Rating: WARTY!
This was disappointing graphic novel which spent too much time on the wrong topics, I felt. Plus it was too long and rambling, and tried to cover too much ground instead of focusing on the core points. That said, it did a better job than the movie of the same name, which was rife with inaccuracies, and no amount of arguing that no-one expects a painting to be a photograph can excuse some of the inexplicable changes that were made in depicting Turing's life at Bletchley Park in that movie, as engrossing and fascinating as it was in parts.
The story is of course Alan Turing's life and his World War Two work on cryptography. Both this and the movie are based on Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma, and at least this graphic novel inspired me to read that, but the biography is over seven hundred pages long, so it will be more of a skim with a detailed reading of points of interest since I do not have the time to read a seven-hundred-page book.
Alan Turing was gay during a time when gay meant something like 'party animal' and nothing more, and when homosexuality was literally illegal - and of course the punishment for a man who loved men was to incarcerate him with a whole lot of men. This made sense how? You could argue (if you were a spiteful SoB) that the way to punish male homosexuals should be to incarcerate them with women, but that seems to me like it wouldn't work either! It makes far more sense not to have it be illegal in the first place!
The art by Purvis was scrappy and unappealing to me and the text by Ottaviani was at times confused or at least confusing and lacking sharpness and clarity, so I took to skimming parts of this. Overall he story was interesting enough to make me game to consult the source rather than read this pale imitation, but as for this version, I can't recommend it.
