Love For Bradbury’s Graphic Novel

Some people distrust whatever the cool kids are into. But that’s almost never anything written by a man about to turn 89. Just the same, Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune says she feels guilty for liking graphic novels. It was hard for her not to let that keep her from praising the new version of Fahrenheit 451:

The new graphic version of “Fahrenheit 451” has helped sort out the contents of my soul. And I’m happy to report that I’m in the clear. I am quite certain that I’d be trumpeting the virtues of this work even if graphic novels weren’t on everybody’s hot list, even if a graphic novel weren’t as trendy an accessory as an Obama campaign button.

National Public Radio hasn’t been the least bit ambivalent about its love for the project. NPR aired a 4-minute story about it:

When Ray Bradbury was 15 years old, he saw images of books being burned in Hitler’s Germany.

“It killed my heart and killed my soul,” he says, “and the memory of Hitler burning the books caused me to sit down and write Fahrenheit 451.”

Then they ran a feature on the artist:

Rendered in a vividly noir manner by artist Tim Hamilton, a longtime Nickelodeon Magazine contributor and a founding member of the hip webcomic collective ACT-I-VATE.com, Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation adds to the claustrophobia of Bradbury’s original nightmare vision.

NPR is also the place to find a 5-page excerpt.

And they reminded listeners that Bradbury produced the original manuscript of Fahrenheit 451 on a typewriter in a basement at UCLA. NPR has posted Nina Gregory’s interview with Ray:

He told her about the $9.80 he spent — 10 cents per half hour — to rent a typewriter in 1951 so that he could hammer out the first draft of Fahrenheit 451.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the links.]