Pink Floyd in Comics by Tony Lourenço, Thierry Lamy, and various artists

First of all, it's just the tyranny of the calendar that lands this book on this day: I'm working about six weeks ahead currently, and this is the book I read next, and this is the Wednesday the post will fall on. There is no plan to it being Christmas today.

Second, I need to get into the credits quickly, which are much more voluminous than I expected when I picked this book up. The title page credits (deep breath) Main editor Nicolas Finet, Comics writers Tony Lourenço and Thierry Lamy (Lourenço took the first half; Lamy the rest), Cover Christopher (no other name; this seems common in French comics, and I have no idea how they decide who gets what name), Articles Nicolas Finet, Graphic design Marion Lovila, and Translation Peter Russella. That doesn't include the artists of the twenty-eight chapters, who are listed on the following two pages - no artist does more than one chapter, and two of them bring (separate) colorists along with them.

This thus is a book that took thirty-five creators - Christopher also did art for one of the chapters, and Finet was both editor and article-writer - to bring into the world. That's not a record, since encyclopedias exist, but it's impressive for a pop comics biography of a psychedelic band.

You may guess from that list, and possibly from a prior knowledge of the "Music Legends in Comics" series from NBM (or, I think, Petit a Petit in their original French), that this is a dense book filled with detail. You would be correct.

Pink Floyd in Comics tells the story of the band from the early 1960s through the time of publication (2022 in France, 2024 for this English-language edition), in copious and potentially exhaustive detail. Breaking it into twenty-eight chapters allows every phase of the band - every album, major tour, and movie soundtrack, plus sidebars like Hipgnosis (the design company that did nearly all their covers) and Syd Barrett's short post-Floyd solo career, to get its own chapter. The breakup gets a couple of chapters, the various reunions and almost-reunions get a few chapters, too - we're only about two-thirds of the way into the book when we hit The Final Cut, which for many people is the end of the "real" Pink Floyd story. (For others, that would be A Saucerful of Secrets, which is arguable but not terribly useful fifty years later.)

Like the other books in the series, each chapter is told first in comics, in a narrative way, and then in an article, with more detail and references. It's a fairly long book for a comics biography to begin with, at 230ish pages, and nearly half of that is the prose articles, so it is longer and denser than even it seems. It may be too long for a bio of a psychedelic band, frankly - I think of myself as a fairly major Floyd fan, with detailed opinions on things like The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (self-indulgent but great) and the post-Waters Floyd (not self-indulgent but also never great and often struggling to be good) and this was a bit too much for me. I didn't really care to get multiple pages about what it was like to work with Antonioni on Zabriskie Point, for example.

So my take is this: Pink Floyd in Comics will give you all of the Pink Floyd you can stand. Possibly much more than that. But, unless you actually are Roger Waters or David Gilmour, you will not want any additional details or background or context that this book does not give you. And, if you do want a comics history of Pink Floyd, or are intrigued by that idea in the slightest, this is not just currently definitive, but would be impossible to dethrone at any time in the future.