There’s a line in the book: “You focus on your music, and I will play the business like my instrument, and you will never have to hear it.” The people who knew Brian best, like Nat Weiss, who is in the book, was his best friend and the Beatles’ US attorney. Certainly there are people like (Paul) McCartney and Ringo Starr who obviously knew Brian, but Brian’s management style was to shield the band from his struggles. And then I just cold-called these people, and they were not the celebrity names. I had basically read all of the respected Beatles books and slowly I put together a portrait of the people that knew Brian best. So 21 years ago, I didn’t have any choice but to do interviews. The Fifth Beatle is the only book in print, graphic novel or otherwise, about Brian. There are none of these online resources that we take for granted today, and there are no books about Brian Epstein.
Starting this project 20 years ago, if you put that in perspective during that time, there’s no Wikipedia, no YouTube, no Google. I understand you spent 20 years in research for the project. So it was about 20 years ago that I really said “Who is this Brian Epstein character that I heard who managed and discovered the band?” I realized that The Beatles and Brian were the team that wrote and re-wrote the rules of the pop music business, but I didn’t know anything about him. I probably heard his name 30 years ago, but it was 20 years ago when I was in business school in Philadelphia that I decided to learn something about the guy. Who were the artists? The inkers? And similarly with bands, I’d get very involved in who signed them and who their managers were.
I’ve always been a bit of a nerdy guy, a bit of an academic…following history, and in terms of comics, I’d get into creators. My parents always say that I was listening to the Beatles before I was born, because my mom was listening to them when she was pregnant.
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