Kick your shoes off, for the volume you are currently fingering, looking for all the world like a strip-cartoon album, is not a strip-cartoon but a graphic novel, no less (or at the very least a novella)... and hopefully you will treat it with the respect it so richly deserves! This enormously significant opus is a so-called “unauthorised biography”, and not some fly-by-night work of fiction. The events depicted in this graphic novel are more or less true (though you wouldn’t always believe it, mind), and the locations and expressions are authentic, except for some of them. Special thanks go out to my wife Tarja and daughter Jenna for the colouring work and to Tarja for her extreme patience. Thanks also to Jouni Koskimäki and heikki lehtonen for corrections and to Mark Lewisohn for some very useful observations. The greatest debt of gratitude is nevertheless owed to “the man on the flaming pie” who appeared and reported this story to me down to the tiniest details. Hence not one line, not one single word of this narrative can be changed, even if someone were to point out that certain events actually took place two weeks later than noted here, or that someone’s boots were not leather but suede...
stuart
pete
george
paul
ringo
john
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MaurI kunNAs
birth of a band
OTAVA publishing company ltd., helsinki
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