Beatles With an A: Birth of a Band

Affectionately tongue-in-cheek, blatantly less than accurate, riotously hyperbolic and totally absorbing.” – Broken Frontier.

These are the first beats of the Beatles’ career as only legendary rock cartoonist Mauri Kunnas could tell them. The cover depicts John, Paul, George and Ringo crossing the street Abbey Road style, but the street is in Hamburg’s seedy Reeperbahn red-light district. Kunnas chronicles the band from Ringo’s birth (against a backdrop of the Luftwaffe shelling Liverpool) through the release of their hit ‘Please Please Me’/‘Ask Me Why’.

Focusing on the band’s pre-fame days in a sly and irreverent style (and not shying away from Brian Epstein’s fixation upon John), Kunnas makes liberal use of corny in-jokes and hokey wordplay, but it’s all done in good fun.

Hilarious moments and details not even dedicated fans will remember having heard before are all told with Kunnas’s characteristically raucous humour and virtuosic drawing skills.