There were some hints in this book of the pace and fun of the future Tintin stories but overall this was just as appalling as '...in the land of the S...moreThere were some hints in this book of the pace and fun of the future Tintin stories but overall this was just as appalling as '...in the land of the Soviets'. Very much improved artwork though, which obviously continues to progress through the rest of the series.
Don't read this if you simply 'like' Tintin or you're curious after the movie, read it only to complete your Tintin reading - 'Soviets' and 'Congo' can easily be read as standalones after the rest of the series.(less)
This was so horrible that I'm worried that my review will sound like the typical 'looking at the past through a modern lens' type of thing, which I ca...moreThis was so horrible that I'm worried that my review will sound like the typical 'looking at the past through a modern lens' type of thing, which I can’t stand.
I hope my reaction is not based in the clumsy political propaganda that the book exhibits, that is obviously one of the reasons for the book being written in the first place (it was commissioned for the purpose of distorting the negativity of life in Soviet Russia). Nor, I hope, is it based in the poor humor – I get that language, humor and audience expectations were much different back then.
I think that there are enough clunky moments in this book and things that should not have gotten past an editor in any age, that it is possible to criticize it for being a rush job and for being crap to the point of stupidity and not fall pray to simply misunderstanding the age that the book was written in.
For one example (out of many) look to the scene early on where Tintin makes a car that will ride on train tracks out of a bunch of scrap metal that just happens to be waiting by the track, he’s a genius crows Snowy. Only he isn’t because later in the book Tintin takes a whole motor car apart only to find that the problem is a flat tire, Snowy points out ironically that “you’re not much of a mechanic Tintin” when he can't get the parts back into the car again. Wait a second here. I thought this was some weird early nineteen hundreds joke at first but no, not twenty pages later and Tintin is making a rotor blade for his crashed plane out of a tree that he’s cut down with a penknife – back to being a genius again! This sort of thing makes me quite distraught.
After I read it I found out that Herge himself hated the first two Tintin stories and tried to have them written out of his personal history. He succeeded for a long time with this one, managing to prevent its printing for years. He also had no intention of using Tintin again, he never thought that the character would become so popular, and so he dashed this off without a second thought. These facts alone tell me that it's ok to dislike this book. It really has very little to do with the later Tintin stories (thankfully) and so can be treated as a weird first step for an author who didn’t know what fate had in store. (less)
This is fabulously perfect; it's almost as complete a world as in a Shakespearian play. This was always my favorite graphic novel and it has stood up ...moreThis is fabulously perfect; it's almost as complete a world as in a Shakespearian play. This was always my favorite graphic novel and it has stood up very well over the years. I love the new additions that James O'Barr was able to make, pages that were left out of the original because of the printing methods of the time according to the author!
The best thing about this special edition, for me, was the moving forward in which James O’Barr described the real story behind his inspiration for The Crow – it made complete sense and floored me at the same time. It was so sad that it opened a whole new level of understanding in me about this book and I’m grateful to the author for finally being able to open up about it.
Nothing less than a five will ever do for this book.
EDIT: So, as I was reading this I felt like I had read it before (I hadn't). It spooked me enough though (and the subject interested me enough) to go ...moreEDIT: So, as I was reading this I felt like I had read it before (I hadn't). It spooked me enough though (and the subject interested me enough) to go back and re-read the infinitely more interesting 'Ten Imaginary Years’, which may seem dated to some but at least it has a grain of authenticity about it, being co-authored by Robert Smith.
Well after re-reading that and ‘The Cure: A Visual Documentary’ I realized why I had the sense of déjà vu – basically much of the first two-thirds of this book are taken, mostly without alteration, from those sources. It makes me wonder how the author got on for source material after 1987, but that probably explains why most of this book is dedicated to the early period of the band and then we are presented with a rushed ‘line-up change/album release’ style of biography for the last hundred pages, a hundred pages which tries to cover nearly twenty years.
The jacket describes this as the definitive Cure biography, it isn’t; that book is still ‘Ten Imaginary Years’. Meaning that until a serious music writer (Mark Blake, are you free?) tackles this much needed project we will be stuck in 1987. Unless Robert intends to pick up his pen again, although ‘Thirty-Five Imaginary Years’ doesn’t quite scan.
I disliked this book for other reasons, the repetitiveness (do we really need to be told at each album release story in the book that Apter is stunned when it comes out, in his opinion, ‘gloomy’?) , the fact that he makes a great show of having ‘spoken to everyone’ in the making of his definitive biography (yet somehow missed out speaking to Robert Smith), that the book is stitched together from previously published stories and interviews and reads like a Wikipedia article, the fact that it's crammed with Apter's personal opinions, but I mainly disliked it because it’s not very good. Wait for something better is my advice.
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