This book has been in the making for 50 years, ever since a boy named Mauri Kunnas read a newspaper article about a group of long-haired young men who were driving the kids in England wild. Before long, She Loves You was playing on his radio too, and an ardent fan was born. The following decades saw Kunnas’s pen turn out innumerable comic strips about the ’60s and ’70s rock scene for music magazines, as well as a unique collection of increasingly wonderful children’s picture books. But the time has come to go back to his roots. 

In this comic book, featuring four-colour illustrations throughout, Mauri Kunnas tells the story of four lads from Liverpool who love to play music, head for the clubs of Hamburg to play some gigs – and end up world-famous. The book offers thoroughly researched information from the core of pop culture and rock history, hilarious moments and details that not even dedicated fans remember having heard before – and all of this told with a Kunnas’s characteristic raucous humour and virtuosic drawing skills. This is a package you won’t want to pass up!

Mauri Kunnas is an internationally known author of children’s picture books, and his body of over 40 bestsellers includes translations into 30 languages – the best-known being the ever-wonderful Santa Claus. Nevertheless, Kunnas started off his career as a comic artist, as Finnish fans of rock music are well aware: the comic strip Nyrok City appeared in 1975-86 in the Finnish pop music magazines Intro, Help and Suosikki. His rock comics have also been published as albums: the collection Nyrok City (1984), Nyrok City Kollektion 2 (1993) and The Best & the Wörst of Nyrok City (2000). In addition, he has published a fictional album where the Rolling Stones make an appearance, Mac Moose and the Jacko Migraine Case (1995). You can get a taste of Kunnas’s earliest cartoons from the years 1965-75 in Mauri Kunnas’s Early Doodles (2007).