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Bradbury’s ‘451’ bursts into pictures

Fifty-six years after Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 in nine days — it came like an “explosion” of words, he says — his science-fiction classic is being reissued today as a graphic novel.

“It’s beautiful,” says Bradbury, who turns 89 on Aug. 22, and harbors hopes that a new movie version will be made in his lifetime of a future in which literature is banned and firemen burn books.

Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by illustrator Tim Hamilton (Hill and Wang, $30 hardcover, $16.95 paperback) follows Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film, stage and radio productions and a video-game version. The title refers to the temperature at which books burn.

Bradbury wrote an introduction to the latest adaptation, but otherwise, “I didn’t interfere.”

Speaking by phone from his Los Angeles home, he imagines “someone giving it to a 10-year-old kid who then wants to read the original novel. That’s what good graphic novels can do. They can make you read more.”

Fahrenheit remains a staple of high school and college reading lists, which prompts a question: Does Bradbury worry that students will read just the graphic novel?

“I don’t know, but I know when I was 5 years old, my parents gave me an illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast, and I loved it so much that I decided that I had to learn to read, and I did.”

He adds, “When I was 9, the Buck Rogers comics took me to the future, and I never came back.”

Despite a stroke in 1999, Bradbury continues to write short stories (500 and counting). He can no longer type, so he dictates them to his daughter Alexandra.

He says Truffaut’s movie, with Julie Christie and Oskar Werner, was “ruined” by downplaying one of the novel’s characters, the free-thinking and questioning student Clarisse McClellan.

And he’s disappointed that during the decade in which Mel Gibson has owned the rights, no production deal has been made. He says Gibson called him recently, “for the first time in six years,” to say he’s still interested.

If so, Bradbury has casting suggestions: Sean Connery as Fire Captain Beatty, who was once an avid reader, and Nicolas Cage as Guy Montag, a conflicted fireman: The actors “are friends, and I’d love to give them the work.”