FAME:Taylor Swift - A No Flying, No Tights Review

    SOURCE: FAME: Taylor Swift

I had no illusions of quality or even basic competence as I began to read FAME: Taylor Swift. I’ve read too many comics by Bluewater Productions to expect anything but the worst. What else could one expect from a publishing company that has no editors or – at the very least – does not credit them in their books? (Perhaps the editors of Bluewater Productions have pulled a collective Alan Smithe and refused credit for their work?) In any case, Bluewater Productions has a reputation for dirty-dealing with freelancers and for hiring anyone willing to draw in exchange for a “professional” credit. Note the quotes around the word professional and that I am using a definition of the word so loosely as to be inappropriate.

In my previous review of the FAME: The Cast of Glee (unauthorized) biography comic, I said that the artwork looked as if it had been created by taking photos from a Google Image search and running them several times through a Photoshop filter, or had been traced over a printed photograph. Judging by other reviews I’ve read, I am not alone in this assessment and this is a frequent complaint regarding other Bluewater Productions illustrated biographies. Thankfully, I can make no such accusation regarding the artwork of Erick Adrian Marquez. Traced images or Photoshopped pictures would look far better.

Marquez’s penciling is, in a word, awful. There is no craft, no character and no design at all in Marquez’s scribbling. The people depicted are all misshapen and deformed. There are whole panels of this comic that appear to have gone uninked, save for a black outline around the individual characters. This outline, it should be noted, appears to have been applied with either a Crayola black marker or the largest paintbrush setting in MS Paint. To describe the artwork in this book as amateurish would be to insult every amateur artist in the world. Indeed, to call the graphics in this book artwork may be an insult to Art itself. For that, I apologize.

The script for this book was written by C.W. Cooke and P.R. McCormack – the same team behind The Cast of Glee (unauthorized). I mention this only so that I can relate that I discovered – while confirming that the same team wrote both books –that McCormack’s last name is misspelled on the title page of the Glee comic. As in that book, there are numerous other spelling errors and tense-troubles in the language of FAME: Taylor Swift, along with several awkward, run-on sentences. (“She became a member of a kid’s comedy group where her comedy blossomed and shined through, something the world would get to see later on when she hosts Saturday Night Live.”)

FAME: Taylor Swift has no place in any quality library collection. The artwork transcends mere putridness to become something truly anathema. The script, while teaching me far more about Taylor Swift’s life than I ever wanted to know, is rife with grammatical mistakes and I keep wanting to pull out a red marker to start making corrections. If you must have a Taylor Swift biography for your collection, please, find something else.

FAME: Taylor Swift
by CW Cooke, PR McCormack
Art by Erick Adrian Marquez
ISBN: 9781450749176
Bluewater Productions, 2012
Publisher Age Rating: All Ages

FAME: The Cast of Glee (unauthorized) - A No Flying No Tights Review

SOURCE: FAME: The Cast of Glee (unauthorized)



I believe there are several things I should state at the beginning of this review, in the interest of full disclosure. First, despite sharing a name with a certain popular star of stage and screen, I have no relation to “the other Matthew Morrison.” I should also note that I am not a “Gleek” – which is to say I am not a fan of the popular television series Glee. I have watched the show a few times and while the production values are good and the actors involved are obviously talented, the show is just not my cup of tea as I’ve never been a big fan of musicals. I mention this because I think it is important to note that I went into this book as a neutral party, who had no particular fondness or animosity for the TV series Glee and the actors and creative people involved in that show before I make the following statement.

FAME: The Cast of Glee is a complete failure on every level and it is easily the worst graphic novel I have read in recent memory.

Unlike previous Bluewater Productions graphic novel biographies, which featured such creative frames as Dracula telling the life story of Twilight scribe Stephenie Meyer, there is no plot to speak of in FAME: The Cast of Glee. All of our information comes from an unseen, unidentified and omniscient narrator. The book consists of a series of information dumps, which dispense random factoids on the lives of six of the actors from Glee and show-creator Ryan Murphy.

Curiously, there is quite a bit of inequity in just how the 36 pages of this graphic novel are distributed, with Chris Colfer, who plays the character of Kurt, only receiving one-and-one-half pages. I would chalk this up to his being a relative newcomer compared to many of his cast-mates, but the experienced comedian Jane Lynch only gets four pages, with one-half of one of those pages being devoted toward recreating a scene from The Forty Year Old Virgin. This seems curious to me, given that with what little I know of Glee, Kurt and Sue Sylvester are easily the two most popular characters and the two people fans of the show would like to know more about.

In terms of information, these biographies are about on par with the average biography written about a hot young star written for a juvenile or young-adult audience. One could glean the exact same information from these celebrity’s Wikipedia pages. Indeed, after a quick web search, I suspect that is exactly where writers CW Cooke and PR McCormack conducted most, if not all, of their research. I should note, however, that Wikipedia apparently has stricter guidelines for spelling and grammar than Bluewater Productions, as I found the word “lead” being used in place of the word “led” on two separate instances in FAME: The Cast of Glee.

I’m not sure what to make of the art in this book, which apparently required the efforts of an artist (Beniamino Bradi) and “Graphics” (Darren G. Davis). Apparently Bradi followed the example of his writer colleagues and turned to the Internet to find photo references for the various actors he depicts. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that – a lot of artists use photo references for their art. But many of the scenes depicted in this book appear to have been traced over from the original photo… badly. Indeed, only one thing prevents me from thinking that the art team just pulled pictures off the Internet and then used the filters in Photoshop to create their art and that is the fact that if they had done that, the artwork would look much better than it does.

FAME: The Cast of Glee (unauthorized)
by C.W. Cooke and Patrick McCormack
Art by Beniamino Bradi
ISBN: 978-145074429
Bluewater Productions, 2010
Publisher Age Rating: Kids, Teens, Adults