I really wish this site would let you do half star ratings, because I feel like a 2.5 would be more appropriate for how I feel about this book. I don’t love it, I don’t hate it, it’s square in the middle. The reason I’m leaning more towards liking it is the art, you can tell this is a clear passion project for Mike Allred and co. His love for the music and iconography of Bowie is super evident on each page and it’s all lovingly rendered. The afterward gives some more insight into his Bowie obsession, claiming that this book is essentially a gift to his younger self who listened to Diamond Dogs way back in 74. That’s the audience here at the end of the day, the young voracious comic readers who are just opening themselves up to the world of music and want a crash course into one of the mediums greatest minds. It fulfills that purpose well, but as a fan myself, I was left wanting a bit more.
I’m not saying you have to cover every aspect of Bowie’s life and make some depressing portrait of ego and the lows of rock and roll excess but something about this just felt disconcertingly, clean? It’s a book curiously free of swearing, free of drugs, free of sex. Albums and iconic moments seem to just be plucked out of thin air, very rarely exploring what got Bowie to those places emotionally. It eagerly jumps from one set piece moment of Bowie’s life to the next, in a very dry way writing wise. This is most apparent in the dialogue. At times it honest to god feels like reading a Wikipedia page. Really, the first thing you’re going to do when Lou Reed is introduced is have him play Perfect Day and have this cartoonishly naive sounding Bowie go “gee whiz, this is just great!” and express interest in producing an entire album on the spot. Oh, Reed also (totally unprompted), specifically mentions loving “Queen Bitch” in this scene, which was famously Bowie’s attempt at doing a Velvet Underground song. It’s just soooo fan fiction-y and honest to god a bit embarrassing how this book is written during moments like this. Given everything we know about Reed and his prickly personality, I have a hard time believing this interaction was as pleasant as displayed here. Also, wasn’t much of the music on Perfect Day arranged by Mick Ronson after this meeting anyway? That just seemed odd to me.
The book frustratingly glosses over the later, arguably much more dramatically interesting moments of Bowie’s life such as his recovery period in Berlin with Iggy Pop. There’s so much more meat to that story then focusing on the glam, and even if they did just want to stick with Ziggy, there was more that could’ve been explored there as well. It just plays like a greatest hits set of his life, which gets really boring to read after a while. Like I said before the art is very good and quite frankly carries the book. If you want a bright, colorful tribute, this’ll do you well. But in the storytelling department it is barebones at best.