Gaet's

A very lightweight, super-high-level overview of the Beatles with no real subtlety or depth.

The writing is relatively amateurish, and the art runs from the terrible (to the point where I couldn't tell which Beatle was supposed to be saying something) to the very good, but nothing outstanding.

...and apparently, the Beatles had a song called All I'm Losing go gold, according to one of the vignettes. It was actually All My Loving, but hey, who cares, right?

I do.

Look elsewhere.… (mehr)

Questo libro è una storia dei Beatles a fumetti, come del resto recita il titolo. Più precisamente, è una serie di piccoli flash, ciascuno disegnato da un artista diverso e con qualche pagina di testo per dare il contesto.
Il problema è che il testo è costellato di errori: per esempio, a pagina 33 si dice che Stu morì tre giorni dopo (e non prima) che gli altri Beatles ritornassero ad Amburgo, a pagina 60 gli studios di Abbey Road sono stati spostati a Birmingham, a pagina 201 si dice che Billy Preston era una "nuova" conoscenza di George (avevano diviso il palco nel 1962...) Diciamo che il libro è per curiosi o completisti.… (mehr)

My fifth Goodreads Giveaway win in two years! (My secret super power? Door prizes. Seriously, you do not want me as your co-worker in any sort of drawing at a company gathering.)

I have a passing familiarity with the Beatles, but growing up, mine was an Elvis Presley family. I do own a few of the Fab Four's best-of compilations and the White Album though.

This is a nice, if not particularly deep, survey of the band's formation, rise in popularity, and break-up. It's jam-packed with photos and comic strips and anecdotes in text and comic form. Fun!

Unfortunately, the text pieces and comic strips are written by two different people, and they aren't well coordinated, so they feature a lot - a whole lot - of redundancies. In each chapter the text piece seems to serve the purpose of setting the stage for the strip, but mostly acts as a spoiler of sorts. In almost every chapter, big events and several bits of trivia from the text is simply repeated in the strip. It just doesn't seem like the best use of time or space.

A couple dozen artists contribute the strips and spot illustrations. All are decent, though most have a fairly cartoony style as opposed to going for photorealism. Not all are quite able to capture and convey likenesses, so John and Paul (and occasionally George) are sometimes hard to tell apart before John gets his glasses.… (mehr)