Meta-nostalgia: “The Beatles Story” by Arthur Ranson & Angus Allan (1981/2018)

This is a follow-up to my previous piece on nostalgia. Not because the world needs any more writing on The Beatles: it really doesn’t.

The book is a collection of the serialised strips which appeared in Look-In from 1981-1982. There was also a similar strip covering Elvis’ rise to fame. I remember them (vaguely) from the days when I got Look-In, though I suspect I flicked past them on the hunt for something more fun. They probably felt too much like a history lesson, something worthy.

Elvis, then, was four years dead but The Beatles had imploded more than a decade ago: before most of the readership of this strip were born. They belonged to your parents. Although much of Look-In was black and white anyway, there was no way these strips could be in colour: they were documenting history.

Ancient history. As Mark Fisher has written, the 1960s are closer to us now than they were in 1979. At the time of serialisation, the Fab Four existed only on records, cassettes and old magazines, discolouring over time. They were the past, when the past was less retrievable than it is now. Which made this an elegy of sorts, an exercise in nostalgia for an audience who could not know what nostalgia was, nor feel it anyway (at any rate, not for something your Mum and Dad listened to).

This re-publication (nicely done by Rebellion), then, is a curious thing. The story – focussing largely on their early years – is well told, and the artwork beautiful¹. It deserves to stand on its own as a quirky piece of Beatles merchandise, appealing to anyone interested in the Fab Four.

What it does, though, coming from the pages of Look-In, is make readers of that magazine nostalgic about a story which was itself nostalgic. A hall of mirrors; mise-en-abyme. There are illustrations – to evoke the mood of Beatlemania – of some of the wacky Beatles merchandise of the time: ephemera within ephemera; nostalgia triggers for the Look-In reader’s parents.

Many of the panels are evidently drawn from photos, which, though stunning, can make the storytelling clunky as the writer fits expository speech into posed images². But this creates a distillation; a poetic truth rather than a literal one:

My favourite panel is the central one below (apologies for the reproduction): a drawing of a young John Lennon. I find the white space hugely evocative: these panels look back twenty years to a precise moment in time, at which point the future of these four boys was utterly unimaginable. The area around the solitary, foregrounded Lennon (whose death would still be fresh in the memory at the time of writing) is nonetheless full of the  history to come, and full of the loss of it.

The bulk of the story is taken up by their ascent: the Liverpool childhood, The Quarrymen, Hamburg, the Cavern Club, Brian Epstein. Once they’ve made it big, the narrative skates rapidly over what for many is their most interesting aspect: their astonishing (and astonishingly fast) musical development. But a kid’s comic strip would sink under the weight of anything much heavier than “striving young moptops”, and anyway (as noted by Rob Power in the book’s afterword) “this was not the place to talk LSD”.

An unfortunate side-effect that it shares with the Elvis story is that it implicitly imposes on its young readers a hierarchy: that These Artists Matter. Contemporary bands had their own frothy strips in Look-In: Madness and Haircut 100, for example, had weekly Hard Day’s Night-type adventures. All of which only reinforces a sour point (which conveniently ignores the cultural detonation that was punk): Elvis and The Beatles built the template for all your favourites, and there will never be anything like them again.

• Buy The Beatles Story from Blackwell’s. My copy was borrowed from Edinburgh Libraries.

¹ I loved Ranson’s artwork for Look-In: he drew many of their other strips including the fabulously eerie Sapphire & Steel, and my favourite at the time: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Someone please republish these!

² Reminding me of Kyle MacLachlan’s in-case-it-had-escaped-you line in Oliver Stone’s The Doors: “we took drugs to expand our minds, Jim!”