The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel by hordes of people

The Best of Ray Bradbury: The Graphic Novel is a collection of some of the many Bradbury story adaptations from "The Ray Bradbury Chronicles," a series of slim trade paperbacks from Bantam in the early '90s, and "Ray Bradbury Comics," which subsequently came out from Topps Comics. Both series were packaged by (and are copyright in the name of) Byron Preiss Visual Publications, and this book was published some years later by ibooks, another arm of the then-sprawling Byron Preiss empire. The copyright page says it was edited by Howard Zimmerman, and it contains adaptations of twelve Bradbury stories by a very varied (but very respectable) line-up of names. Bradbury contributes a short foreword to each story, about when and how the story was written.

I seem to be alone in this among those who've reviewed this book, but I didn't like it much. Bradbury has a very wordy style which is hard to translate into comics -- or, rather, often translates into comics as lots and lots of captions with straight Bradbury prose. I found the result was generally too wordy to flow well as a comics story, which meant these felt like abridged Bradbury tales with very extensive illustrations.

Some of the stories work better than others; I liked Dave Gibbons's take on "Come Into My Cellar" and Daniel Torres's "Night Meeting," mostly because those stories weren't overwhelmed by the narration. And the art is fine, and varied, in all of the stories. But I'm afraid I really didn't see the point in all this in the first place -- prose short stories and comics scripts aren't the same thing, so there's no reason to believe one would be generally useful as the other.