Revisiting Ray Bradbury and appreciating Robert B. Parker
August 4, 2009 at 10:22 pm by William McKeen
Maybe I’m just a geezer who never got it with graphic novels.
I grew up on comic books and loved them, from the DC super heroes, to the uber-cool Marvel mutants, to the great works of literature presented by Classics Illustrated comics.
But I was well removed from my comic- buying years when graphic novels began appearing. I figured they were just very good comics – well drawn, cooler angles, slick paper.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus changed my view of these books. That look at the Holocaust shocked a lot of people when it was published – you’re turning that atrocity into a comic book … featuring a mouse? But Maus worked and earned respectability for the genre.
Now a great work of 20th Century fiction has been re-imagined as a graphic novel.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Hill and Wang, hardcover, $30; paperback, $16.95) takes that classic about a book-burning culture maintained by thought police and presents it anew, with the sharp visual style of artist Tim Hamilton.
Of course, Bradbury would embrace this. This forward-thinking gent has even written a new introduction to the book. His classics – The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man and the essential Stories of Ray Bradbury – loom large in my life. I remember my older brother reading me Something Wicked This Way Comes from the top bunk, and I began a lifelong love for Bradbury’s work. I’ve particularly admired Fahrenheit 451, with its tortured protagonist Montag. He’s a fireman, but in the future, firemen start fires — to burn books and kill free speech. (The title notes the temperature at which paper catches fire and burns.)
Bradbury hasn’t gotten the respect he deserves as an American grand master. Unfortunately, noodle-headed mainstream critics long ago marginalized his work as science fiction when it’s actually great fiction that sometimes deals with science, technology and speculation.
Fahrenheit 451 was required reading when I was in high school. Let’s hope it still is. Some arch their eyebrows over a book about a society willing itself into illiteracy being turned into a glorified comic book. (Life imitating art?) But Hamilton’s images match Bradbury’s elegance, wit and insight, and elevate the genre and make Bradbury’s masterful work sing again.
A couple of other graphic books of note: The Vietnam War (Hill and Wang, $19.95) by Dwight Jon Zimerman and Wayne Vansant fills its 145 pages with history and heartbreak, serving as an excellent primer on the war. And soon to arrive: Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated (W.W. Norton, $24.95.). The Michelangelo of San Francisco hippie culture reimagines the creation of the world. I’ve taken a few bites out of the book and let me just say: this ain’t your father’s Bible.
PARKER OUT WEST: Reading a book by Robert B. Parker is like taking a master class in writing. I’ve said this before – Parker writes as if he is being charged by the word.
In short, this is intense, tight writing. Everything he writes has the urgency of a telegram.
He’s best known for his modern detectives: Spenser (most notably), Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone.
But as if those three great cop characters are not enough for one writer’s career, he’s now begun a series of novels set in the West. These tales are built around gunslinger Virgil Cole and he and his pals are a lot like the characters in Larry McMurtry’s classic Lonesome Dove, only Parker’s cowboys aren’t nearly as verbose.
Brimstone (Putnam, $25.95) is the sequel to Appaloosa, recently movie-ized with with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen. Two tight-lipped cowboys and the girl they hope to save from the dark side make a great trio in the town of Brimstone.
Parker packs more entertainment into one paragraph that most authors do in a 400-page novel.
COMING TO INKWOOD: New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva will appear at 7:30 p.m. on Friday at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia Ave., Tampa. Silva will discuss and sign his 12th book, The Defector. Call Inkwood at 813-253-2638 or inkwoodbooks@gmail.com to reserve your first editions
William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the acclaimed Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist, now available in paperback.
(click button for feed)
(follow us on Facebook)
(follow us on Twitter)