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 20^th 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, critics long ago marginalized his work as science fiction when it’s actually great fiction that sometimes deals with science, technology and speculation.

This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2009.