walls at FFT Towers â is the first one below, dedicated to erstwhile Boro assistant manager Viv Anderson. The right-back is often pigeon-holed as 'England's first black international' but the MiniBoro illustration resembles an Ishihara colour-blindness test.
See below for all those images plus more dedicated to Carlos Valderrama, Socrates, Terry Butcher, Norman Hunter and Sheffield United. Welsh has produced dozens of images, perusable at MiniBoro.com and available to buy as prints, framed prints and stretched canvases.
What else is in the new issue?
