Shadow Show: Stories In Celebration Of Ray Bradbury TPB (review)

Review by  Lily Fierro

Though I’m a bit more of an Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut gal when it comes to dystopian writing, there’s no doubt that Ray Bradbury contributed a distinct vision and voice to American literature.

While the formal literature media format proved to be an excellent vehicle for dystopian themes, the comic book and graphic novel format always seemed like a perfect medium to convey the fantasy and science fiction worlds created to reveal the foibles of our current society and the ones to come.

Thus, it is of no surprise that many of the world’s best storytellers and comic book and graphic novel writers and illustrators have found inspiration from Ray Bradbury’s work and that they would want to pay homage to this father of American dystopia and science fiction.

With Shadow Show, major writers and artists take their shot at creating their own short stories in the Bradbury tradition.

Appropriately, the collection opens up with a fictional letter from Bradbury himself. Here, he has not quite risen from the grave because he never really went to a grave in the first place.

In fact, he lives comfortably on Mars, where he reinforces his belief in the power of love and creation. With this welcoming from Mars into the Shadow Show collection, you are now ready to embark on a journey where the lines between reality and fantasy intersect in the nonchalant yet sudden Bradbury way.

While all of the stories certainly pay homage to Ray Bradbury in their uses of the supernatural to explain the mysteries of life, some succeed more than others in toasting the man of the hour.

Of course, the strongest of the bunch comes from Neil Gaiman. His story, The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, follows the thought process of a man who cannot remember Bradbury’s name but can recall everything else about him. It perfectly blends Bradbury’s style (and fascination with Mars) with his own voice, creating a tribute that is far from saccharine (since we definitely know Bradbury would scorn that) but one produced from an enormous amount of respect and love for not only Bradbury’s work but the man himself. And to make the story even more effective, Gaiman’s own earnest reflection on his creation of the story, included immediately after a drawn image of Bradbury, pushes The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury to the forefront of Shadow Show.

While The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury stands as the strongest story from a storytelling perspective, Backwards in Seville written by Audrey Niffenegger and illustrated by Eddie Campbell makes the best use of the comic book form to tell its Bradbury-esque story. The text of Backwards in Seville floats over and in between out of focus images, making everything feel almost like a dream or all within the imagination of the main character Helene’s head as she wonders if it would be possible to transfer her own remaining years on Earth to her rapidly aging father. In parallel, the visual style has distinctive parts of both realism and fantasy to pair with the story which has a similar balance of both.

In stark contrast to Gaiman’s kind and delicate approach to his tribute and Niffenegger and Campbell’s combined visual and text approach to theirs, Harlan Ellison includes his memoir Weariness. Ellison’s story is the only one in the collection that does not get a comic book adaptation, which in some ways provides a nice change of pace in the collection but also makes it feel out of place. Ellison’s version of the tribute includes a pseudo-stream of consciousness style mixed with his trademark obfuscation and formality, making it all too Ellison and not Bradbury enough, even though the story centers on his own encounters and conversations with the man.

Shadow Show certainly has more value if you enjoy Ray Bradbury’s work, but one of the best features of this collection stems from the reflections of the stories’ authors included after each one. Each of these author’s notes give insight into how Bradbury inspired the creation of a work, and these discussions of his influence on their thought process and story construction exist as the best salutes to him.

They best exhibit Bradbury’s own messages of the strength of literature, writing, and love, and together, they provide the strongest connection for the reader to Ray Bradbury as an author and fellow human, achieving the goal of celebrating this fundamental American writer.

Shadow Show honors Bradbury’s dystopian sensibilities, but most importantly, it allows fans to see how Bradbury lives on in the generations of writers after him, and it also gives any reader only familiar with Fahrenheit 451 more reason to explore more of his work, allowing his legacy to live even further on.