Moto Hagio with Ray Bradbury at Comic-Con 2010.

Time to refresh Taral’s screen with these links (courtesy of John King Tarpinian)….

(1) Artist Moto Hagio, who did a manga adaptation of R Is for Rocket, got to meet Ray for the first time at Comic-Con:

For me, and even more so for Hagio, the most moving moment was a very private one, in which Hagio was introduced to the great Ray Bradbury in a quiet room in the convention center. Mr. Bradbury has difficulty hearing and speaking, but the two of them were able to communicate quite well without words. (No interpreter required.) Ms. Hagio had tears in her eyes at the end of the meeting. For her it was a dream come true.

(2) Ray Bradbury’s play 2116, previewed in South Pasadena last December, gets its world premiere at the Fringe in Edinburgh on August 22. Claire Prentice interviewed Ray for the Scotsman:  

Relaxing in the study of his Los Angeles home, sandwiched between a Tiffany lamp and a large plastic dinosaur, Bradbury says: “To have it performed is a gift. When I saw it here in LA, I wept with joy.” While 2116 is on in Edinburgh on 22 August, Bradbury will be celebrating his 90th birthday with his four daughters and his grandchildren.

The man charged with resurrecting the piece was Steve Josephson, the multi-award winning artistic director of Gallimaufry Performing Arts. By the time Bradbury dug out the original script of 2116 to show Josephson, the musical was missing numerous pages, the original score and an entire second act. “All I got was pages and pages of lyrics with character names and no music,” recalls Josephson, sitting next to Bradbury in his study….

(3) FX Feeney’s Comic-Con report “Young Hearts Versus the Undead” offered a long quote from Ray Bradbury’s talk:

“The man you see here is in reality a twelve-year-old boy,” iconic sci-fi author Ray Bradbury thundered before a capacity crowd of a thousand or so who’d gathered to hear him speak. Bradbury’s hearing and eyesight may be at full fathom-five these days, but his mind is as sharp as Captain Nemo’s at the console of his submarine. “How do I do it, you ask? By exploding, every day! If you are dynamic, you remain a child. I’ve remained a boy because I’ve never looked back. That’s me—The Running Boy.”

As a bonus, several photos of Comic-Con panels accompany the article, and LASFSian Craig Miller appears in one of them.

(4) CNN ran a story on Ray’s approaching 90th birthday:

Ray Bradbury lives in a rambling Los Angeles home full of stuffed dinosaurs, a tin robot pushing an ice cream cart, and a life-sized Bullwinkle the Moose doll lounging in a cushioned chair.

The 89-year-old science fiction author watches Fox News Channel by day, Turner Classic Movies by night. He spends the rest of his time summoning “the monsters and angels” of his imagination for his enchanting tales.

(5) John King Tarpinian promises this is a link to a Classical Birthday Card for Ray on YouTube.