Customer Reviews

The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel

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I love Ray Bradbury, and I love comics, so I was hoping that a combination of the two would be excellent. It wasn't. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed this graphic novel. It just wasn't perfect. One of the major issues I had with it is that in several of the stories (most notably Dark They Were With Golden Eyes) the pictures and text had a tendency to run off the edge of the page, as though the page was not in quite the right position during the printing. Usually it was not more than a letter that was missing, and I had no trouble in determining what was meant to be said, but it was still annoying. There were also several typos in the brief intros to each story.
The art is wonderful, and fits each story very well. The writing, of course, is Bradbury and I don't think I need to say any more about that. Each story stays very true to the original, and I believe that every line of text is directly from the text of the story, which is nice. Of course, a lot is missing as well, but that's what the pictures are for.
I do think that it helps to have read the stories before reading this. There was one story that I was unfamiliar with, and I don't feel that I got quite as much out of that one as I would have liked. Familiarity with the stories definitely seemed helpful in my appreciation of the renditions of them in this graphic novel.
All in all, an interesting experiment that worked out fairly well. It's enjoyable, but I would recommend it mainly to Bradbury fans, as I don't think others will appreciate it as well.

Bradbury, more than most well known SF writers, put a human face on his tales of maybe-if and far-away.

Here, some of comics' best artists put faces on Bradbury's tales. On the whole, the matching of artist to story was brilliant. Jon J. Muth's watercolors illustrated an eerie, atmospheric experience within another mind. Harvey Kurtzman's geometric, brash figures walk through a noir murder mystery, narrated by the deceased. Richard Corben's piece opens the book, showing not a hero or has-been but a never-was, who screws up 65 million times over. P. Craig Russell's pictures give life to two stories, both that want the kind of majesty he puts into visual storytelling. All that, and lots more.

These are good comics - masterful artists rendering a master's storytelling. Good for anyone who like narrative comics or who likes Bradbury. I have the good fortune of being both.

//wiredweird

please note that the second printing FIXES the error that inverted two mike mignola pages accidentally.

The Best of Ray Bradbury contains illustrated adaptations of some of Ray Bradbury's most famous stories. The text and the art unquestionably captures the essence of these classic science fiction tales from the 1960's. The language and clothing reflect the time period, and are not modernized. Reading it, I felt as if I was holding a yellowed paperback published in the 1970's. Definitely authentic.

The art for each story is unique. No artist's style is the same. Best of all, Bradbury (who is still alive and writing) has written a moving introduction to the book. The introduction really touched my heart. It has to do with following your dreams, and how he got his start in writing sci-fi. And as a delightful bonus, Bradbury has written brief introductions to each and every story in the book!

Its great to see classic Bradbury stories adapted into graphic peaces. Only one compliant; the book description mentions HOMECOMING illustrated by Steve Leialoha, this is not in the book. Homecoming is a favorite of mine, and I imagined it would be great illustrated. But nonetheless I enjoyed the book for the great stories, and beautiful art.

hey! ibooks has reprinted ray bradbury graphic novel with the pages of 'the city' corrected. the book is now a bargain!

I bought this at lunchtime and sat in the car to read the first two stories. I found both Thunder and The City rather confusing and in fact began to think The City had the pages printed out of order (although there are no page numbers). So I though I'd the web! Sure enough, daveydooski saw it too.
The occasional typo I can understand, but this kind of screw up is unforgivable!
But I love Bradbury, and having some stories interpreted visually in this way is a treat. Only for the completist probably.

Ibooks continues to amaze me with their selection of reprints, but this one didn't impress me quite as much as others. THE BEST OF RAY BRADBURY: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL is a softcover reprinting of selected tales from Topps Comics' excellent early-90s RAY BRADBURY CHRONICLES series. RBC combined classic EC adaptations of Bradbury's work (by Jack Davis, Johnny Craig, and others) with modern adaptations by top comic and fantasy artists (Corben, Moebius, Muth, VanFleet, P. Craig Russell, & Wayne Barlowe, to name just a few). The problem with this particular release is that iBooks seems to be doing this as a one-shot with just a few select tales, instead of reprinting the entire series. What a loss! Additionally, it appears that one of the included stories ("The City", adapted by Mike Mignola) is a misprint. I could make no sense of the story as presented, so I had to flip some panels/pages around in my head in order to make it work. I would love to see a thorough reprinting of this entire RBC series, so I'll keep waiting.

As a lover of both Ray Bradbury and graphic novels I was more than ecstatic to find this. It gives a nice breath of stories and a variety of different illustrators so I think there is at least something in there that everyone would like (and equally something that you probably won't care for). Short stories can be hard to pull off in comic form, but these seem to be done well and while they may not carry the omph of the original they do hold their own and the illustrations do add their own touch which is refreshing for those who are familiar with the stories.

I'm not a particularly huge Bradbury fan, although I am familiar with his most famous/popular work, and am aware of his vast influence on modern science-fiction. I am a fan of graphic storytelling though, and that led me to pick up this collection of graphic adaptations of twelve of his short stories (I have no idea why the publisher has chosen to give the book the subtitle, "The Graphic Novel", presumably to cash in on the current popularity of the so-called graphic novel). To add to the confusion, the selections here all previously appeared in the "Ray Bradbury Chronicles" comic-book series published by Topps. And just to make things totally muddy, some of those reprinted much older adaptations published as comics by EC! So, consider this a sort of best-of collection from the Topps series. Phew!

The book opens with a very nice one-page introduction from Bradbury, about falling in love with comics, abandoning them in the face of peer pressure, and then coming back to them even more committed. He also provides a paragraph intro to each story, telling how it came about, which is a nice bonus (although I would have liked to know what year each was written in). Not having read any of the original stories, I can't comment on how faithful these adaptations are -- although other reviewers say they are quite close. Similarly, those familiar with the story will probably get a richer experience from these visual versions.

"A Sound of Thunder" lays out the classic problem of time-travel -- the smallest impact you have on the past might have a dramatic consequence for the future. This is shown via a plotline involving prehistoric safaris to shoot dinosaurs (surely the developers of time travel could come up with a better business model?) and what happens when one such hunt goes awry. The art here is supplied by Richard Corben, whose strengths lie more in showing the natural world than people. The story was made into a pretty bad film a few years ago with the same title.

"The City" is a very dark and cool story about a city that is alive and waiting for humans to come back to it. The artwork is by Mike Mignola, who is one of my favorites. "Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed" is another dark story, this one about Mars colonists who are stranded following a war on Earth. The artwork by Kent Williams and John Van Fleet is a little too arty and impressionistic for my taste. Van Fleet appears again in "Picasso Summer," about an American's summer vacation in Southern France and his obsession with Picasso. It' a cool piece, but I didn't care for the art that much.

"The Golden Apples of the Sun" is a kind of weird one about a spaceship on a journey to harvest a portion of the sun in order to save humanity (which strikes me as quite similar to the recent film "Sunshine"). The art by P. Craig Russell is nothing particularly interesting, sort of well-done generic comic-book stuff. Daniel Torres's art for "Night Meeting" is much cooler, as the material allows him to mix the machines and fashions of the 1950s with crazy organic Martian dwellings and forms. The premise is a kind of neat idea -- a human and Martian meet on Mars, but they're each in a different point in time -- but there's not much story to it. Mars features again in "The Visitor," in which sick men are sent to Mars to die with minimal comforts. When a Christ-like figure arrives and demonstrates his ability to conjure up immersive illusions to ease their final days, human nature at its worst takes hold. P. Craig Russell and Michael Lark combine to bring this to life with quite vivid work.

"A Piece of Wood" is a cool story about a soldier who has worked out how to rust all the weapons of war, unfortunately it's pretty static and doesn't really lend itself to a visual interpretation, leaving Mark Chiarello with not a lot to work with. On the flip side, "Come into My Cellar" is a classic 1950s cautionary tale, providing tons of iconic retro material for Dave Gibbons to work with. Basically, it involves alien mushrooms, and that's all you need to know! Less compelling plotwise, but totally different artwise, "It Burns Me Up" is a semi-crime story set ablaze by Harvey Korman and Matt Wagner's stunning and unique work. Their style is hard to describe and really works better as individual frames than it does at creating a flowing story. The last two tales, "The April Witch" (art by J. Muth) and "The Foghorn" (art by Wayne Barlowe) failed to do much for me from either a storytelling or artistic perspective.

Overall an interesting project, with maybe slightly more misses than hits. Definitely not the way to be introduced to Bradbury, but certainly something existing fans will want to check out.