The Beatles: Their Story In Pictures was published in 1982 by the TV Times and Look-in magazines. Drawn by comic book illustrator Arthur Ranson with a story by the writer Angus Allan (22 July 1936 – 16 July 2007), the book was based on the Look-in comic strip of the same name.
Ranson created strips for Look-in (9 January 1971 to 12 March 1994) based on popular TV series, such as Sapphire and Steel, the British supernatural television series starring David McCallum and Joanna Lumley, and Danger Mouse, an animated television series about a secret agent mouse and his hamster sidekick Penfold.
The stories were pretty much all written by Allan, who in the 1960s had cut his teeth at the weekly British children’s comic TV Century 21. Because the strips were based on specific TV shows, Ranson says that “it seemed important that the characters looked as much like the actors as possible”, and thus “used the methods I knew” to achieve the accurate likenesses that typify his work.
Ranson and Allan also collaborated on a series of comic-strip biographies of pop stars and bands for Look-in, including ABBA (1977), Elvis Presley (1981), The Beatles (1981-2), Haircut One Hundred (1983) and The Sex Pistols (1983).
Via: Brian McCloskey
