The Best of Ray Bradbury
Graphic Novel Adapts Sci-Fi Classics
Ray Bradbury collected Buck Rogers comic strips for three months in the autumn of 1929, but tore them up when kids at school made fun of him for believing in science fiction. A week later, affected by remorse over his action, he went back to collecting Buck Rogers. “I never stopped flying or reading after that,” says Bradbury. He determined to never again listen to anyone who made fun of his love for the future.
The City
Suppose a city is alive. Then suppose a life form – something alien, something human – arrives in the city. Wouldn’t the living city do something about the invaders?
"The City" is adapted in beautifully subdued colors and Mike Mignola’s signature line style. Every panel serves its purpose, nothing superfluous. The economy of art belies the city’s economy of action. Five dozen panels across ten pages tell all we need to know from the fateful landing of a human crew to the city’s eradication of the foreign element.
The story pulls us back and forth through time with no explanation as to where we are in the line of events. Some scenes progress forward while others travel backward, inducing in us the same disorientation experienced by the hunted astronauts.
In the end we discover there is more to the city’s hostility than first seen. Each human is systematically captured, gutted, and remade. The new automatons return to Earth with biological weapons capable of destroying the human threat completely.
Dark they Were, And Golden-Eyed
Their rocket ship lies in the red sand. Harry Bittering has brought his wife and children over 60 million miles to escape the war-torn Earth. The Martian wind blows across abandoned towns, lost meadows, and time-worn hills, pulling at his soul. He has second thoughts.
He notices changes in the peach tree he plants and in the garden he tends. His wife assures him that the food isn’t poisoned. “But it is,” he says. “Subtly. A bit. A very little bit.” He fears the food will change them also.
Earth suspends all rocket trips to and from Mars, stranding the Bitterings and colonists like them. Harry begins construction of his own rocket, but soon discovers there is no escape from the legacy of the red planet.
Kent William’s and John Van Fleet’s adaptation of "Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed" tells a genuinely creepy story of a human colony lost to the mysteries of Mars. The art, consisting of rough sketches against a predominately red and yellow palette, perfectly captures the gritty feel of the story.
The art remains true to Bradbury’s imagination of space travel by rocket and Mars as a red Earth vacated by its former occupants. These concepts become increasingly rare in modern science fiction as mankind learns more about our solar system and looses our child-like wonder about the stars.
The Golden Apples of the Sun
“When you travel on down towards the Sun and everything gets yellow and warm and lazy, then you’re going in one direction only.” South. So begins Bradbury’s parable about a group of astronauts who aim to borrow a cup of Sun.
Ice fills their ship, creating a sub-zero environment meant to protect the craft from the 7,000 plus degrees Fahrenheit it must endure. While nearing the vast burning hearth a crew member’s suit ruptures due to a defect. He freezes to death in the grip of the Sun.
P Craig Russell’s art nicely captures the irony of the death by contrasting colors from the opposite ends of the spectrum. Juxtaposed blues and yellows ratchet up the tension as the crew struggles with the death of their friend and completes their remarkable mission.
"The Golden Apples of the Sun" may appear at first glance to be a Promethean tale of the high cost of forbidden fruit, but this is never Bradbury’s message. Instead, his magnificent story encourages us to die to our narrow-minded beliefs about the impossible and embrace our potential for greatness.
The Best of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury, perhaps best known for Fahrenheit 451 and The Electric Grandmother, exhibits a gift for writing more than just sci-fi. His flights of fancy and stories of the future often transcend categorization. The Best of Ray Bradbury -- collected by ibooks, inc – presents an excellent introduction to the master’s works. Its contents previously appeared in either The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, published by Bantam Books, or Ray Bradbury Comics, published by Topps Comics.
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