A comic book by someone with an obvious love of drawing David Bowie. Covers the years surrounding Ziggy. I particularly liked how the famous "Not only is this the last show of the tour" mini-speech was broken up over multiple pages, scattered throughout the story. I'd buy a sequel. ( )

As a Bowie fan and as a fan of graphic novels, this is a wonderful interpretive graphic novel biography of Bowie's life but it's not necessarily traditional nor straightforward. Bowie as a person was a complex enigma, who never let his personal life shine too long in the spotlight. He was also perhaps the quintessential post-modern rock star. I think that this graphic novel does a fine job illustrating how Bowie rose to fame in the 1970s and how he constructed a multitude of personas. And I found it compelling, informative, and fascinating in its own ways. ( )

The art is beautiful, the narrative is a bit more unclear. This is not necessarily a scathing critique, however, as this may be indicative of Mr. Bowie's existence.

It's certainly a beautiful thing to look at. Mr. Allred is to be commended. ( )

Amazing artwork with so much detail (even David Lynch appears at one point!), colour throughout. Forward by Neil Gaiman. Definitely a must have book for any Bowie fan. ( )

This was...not good.

First, because it's a graphic novel, let's talk about the best thing here, and that's the art. Finally, someone's gone and done a graphic novel about a musical artist, and they can actually draw that artist. Not cartoony, not in a "style"...they draw the damn artist. So, kudos to Allred for that.

But...not so fast. Obviously he lightboxed a lot of this stuff, because, having read a lot on Bowie and collecting many books about him, I recognized the original photos behind the art. And it appears that Allred couldn't find many for Bowie's lousy manager Tony De Fries, because there's two pages where he appears at least three times, and it's the same drawing, the same expression, every single time. I mean, sure, you need references, but goddammit, you're an artist, not a tracer...extrapolate a little, willya?

So, major points off for that.

And then...sigh...we come to what may laughingly be called the "story"...which it's not. It's essentially a chronology of events both major and minor, and a detailing of every soon-to-be-famous person either met Bowie or was in the audience for one of his shows.

But what it really is is a dry bullet list of people, places, and events. My god, at some points, there's literally a single panel showing each of the band members, and they're speaking the names of the cities they played.

It's pretty, but at the same time, it's pretty lame. ( )