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The Best of the Ray Bradbury Chronicles is the 2003 NBM Comics graphic novel collection that gathers nine of Bradbury's short-story adaptations from the original Bradbury Chronicles comics series of the early 1990s. The adapter pool is the headline: P. Craig Russell, Mike Mignola, Daniel Brereton, Tim Truman, and several others. The story selection covers some of Bradbury's most-anthologized pieces, including The Long Years, The Million-Year Picnic, and The Veldt.
The collection lives and dies on the artist-story pairings. The P. Craig Russell adaptations are the standouts (his line work suits Bradbury's slightly elegiac prose register particularly well). Mignola's The Coffin is the kind of small Bradbury horror story that benefits from his shadow-heavy art. The lesser-known artists in the collection are competent rather than memorable. The introductions and Bradbury's notes give the book some bonus context for readers who already love the source stories.
Recommended for Bradbury completists, for fans of literary-adaptation comics, and for anyone looking for books like The Best of the Ray Bradbury Chronicles at the intersection of canonical SF and graphic-novel adaptation. Three stars, with the Russell and Mignola pieces doing most of the lifting.
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