RINGO AT 84: A look at a beautiful adaptation of a classic work… — UPDATED 7/7/24: Sir Ringo Starr is 84! Wow! Perfect time to present this interview with our pal Bill Morrison from 2019 (with minor alteration). Fab! — Dan — Ringo Starr is 84 years old today. Man. Well, to celebrate, we’ve got a bit of an offbeat treat for you: Back in October 2018, I sat down with cartoonist Bill Morrison to discuss his beautiful adaptation of the Beatles’ classic film Yellow Submarine for Titan Comics. (A new edition was released by Insight Comics in 2023.) For reasons that are entirely my own fault, I wasn’t able to run the interview right away, so I saved it for a special occasion. Since the movie’s eponymous song is Ringo’s best-known vocal work, his birthday would seem to fit the bill. Now, some background about the project itself. Morrison, formerly with Bongo Comics and Mad, began a Yellow Submarine adaptation in the late ’90s for a different publisher but it died on the vine. “I think it was going to be a 48-page comic,” Morrison told me. “And for whatever reason, the project was shelved. But I got about 25 pages done plus a cover, and I began showing those around to friends and posted on Comic Art Fans and it was just kind of a curiosity — this Beatle project that never came to fruition.” Fast forward a couple of decades and the project was revived with UK-based Titan, which released the hardcover in time for the movie’s 50th anniversary last year. “They said we’d love you to finish this thing you started 20 years ago,” Morrison said. “And (they) wanted it to be a substantial book so they made it 96 pages and a hardcover. It was really a dream come true to just be able to finish that.” So pop in your songtrack, sit back, and see what other secrets Morrison revealed in our talk: Dan Greenfield: Did you work off of a transcript of the movie or did you work on an original script? Bill Morrison: Well, initially my wife and I had two VHS copies of the film that were struck from a laser disc that was owned by (cartoonist) Scott Shaw. This was before the DVD even came out and I don’t...