As of now, this is translated through Chapter 44. I think I'll keep reading as they come out, but I'm confident my opinion has solidified and won't change.

This manga is OK. I started reading it because I'm a Beatles fan and a plagiarist. As a Beatles fan, I was expecting Beatles references and maybe some cleverness in terms of the 1960s setting, and there was far less of that than I thought there would be. The particular band that's the subject of this story could have been almost any other one and only aesthetic details would have changed.

As a plagiarist, I was expecting this story to be Author supremacist, and it is firmly so. They say all sorts of weird things to make it seem like the band members are bad people for plagiarizing the Beatles, and the effect of the release of their records on the historical Beatles is mostly dealt with off-panel. As I say, I was expecting this. It's not unusual for a professionally published story to demonize plagiarists, but I do not believe that the characters did anything wrong by plagiarizing The Beatles. In fact, an extra year of influence from the Beatles songs might make the world a better place. Maybe if the Beatles came up as an act emulating the Fab Four, then John Lennon wouldn't have been murdered in 1980. Maybe John and Paul McCartney would write different songs to try to make a name for themselves. Maybe they would have thought of a different style of song that interested them. No possibility like those is seriously explored. "The Beatles will write new, different songs" is portrayed as a pipe dream that's an unreasonable justification for the Fab Four's supposedly unreasonable behavior. It's just bigoted nonsense, but I expected it. What's funny to me is the ridiculous lengths they go to make their Author supremacy seem reasonable. For example, someone who had never been to Liverpool previously goes there and recognizes the soul of Liverpool in the songs "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Yesterday". What? What does that even mean? Paul composed "Yesterday" in France in 1964, after the Beatles had their initial successes. Lennon-McCartntney wrote "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in 1963 specifically because they were having an issue breaking into the American market and they wanted something that sounded more appealing to Americans. As a plagiarist, I don't think these biographical details really matter THAT MUCH, if at all, but the Author supremacist line is that they're more important than anything else. OK. So then why did you pick songs that were written outside of Liverpool? They didn't even bother to say that the Fab Four chose songs written later in the Beatles' career so that The Beatles would still be able to release their debut album unchanged. Their Author supremacy cut off potentially interesting story possibilities.

But I'd be lying if I said that the rivalry driven by differences of opinion over whether the plagiarism is permissible was uninteresting. It takes its sweet time getting to the point where the other two band members come back into the narrative and that issue comes to the fore, but it's cool when it does.

Overall, this is very much a man's comic for men, which is not typically the style I go for. The art is fine. If, like me, you prefer shonen or shojo fare, you might find the delivery of the dialog in this and certain artistic sequences stilted in comparison. I almost dropped it early because I wasn't really vibing with it. But, eventually, I promise the story decides to pick up and the 20-pages-per-issue loop took over my monkey brain. I ended up reading the half of it that was translated in less than a day.