Rating: WARTY!
Having enjoyed the movie derived from the first in this graphic novel series, I was curious to see what the actual novel looked like (the movie bore little resemblance to the novels), and the library happened to have three volumes: 1910, 1969, and 2009, so I picked all of those up. The original series, began in 1999, had twelve issues, so I'm not sure how these relate to that. Wikipedia was unusually vague about how the issues were published and named, and how they related to one another.
This particular volume, 1969, was presented as a slightly psychedelic 'summer of love' edition, but it really wasn't very good in terms of telling a strong and coherent story. The basic plot was that there's this dude who has found a way to transfer his essence (however you want to picture that) from his old body into a different, younger body. The younger body's essence is swapped into the old body, and in the example we're shown, the old body quickly dies because it has been poisoned for the very purpose for preventing the transferred younger essence from making itself known. This struck me as gobbledy-gook, but let's just take that and run with it.
The problem with this scheme is that the original transfer was from a very aged man into a younger man, but later this younger man, who is now older, but still looks hale and hearty, is planning on transferring his essence again into a rock star. That didn't strike me as a wise choice! And why he's so desperate to transfer at that point into this person isn't made clear. The worst problem, however, is that there is nothing to indicate what kind of a threat this guy posed. His entire story consisted of his desire to transfer his essence! So what? Who cares? He;s doing nothing - other than the criminal theft of a person's body! It's horrible for the person concerned of course, but it's hardly a world-shattering event!
Many of the characters I knew from the movie were alive and well in the 1969 edition, and working independently of the British government now. They had a rather amateurish 'secret hide-away' not very well hidden behind an electrical utility door down a dark alley. The problem with that was that the space inside was huge and really brightly lit, so anyone passing as they entered would have seen this and known something was seriously wrong with this picture. Alan Moore's story-telling was limp, and Kevin O'Neill's artwork was tame, so I wasn't impressed there either.
There was a lot of reference to British pop culture (from the era) and to Monty Python, such as Doug Piranha, and The Rutles (which was an Eric Idle spin-off). There were also references to the early Doctor Who long-running sci-fi show, in the form of a very fleeting cameo by Patrick Troughton, who played the second Doctor. I saw no other incarnations of the Doctor (at least none that were readily detectable to me!), but there was a Dalek which showed up in one psychedelic double page spread.
Whether the US audience will get the rest of the references that I caught, I can't say. They were peculiarly British. There was one frame featuring Simon Templar's Volvo 1800, from the TV show The Saint starring Roger Moore, which US audiences might get, but that's about it. There was a main character modeled on Michael Caine from his appearance in the original Get Carter movie, which was tame, but better than the Stallone remake. There was an appearance by Lonely, a character from the Edward Woodward TV spy show Callan.
There was Parker, the butler from the TV puppet show Thunderbirds, which to me was amusing, because the characters portrayed in the graphic novel seemed to me to be often posed unnaturally, as though they were marionettes from one or other of the Gerry Anderson shows. There was also a couple of frames featuring the venerable British tabloid cartoon icon Andy Capp. These were fun to spot, but contributed nothing to the value of the story, and that was the problem. Overall, I have to say that this was not a worthy read, because there really was no story there.
